Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jean-Philipe | Hacker News Reader

> After everyone's input, we decided to just opt for one field `name` because simply first/last/family name does not work across cultures.

Thank you so much for this! Me and family members struggle filling forms because of this on a regular basis.

Another pet peeve of mine are address fields. Why not just one field? People are smart enough to write down their address. Not everyone has a zip code or a street number, or streets for that matter.

View on HN

> People are smart enough to write down their address.

Not usually.

In this scenario, given its use for display on a user page, it may make sense.

For most other cases, this doesn't pan out. Here in the US, for example, the general public has little sense of how to properly write addresses with floor, apartment, unit, or suite numbers. Folks routinely put things in the wrong order or use the wrong symbol or abbreviation. Others make up nonsense and genuinely think what they have is correct. Developers and geeks aren't immune; I've seen forms that reflect an inadequate understanding of addresses.

Yeah, if you work for a company that has to run any kind of validation on addresses, you learn quickly most people cannot type their address in correctly at all. My take: Make it as dumb and straightforwardly painfully obvious as possible.

Coincidentally enough, we just got through writing a nest of regexps to retrospectively validate about 2K user entered addresses, and they turned out to be surprisingly well entered, probably about 98% parsable. In this case the user was entering a field called "street" and we were validating down to a number followed by a street type (e.g ST) and a few local wrinkles such as additions like "RD1" for rural addresses. The most common error, which we brute force corrected, were various misspellings of "crescent". We did not however attempt to unpack the street number, which fortunately was not required.

> Why not just one field?

Sales tax calculations by region.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com