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Comment by fnordfnordfnord | Hacker News Reader

Someone should make this guy King of the Internets.

Swanson: I need you to take a look at address forms. I don't want to enter my city and state any more after I've given my zip code.

PS Yes, I know that not everyone lives in the US.

PPS Yes, I've heard about some places where a single zip code serves two cities. Edge cases, there will always be one or two.

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Just enter your easy-to-remember latitude/longitude pair into this form field - no more typing your city ever again ;)

Exactly: http://diveintohtml5.info/geolocation.html

I'd hate to use this for anything important - my entire regional area is reported to be 300km (~185 miles) away from its actual location :)

On the other hand I'd be quite happy for sites to calculate shipping based off this since the reported location is the capital city.

I don't know about the US, but in Australia post codes (our zip codes) regularly service more than one town (or principality) when you're rural, and if you're even vaguely familiar with Australia we have a lot of rural :)

I've seen this handled quite well by a number of sites - you enter your post code and they'll just drop down a list of all the places it matches. Choose your town/suburb and you're done!

The ridiculous part is that they'll often ask you to enter your state as well, which you can derive from the first digit of the post code :/

I find it hilarious that Australia has just 4 digits in its post code. The US has 5 digits with 4 optional digits. Taiwan (a much smaller place) has 3 digits with 2 optional specifiers.

Singapore has 6.

Singapore's post codes are 6 digits because they're granular enough to specify exact buildings -- it's possible to receive mail addressed to "John Tan, S(123456)".

Australia's post codes, on the other hand, are really wide. The entirety of central Sydney is all "2000" and mine covers around 6 city suburbs.

Re: deriving state from first digit of post code, that's true 90% of the time but the exceptions -- some of which are pretty big, eg. the entire Australian Capital Territory -- will kill you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_Australia#Austral...

Oh interesting, not having lived in the NT or ACT I didn't know about that one.

You know what I want? Just the opposite. I know my address, it just isn't in the autofill databases and doesn't fit your standard format (e.g. I don't have a state). Just give me a plain text area I can type my address into.

And there's a special place in hell for webdevs who force me to use their fancy javascript date picker rather than typing in a date.

Asking for zip code first or instead of city/state is so rare that I find it jarring. I've rarely, if ever, thought that entering my city and state was overly burdensome and I strongly doubt there's any conversion improvement.

But wouldn't you be happier if all sites asked for zip first? User's time is precious even if they're not angry at you for wasting it.

If you are saying positioning the zip field first actually wastes more user time because it's so jarring, there are so many possible improvements:

- Don't change layout but populate city & state if zip is entered first. I know, hard to justify the effort.

- Populate zip from address.

- Offer city, state completions when you start typing city.

- Offer full-address completions from street address & geoip.

- Just statically populate city, state (and possibly zip?) from geoip.

These days, zip code solves a lot of our location issues. In another product, we simply elected to request location data from the user's phone as a secondary option.

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