On Jan 5, 2010, at 2:38 PM, nedlud wrote:
In terms of coding such a form, are you populating the state field
with any information that depends on knowing what country the user
is in? (or any other location dependant information in other fields?).
If the answer is yes, then I'd say it's quite important to have the
country field *before* state for exactly the reasons your client
states. And in my experience, this is also quite normal for commerce
sites of international companies. Try buying something from Amazon
or Apple for examples.
If there is *no* dynamic or location dependant information in the
other fields, then I'd say that it doesn't matter, in a technical
sense, where you put the country field. It becomes a question of
taste. Having said that, I think you will find it is quite common to
put country before state (that sounds almost like a political
statement ;) ).
The state/province doesn't populate based from the country.
Now I can see the reason after seeing the discovery's form posted by
Elias.
I would be cautious about looking at American sites for examples of
this. Many American sites are strangely myopic about the rest of the
world.
Coming from Asia and live in the US, I have to agree with this :)
Look at big/international company sites (even ones based in America.
Bigger companies see the bigger picture more clearly).
This reminds me of the checkout form from Apple website. I think what
Apple does with its shipping address web form makes perfect sense for
international company's site, it has 4 input fields for user to enter
the complete address with one label, in which State is populated upon
entering zipcode and Country must be IP detectable as it shows me
"United State".
I actually made a similar form for a 'request catalog' form years ago,
however it didn't quite work for some careless users despite that the
form has indication to "enter complete address" in bold and in
different color. The form was for US customers only so no country
field, still, some submitters either forgot to enter State or zipcode
(it was a wander to me these are the two they would missed); after few
months receiving too many in-completed addresses, I rephrased it to
"please enter your full address including state and zipcode", still,
some people missed it. In the end I had to make the form the standard
US format, one input field for each and that solved the problem.
The problem might be that the server-side validation was not perfect
as it couldn't' give a validation error if a user does not entered a
State or Zipcode. I think this can be solved with extra JS validation
to enhance the usability today.
tee
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