> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country
False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompetence of the people implementing most web forms, you're asking for disaster here.
Instead, learn to use your browser's autofill feature, and design your sites with it in mind. If you do it right the user literally doesn't have to type a single character. That's even better than typing a numeric code. Sadly even this seems beyond the abilities of the people who implement web forms.
USPS doesn't care; each ZIP code has a single preferred city name and a list of acceptable alternate city names to account for cases in which a ZIP code spans multiple cities. However, USPS's address validation will prefer to use the preferred city name for the ZIP regardless of whether the recipient actually lives within the boundaries of that city. That's because USPS has opted to organize addressing entirely around the ZIP codes, and other political boundaries are irrelevant except in cases of problems interpreting the address.
This does mean that you might autofill a city name that is "wrong" in the view of the person completing the address form, but much of the bulk mail they receive probably uses that city name anyway.
Technically speaking ZIP codes are not "supposed" to span states but, in exceptional cases, some do. In this case USPS handles it the same way: the state of the preferred city is the preferred state for the ZIP code.
The preferred city is almost always the location of the post office serving the ZIP, which makes this situation fairly intuitive. You can find some interesting edge cases where a post office in located in a suburb city, resulting in a ZIP that includes part of a major city having the suburb as its preferred city name.
You can look up the city name and alternates for a ZIP here: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode
and the Domestic Mailing Manual covers this, although it's scattered across several sections and mostly part of how the City State database (the database used for validating city and state names in addresses) works.
But addresses aren’t just for sending mail. Location also determines which municipal and state laws apply, so there are contexts where the distinction matters.
It’s more that the municipal “geofence” encompasses a certain area, and all addresses that fall within that space belong to that municipality. I.e. the address doesn’t determine the location, it just happens to be located somewhere.
> Technically speaking ZIP codes are not "supposed" to span states but, in exceptional cases, some do. In this case USPS handles it the same way: the state of the preferred city is the preferred state for the ZIP code.
I've heard this before but it raises a million questions for me and I don't understand how this doesn't cause massive systematic problems and headaches in practice. Are residents even usually well-aware what city they live in, versus what's on their postal address? I sure as heck have always assumed whatever my mailing address says is the city I live in; I can't imagine a ton of people questioning it.
Doesn't this mean a ton of citizens would be registering for the wrong state's elections? Do the election officials always catch these? What about businesses - don't they constantly pay taxes incorrectly if the address is written incorrectly? What about laws (say privacy, wiretapping/call recording, etc.) where people make assumptions based on the city and state - what if they're wrong because the written city isn't the actual city? Who's criminally liable then?? Does every business have to perform a jurisdiction lookup to make sure an address isn't misleading?
My dad had an address in Morgantown, Indiana, and the fact that he lived several miles south, over the county line and past antother small town, always made it pretty clear to me that he didn't live in Morgantown.
Likewise, if you live in another state, there's little confusion because state lines appear on maps and are well marked on all major roads.
Businesses and individuals are responsible for knowing which state they reside in and paying the appropriate taxes, regardless of where their mail is sorted.
As for elections, electoral districts don't generally align with city limits in the first place, so this has to be sorted out by the election registration system based on the full address in most cases anyway.
As for what city name appears in legal documents, the answer is that "preferred" doesn't mean "mandatory". A warrant to search the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 4790 W 16th St, Speedway IN, 46222, would be perfectly valid, despite the fact that the USPS prefers mail to be addressed to "Indianapolis" rather than "Speedway". For there to be any possibility of confusion, you'd need to have a scenario with two distinct addresses with identical ZIP codes differing only by city name, which for obvious reasons the postal service will not allow.
I agree using the preferred city name works just fine for USPS, though maybe not for UPS/Fedex.
What I want to know is: Why isn't this preferred city+state mapping dataset for zip codes publicly available from USPS? It would be like 40kb of data for the entire thing. Why is this not public domain from the US Government?
It's missing 00501 at least (which zippopotam has), and military zip codes (which zippopotam doesn't have). Military zip codes are included in this file: https://postalpro.usps.com/areadist_ZIP5
Also fun fact 88888 is for "Operation Santa" uspsoperationsanta.com, which zippopotam is missing, but appears in the areadist_ZIP5 file.
This 1000 times. I’ve tried implementing what OP has mentioned, and quickly learned it isn’t possible. A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state. So, to be safe, you have to enter city, state, and zip.
I don’t understand either of these arguments. They both appear to reinforce the point made in the article. At worst a zip code contains multiple cities? Voila the city box becomes a dropdown. It’s 2025. JavaScript.
I get the vibe that it's more like there's unexpected complexity and it's difficult to be confident you know how zipcodes work with enough detail to make the feature work. And that is just one example of possible complexity.
Do zipcodes change for example? Can your drop-down quickly go out-of-date? You'd need a way to manually enter a city so people are able to tell the system an address. Do you want to bother making an auto-updating zipcode feature just for a form?
Is it going to confuse people because nobody else has bothered to make this superfancy selection feature thing?
Is this USA only? There are postal codes/zipcode-equivalents in other countries.
It starts to feel it's likely not worth the time and effort to try to be smart about this particular feature. At least not if I'm imagining this us some generic, universal address web form that is supposed to be usable for USA-sized areas.
To me it feels similar to that famous article about what you can and cannot assume about people's names; turns out they can be way more complicated and weird than one might assume.
Although maybe zipcodes don't really go that deep in complexity. But on the spot I would not dare to assume they are.
> Is this USA only? There are postal codes/zipcode-equivalents in other countries.
This is where the real problems start - postcodes exist the world over.
Speaking as someone that has dealt with countries that have postcodes, but no states, so it's just Street Address (if applicable) | City (if applicable) | Country | Postcode
Inputting a "zip code" first would result in every country being in the drop down.
In Australia, addresses too are wild, they should be considered "free form"
I have a 4 digit postcode, I have to look it up every time I have to fill in an address form for delivery.
I've had people screw 1 digit up in that postcode and their items (a laptop in one case) went to the completely wrong city.
A code sounds foolproof, until you realise most people don't engage with them for most of their lives - you don't tell the uber driver the zip/post code you are waiting in, and travelling to, nobody does.
edit: just to add - Magic numbers are bad. Software engineers know that a number that's undocumented in code is unmaintainable, a zip code is worse.
When the above comments said +4, they meant knowing the second half of the nine digit zip code.
Basically everyone in the US knows the first 5 digits. It's really easy to memorize them. If you can remember your city, you can remember your zip code. And in the US you use it all the time, so it stays memorized.
Your complaint about magic numbers is completely off base. Magic strings are just as bad in software. "Beverly Hills" and 90210 are equal sins on the magic front.
Yeah, anyone who has had to work with USPS bar codes should know that internally these are called routing codes, and they come in 5, 9 and even 11 digit variants. The 11-digit one narrows down to a specific delivery point, but even that isn’t enough to derive an address (just enough to know whether you’re looking at the right one or not). Zip+4 codes also change frequently because they aren’t based on locations but on delivery routes and sequencing.
> Zip+4 codes also change frequently because they aren’t based on locations but on delivery routes and sequencing.
This was news for me. I know the few zip+4 I memorize never change.
I think the source for the parent is AI slop. See [1].
> Due to an increase in population or to the improve postal operations, the US Postal Service® will occasionally add a new ZIP Code or change ZIP Code boundaries.
The census bureau (very) periodically publishes zip code data (which is where some places get their geolocation info). If you work with enough addresses you’ll find some zip+4s that are wildly far away from where they used to be. There are paid services that have better accuracy, but I’m not sure how they acquire their data.
Some people don't realize just how much you can "customize" deliverability with the post office, especially if you're big (like a school or large business) - you can have something that looks like your physical address, but is actually really a maildrop/PO Box at the nearby post office.
You can do relatively complex forwarding that would only appear to the end users if they can decode the barcode.
Only if there's never more than 10,000 addresses in a single zip code, which means that if you enforce that, you can force a zip code to appear by building enough house
I've implemented it, too, and didn't run into any problems. User inputs the zip code, if there's multiple city matches, they select the correct one from the drop-down (or you auto-complete the city name after they type the first 4 letters).
The fact that "A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state" is a good point IN FAVOR of asking for the zip code first (NOT to avoid it) because you certainly can't do it the other way round.
And if you just leave it to the user to free-type all that info in, you have to verify it after... Users are going to make typos, and the USPS will kick your butt if you don't correct it (and credit card payments won't go through, either). So it may be less work for web-form creators, but pushing the verification down stream just makes it all worse for the company using it.
The postcode doesn't tell the whole story. But what you can do is use an IP geolocation service which should narrow down your location enough, so that typing in the entire address is no longer necessary.
I.e. using something like https://ipinfo.io/json and then typing in a full postcode and street name + number should work well in most cases.
IP geolocation is increasingly not useful for anything, especially for mobile users. The best it can do is give you the correct country and maybe get you in the right region.
What if I order something on the road and want it delivered to my home? Or what if I want to order something over mobile? My mobile IP is often 1500km away from where I live.
Autofill solves all of that with an implementation cost that approaches zero.
Make that 1003+ times. At least in my part of the US, even a pretty modest-size city will have multiple zip codes. And zip codes can have zero geographical footprint (meaning street address) - for example, some zip's are just for Post Office Boxes. And a physical address can have an official USPS address & zip of "Middle City", while physically being in (say) Middle Township. And other fun stuff.
> Instead, learn to use your browser's autofill feature, and design your sites with it in mind. If you do it right the user literally doesn't have to type a single character.
Funny that the best solution is circa-1997 Netscape 2.0-level technology, while everyone iterates on how we can make everyone's life worse with even more unnecessary JavaScript. Like we all collectively forgot what the <FORM> tag does.
To type an address on a letter, something a 5 year-old could do with a crayon.
Address forms, with unnecessary and unhelpful drop-downs, many of which reject keyboard input and require use of a mouse to scroll through them, are the bane of my existence.
These details don't detract from the efficiency. The postal code can prefilter every other field which can frequently narrow down to one. I would leave the ability for the user to override with free form data entry as data isn't perfect and changes over time.
I don't remember asking for "efficiency" in typing out an address, something we teach children how to do. It doesn't seem like a societal problem worth iterating over.
These tools are more than often wrong, and cause more grief for the user than any potential help it could provide.
There is no developer in the world that knows this data better than the person typing it into the form.
The linked article feels like it is going to get linked in a response article titled "Things you don't know about zip codes" in the next 48-hours to a week.
yeah - I do think zip first to bring matching things to the top of your other dropdowns and lookup results (not filter, just prioritize) is almost certainly a good idea, but it's very much not an always-match.
I'm always struck at how the state abbreviations are alphabetical order of state name. This leads to the abbreviation not being in strict alphabetical order.
I'd be fine if it autofilled one city from the zip code, which for me is always wrong. I can tab to the field and type in the correct city. Don't even need a drop-down with the possible cities. And if I don't fix it, it doesn't really matter for USPS. They just care that the ZIP is correct.
This. I have to fill out a form that requires uses the ZIP code to look up cit(ies) and state, but often has multiple options for county, which I have to look up in a separate tab independently. It's not the huge time saver it should be... unless we start including ZIP+4, but I couldn't even tell you my own address with +4.
US-centric. I typed a Mexico postal code (it’s five digits) and got routed to somewhere in Maine. So - yeah the whole “I can tell you’re in the US just by the zip code” premise is entirely flawed.
The best times are when US ecommerce sites try to confidently lint foreign addresses, even when they allow shipping there.
I've had them tell me I need 5 digits for my postal code in Norway, which uses 4 digits. I selected Norway in the shipping web form.
Or when they tell me special characters aren't allowed, yet the "special characters" are just letters in the Norwegian alphabet. My address contains ø. These aren't even unicode, they're in the extended 8 bit ascii set. Why are you linting these!?
These happen all the time. Thankfully our postal system recognises this and allows some substitutions (å=aa, ø=oe, æ=ae).
Should be titled "Put the Zipcode and country first".
Would be simple enough to have someone type the zip or postal code first, then move the countries that are known to have that zip code to the top of the drop down (still in alphabetical order), and all the other countries below that (also in alphabetical order).
Leave all the fields editable, i.e. the postal code only suggests, ranks, or prepopulates.
Seems like that would handle all the edge cases, including those where a zip code doesn't refer to one and only one city, or where a zip code has changed or been added to a country.
Because most websites won't have two separate fields for "ZIP code" and "postal code". Even if they knew that ZIP Code is a trademark (I didn't until you mentioned it), they would (wisely) know that putting in two fields would just confuse most people. So they put in one field. Many sites label it as "ZIP code / postal code", but some just label it as "ZIP code". But the intent is clear: put in the multi-digit string that identifies your address, whether your country calls it a ZIP code or a postal code.
Put country first. Postcode doesn’t make sense without one. Prepopulating one based on location is generally okay, but don’t assume it will always be the same.
That assumes the existence of a reliable, free postcode API of all addresses on the planet.
I did a very brief search, and none of the commercial offerings I could test recognised the postcode of the Eastern European neighbourhood I was born in. Also, like half of African countries don't have postcodes. It's just not a good system.
Only if you're limiting yourself tok those two countries. A lot of countries use the entirety of a 4 or 5 digit range for their codes. Any given 5 digit number is likely a valid ZIP code in at least half dozen countries.
The form stopped accepting input at five characters. I could not enter a "zip code" for my country even if I wanted to.
Even if they fixed that, there are other issues. (You pretty much need to cross-reference it with a database, which assumes said database even exists.)
Yup. I typed my French ZIP code (code postal) and this guessed a US city...
But the author has a point. Combine it with some approximate country-level geolocate of the web client and this would work perfectly 99% of the time modulo edge cases like VPN users.
Yeah, post codes are a huge pit of an implementation. Each country has their own way of presenting and formatting them, as well as additional validation rules (e.g. valid postal districts). This should be amazing (and is), but if you maintain such a validator you'll have a continuous stream of bugs where clients were able to make a mistake they shouldn't have been able to (often breaking downstream where it is hard to recover) or where you refuse to accept somebodies very real address and they are very personally upset (rightly so).
That said, the obvious solution is <country> <post code> where <country> is prepopulated from geo-ip or browser signals or similar.
In the mid-1990's, I requested information from a major multinational corporation (IBM) that had a significant presence in my country. They somehow managed to mangle the six characters of a Canadian postal code, which alternates between letters and digits, into a five digit zip code. Making it even more perplexing, the envelope was addressed by hand and came from New York state. Some Americans seem to think that the rest of the world is a mirror of them, and will go through unusual contortions to maintain that belief. (To be fair: there is another level above that which is Anglo-centric, which allows for just enough variation between English speaking nations.)
I have seen websites that more-or-less takes the author's advice though. They are country specific. They are backed by the postal system's database. They present a list of addresses that match up with the postal code. They do not work very well when a particular address does not have a postal code. And yes, that happens.
The UI pattern is still stupid. You should be able to quickly enter forms like this on a keyboard.
When I look for a part for my car, I pick “Honda”, “Model Year”, “model”, “trim”.
With address forms, if I type “U” in a keyboard aware field, it defaults to “US Minor Outlying Islands”. Places that try to accommodate will put the US and Canada first.
If you asked country, first, you could utilize the postcode method. Some sites try to autocomplete street address which I personally find annoying as my street is a common streetname.
Small distraction, entering the year first is preferred for vehicles, as manufacturers changed names (Nissan/Datsun) or were discontinued (Saturn, Pontiac) after known years.
Agreed. I suppose they could lookup based on your IP to pre-select a country (which you can still override if you need to aka VPNs and ordering from a different country), and based on that then ask for a postcode.
I fail to see how you can claim this to work for sites which serve areas outside the United States, but have either no ZIP code, an overlapping code, or something else entirely. Germany has 5 digit PLZs, but putting some valid ones in doesn't get a result. It really seems like the author does not think about other countries.
I don't disagree with reordering the entry by relevance, but you have to start with country. That can also be a nice search - it will be a very short lookup, even if you put every country name in every language. Only after that is postal code (of whatever kind - it's only ZIP in the US) relevant.
Ok but that only fetches the codes from the US, so now a non-US resident will start with their zip code and end up with random ass place on the other side of the globe. Now not only I still have to fill in the fields, but also clear them first.
Obviously put country first, then whatever the equivalent of a ZIP code is second. In the UK, a post code gets you down to around 15-16 delivery addresses on average. No-one there really _ever_ needs to type an address.
Most British websites work like this website suggests, in that they ask for the postcode first, then give you a dropdown of all the addresses at that postcode.
It works great, except my address is for some reason not in whatever databases these websites use. The building number is on the list, but not the individual flats. So I have to put in the postcode, choose something like "My address is not listed", then fill in the form manually. A few times it wasn't even offered as an option.
It sounds like your address isn't listed correctly in the UK Postcode Address File (PAF).[0] There's a form you can fill in requesting a correction.[1]
“Obviously” didn’t read the article. Not having to pick the country is literally the premise!
“I type 90210. You now know I'm in Beverly Hills, California, United States. You didn't need me to tell you that. You didn't need a dropdown. You didn't need me to scroll past Turkmenistan.”
The author seems to have either misunderstood the API they're referencing or are assuming US only addresses. The specific endpoint they're calling seems to be for US specific zip codes.
The point stands that this doesn't "just work" for global services.
"Obviously" the article is wrong, as pointed out by the grandparent of your comment (and several others in the comments). I won't violate the site guidelines by suggesting you didn't read it.
Great. Pretty sure jen20 did too; they are replying to a comment pointing out the article is wrong and suggesting a compromise between the web default "enter all your address, then the zipcode" and the article's "you don't ever need to touch the country, state, or city fields" that is closer to working beyond the US. In that context, I find it strange and rude that you're suggesting they didn't read the article.
You also suggested I hadn’t read it. “I won't violate the site guidelines by suggesting you didn't read it”. Only you did (saying you won’t say something and then saying it doesn’t really absolve you).
At that point, should we even show the whole form? Or should we only ask the country first and then based on the answer, decide whether to show a form? That way the form can be different for each country?
I think auto full suggestion should be just that -- a suggestion, not validation.
Yeah, I’m thinking about how the address validation databases would for years correct my house’s address to point to a house in a cul-de-sac a block away. I could tell who was auto-correcting my address by which parcels arrived there. The USPS carrier knew too and he would ignore the address on some parcels.
I eventually had to dig through a bunch of USPS documentation for their Address Element Correction database to find their helpdesk. Apparently places like Fedex use that database.
So I agree as well, and I would be pretty angry if someone forced me to pick from a list instead of just trusting that I know my own address.
Also as another aside I was a shipping clerk for a while and occasionally came across an address like “across from such-and such store halfway down the alley.” So the author is making a pretty bold assumption that there is such a thing as a standard address that can be auto-filled.
Yeah but, the article was specifically saying that you don't need to put in country because you can look it up by ZIP. That's obviously wrong, but apparently not to the author of the website.
It’s easy enough to say “put the zip first because that will tell you city, state and country in one input”.
What happens to customers not in the United States? They have no zip to enter. Or if they have a postal code of some stripe, it has a different format.
What about folks who are in Turkmenistan, that you’re grumpy about having to scroll past? How are they signing up?
A lot of the times both "zipcode" and "state" are mandatory fields.
Zipcode is easy, the platform likely wants my postal code.
You have to be a little bit more creative with state, sometimes "We don't have any states" is fun to see printed on your address label on a parcel, other times "Denmark" could be considered a state in the EU and that can be an answer, but most times "N/A" is enough.
IMO, the spirit of the idea is to put higher information density fields first, and let that smooth out the UX for the remaining fields as you go downwards. Yes, there will be exceptions but that only matters if you’re trying to absolve the user of all work for 100% of situations. Trying to do that is a fools errand. Invert the order and use the information gathered to make inputting the rest simpler for 80% of the users. Then make it easy for the other 20% to course correct (ex: don’t disable autofilled fields, highlight all text when tabbing to the next field, etc). I think this pattern is a good one to keep in mind, but not blindly follow, when designing the UX of a UI.
Falsehoods US programmers believe about addresses: there are no other countries than the US of A, and if there are, they don’t really matter.
This person bought a whole domain for something that doesn’t work for 90% of the world, claiming it does, never even testing their assumption. Great job!
I entered my zip code… well, wrong country: I’m living in Germany.
And even if you knew that, the only thing you could have known from the zip code is the city. At least roughly, because multiple small villages share one zip code.
Or, to cut it short: This doesn’t work at all on a general and global level, so I guess there’s a reason why websites do this differently…
I wonder if people had a similarly negative reaction when someone first proposed speculative execution in processor pipelines.
“This is is a terrible idea, you’re telling me you will make 99% of cases way faster but completely ignore the 1% that will be slightly slower? Unbelievable.”
If you have SA that mast of your customers are in USA, this is a good idea. If not, maybe use your brain a bit and figure out if it can be adapted to something which will work for your customer base.
I definitely agree in principle. But - without doxxing myself - I input my zip and the city is not correct. It’s a very close neighboring suburb (where the boundaries are definitely blurry) but it’s not the city on all the legal documents for my current house.
Yeah city is not fully a function of zip. ~I think state is though.~* I believe when multiple cities share a zip code USPS uses the larger one. Usually the wrong city will get delivered though, probably not guaranteed.
* correcting myself, some zip codes do cross state lines
Legal address doesn't matter for mail, and all of this stuff is about mail/shipping. This includes billing addresses.
I would have assumed that you knew that. I know people whose ZIP code belongs to a neighboring town (because mail works that way) and it basically becomes their de-facto address.
Some areas have duplicate, or very similar street names (ie, 'ave' vs. 'street') I don't think its that much of an ask that a website lets you enter your address correctly
FWIW I have received mail from the USPS in places that had no canonical full address as well. It's not the case in reality that the USPS only delivers mail to mailboxes that have an associated entry in their canonical database here in "messy" reality.
The author complains about country selector drop-downs as part of the address flow, but if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States. I don't think there's a country-inferer from completely generic postal code tool out there yet, is there?
In the UK, it's pretty common for the post code to be the first field in address forms, and for the form to then offer auto-completion for the whole address based on the post code. Postcodes are specific enough that the autocomplete will just give you a handful of addresses (e.g. my postcode will give you just the flats for the building I live in).
Most sites I use auto-fill city, state and zip once I type the street address, which is the 1 piece of my address that can’t be guessed from any of the others. So I’d say that’s probably the optimal path for most people, at least in the US. I’m sure people from other countries scoff at the US address suggestion and go straight for the country box from the beginning.
It's impressive someone went to the trouble of putting together this angry dreck, and completely ignoring the fact that ZIP codes often span multiple cities/towns, which not only completely invalidates the author's premise, it would populate the fields with wrong information that would have to be manually corrected later.
Address entries are the weirdest places of frustration. Business clients want Google Places to make address input easier. This user wants a single ZIP code entry to begin the process. Why is adding one’s own address manually that huge of a hurdle that we have to separate the user from the inputs? If there is one person in the world who should know my address, it’s me: why then put such an effort into building a site that takes away my ability to enter my address?
The ZIP-first approach assumes a postal code can deterministically resolve the rest of the address, which is rarely true in practice since many codes map to multiple cities or large geographic areas. Making it reliable requires maintaining comprehensive, frequently updated postal datasets or integrating with external geocoding services, which introduces non-trivial operational complexity. Additionally, deviating from standard address field ordering can work against established user expectations and may degrade usability rather than improve it.
I’m reading this from UAE where zipcodes don’t exist. I wanted to make a similar post so that when you select UAE as country remove the zip code field. Usually the workaround is to type 000000
Zipcodes are not great for reliably describing locations. They're collections of multiple postal delivery routes, and that's it. There's no guarantee that any given zipcode lies within a single city, or a single state, or that it lies within the boundaries of the US at all, or that it's contiguous, or that it's stationary (there are some for boats), or that any given location only has one, etc., etc. People think this is a good idea because their particular case happens to work well, but zip codes are rife with edge cases.
Zip codes do not have a one to one relationship to cities in the US. It's a common misconception. It's true about 90% of the time, but there are a lot of outliers. I used to work with GIS data and there are a ton of exceptions.
Looks like that is just an area that straddles the border between Tennessee and Kenucky. Though it maps to more than one state, it is a single, connected region.
Awesome idea, IF you are US only and don't cover edge cases and (want to depend on an external API or want to have some sort of eventually outdated map of city <> postcode).
It is possible to do this properly, e. G., DHL and UPS do a somewhat okay job of it but isn't easy.
I like how instead of just rephrasing the website’s premise to make it clear he only cares about the US, he added some ip-based geolocation to select a snarky response based on where you are. Essentially the site argues back to you if you’re not in the US or something. Why did this person even bother creating the website if he’s so hostile and angry.
Besides the issues of the OP approach that many point out on this thread, I also want to point out that the ZIP code input on the example, doesn't have the type=number so my mobile keyboard opens with the whole keys instead of the numeric keyboard, in this case that ZIP codes are only numbers, the type=number will improve accessibility.
It's very interesting how the "you know the city, the state, the country" mantra here is really "you know the city, the state and obviously the country is the USA no other possibilities are considered or worth considering"
It should be at least "Put country first, then ask for zip code".
08036 Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
08036 Hainesport, New Jersey, USA
It does make some sense to go from most general (country) to more specific (address) instead of the opposite, so the form can implement better auto completions.
However in practice postal addresses are not that clean so simple dumb forms are usually better, because it's easy for exceptions to be missed by auto completion algorithms. I would be very pissed if I had to type the zip code above and then correct the wrong guess on every website.
Either you are helpful and guess correctly or you don't guess at all.
My postal code is 2200 (København N), and that form didn't do anything for me.
All zip codes are postal codes, but not all postal codes are zip codes.
At my last gig, this sentence was said a lot, and people kept confusing the two, both in code and in daily speech, so maybe colloquially they are the same :)
This sound like it's more efficient - however... (and ignoring the US specific stuff)
Even in forms where I've designed this it breaks my flow as a user. I'm used to suburb state postcode order (I'm an Aussie). It's how we were taught to write the address in school. It's been a pattern for a long time, and the reversal of the fields slows my brain down.
IMHO The better user experience isn't changing the order of the fields. It's honouring auto-complete so the user doesn't have to enter this data in the first place.
In the last couple of years in the uk, address forms ask for you street address and the rest will autocomplete from there - city, postcode. Makes things a lot easier in the way the author suggests
Why do we not use ZIP+4 add-on codes anymore? Some sites won't even accept them. If you put that in first, you've narrowed it down to one street at worst, in most cases.
In the Netherlands most websites use a common routing database to map a combination of a ZIP code and house number (+ suffix) to your exact address automatically. Great UX! And naturally depends on good administrative and postal services data quality.
Ehh... US-centric. Better to use significance order: Country, then postal (most countries have postal), then region, city, and street address. Best, however, is to _not_ separate the address into fields. Instead, allow a free text field for the person doing data entry to put in the address in _their_ format and then parse it on the backend. This gets you the most flexibility and allows you to encounter and handle corner cases by using (my favorite test data) public addresses from all over the world. _I_ routinely test my address entry by Googling McDonald's locations and feeding them into my system. Handle an inscrutable address like any other bad data and say, politely, that your system does not understand the data.
All that said, free-form entry is a hard sell. My _customers_ expect field data entry, so I implement field data entry. I just re-order my checks to be more forgiving until the data entry is complete.
I was implementing a customer service address entry using significance order 25 years ago. As I already _knew_ that I had a US-centric customer base (we sold long distance to sorority and fraternity members), entering US ZIP first saved a lot of time and more highly leveraged the US postal address cleaner that we had already purchased for our mass marketing mailers. The people working the call center _loved_ it, as they could focus more on their call turn-over than on data entry.
I know some zips covers multiple cities. I would imagine some cross state lines in places too. Doesn’t cover multiple countries either as some have similar formats (5 digits). So there are edge cases that make this infeasible
The Dutch zipcode and the house number are unique. So, to mail something to the Netherlands anywhere from the world, it is enough to write something like: NL 1072CT 4.
This works really well in Ireland. Eircodes (our late adoption postal codes) resolve to individual addresses rather than areas, so Irish sites mostly do this.
When you create a site with a tone this self-righteous and condescending, you should really double check your thinking to make sure there is not some glaring flaw invalidating the premise for the majority of people in the world:
> A US ZIP code is 5 characters. From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country. That's 3 fields. Autofilled. From one input.
I guess this is par for the course in Trump's America, but I still feel embarrassed for the creator.
I completely agree with the premise, but if we just ask for the ZIP code first and auto-fill the rest, how am I going to justify my 2-week sprint to build a custom, React-based, fuzzy-searchable, virtualized dropdown component for the 'State' field?
In a similar tone, it’s 2026. Why are we still messing with form ordering instead of leaning into autofill? So somehow it makes more sense to change every single address form in existence to a non standard order because…why exactly? There’s a whole world outside of the United States with many formats for postal codes. It’s more efficient to just use autofill…
Le sigh. It has now a disclaimer at the top. “Hello from across the pond (or whichever body of water separates us). This is a US ZIP code website. We are aware that other countries exist.”
This guy just keeps digging himself into a hole of ignorance - is he aware of Mexico? Canada?
const msgs = [
`Yes, we know ${country} exists. We're very proud of you.<br><br>This site is about US address forms — the ones that make <em>Americans</em> scroll past Turkmenistan 200 times a year. You have your own postal code problems. We believe in you.`,
`We see you're visiting from ${country}. Welcome. We regret to inform you that this rant is specifically about American address forms, which are — and we cannot stress this enough — <em>unbelievably bad</em>.<br><br>Your country probably has its own postal code horrors. We'd love to hear about them: <a href='mailto:shame@zipcodefirst.com'>shame@zipcodefirst.com</a>`,
`Hello from across the pond (or whichever body of water separates us from ${country}). This is a US ZIP code website. We are aware that other countries exist. We just have 160 million addresses and a 50-state dropdown to be mad about first.<br><br>Your frustrations are valid. Your postal codes are also useful. Put them first too.`
];
Related, on the country drop-down front: please put the United States (or whatever your customers' main country is) at the top. You can probably tell I want the US from a combination of, you know, 99% of your sales being to the US and my language being set to English. And, sure, put Canada and even the UK next to it. Go wild, have the top ten English-speaking countries there if you like! It makes things so much easier.
The trick, then, is that you don't remove anything from the alphabetical list. With modern computer technology, we can have two places to find something! So if I miss your fancy shortcut, or it's not applicable to me, everything will still be in the regular old familiar place. It just works.
This generates a really annoying features with some browsers. Suppose I want to select "United Kingdom". I open the drop-down and there are all the countries in alphabetical order, plus "United States" at the top of the list. I hit the 'U' key. It does not take me to the alphabetically listed countries beginning with 'U', it takes me to the "United States" entry at the top of the list. I might be able to type 'U-N-I-T-E-D-K' and get to the "United Kingdom" entry, but there are browsers where that does not work. (Nor does repeatedly hitting 'U' bring me to the later 'U' entries.)
Um a lot of US zip codes map to multiple cities. Some even to multiple states. If you build a picker for city/state this works fine but your premise is easily refuted if you look at the data!
I wish I could downvote this. Please don’t do this folks. Editing “guessed” filled inputs when they’re incorrect is a higher UX bar of effort than browser autofill or even just typing it (especially on mobile). Plus a non-zero number of users will just not correct or be confused and abandon.
I would say this doesn't actually work well for UX, because people are more likely to know their street address and city than their zip code. Personally, every time I've moved over the years, it took a few weeks for me to internalize my new zip code.
False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompetence of the people implementing most web forms, you're asking for disaster here.
Instead, learn to use your browser's autofill feature, and design your sites with it in mind. If you do it right the user literally doesn't have to type a single character. That's even better than typing a numeric code. Sadly even this seems beyond the abilities of the people who implement web forms.
This does mean that you might autofill a city name that is "wrong" in the view of the person completing the address form, but much of the bulk mail they receive probably uses that city name anyway.
Technically speaking ZIP codes are not "supposed" to span states but, in exceptional cases, some do. In this case USPS handles it the same way: the state of the preferred city is the preferred state for the ZIP code.
The preferred city is almost always the location of the post office serving the ZIP, which makes this situation fairly intuitive. You can find some interesting edge cases where a post office in located in a suburb city, resulting in a ZIP that includes part of a major city having the suburb as its preferred city name.
You can look up the city name and alternates for a ZIP here: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?citybyzipcode and the Domestic Mailing Manual covers this, although it's scattered across several sections and mostly part of how the City State database (the database used for validating city and state names in addresses) works.
I've heard this before but it raises a million questions for me and I don't understand how this doesn't cause massive systematic problems and headaches in practice. Are residents even usually well-aware what city they live in, versus what's on their postal address? I sure as heck have always assumed whatever my mailing address says is the city I live in; I can't imagine a ton of people questioning it.
Doesn't this mean a ton of citizens would be registering for the wrong state's elections? Do the election officials always catch these? What about businesses - don't they constantly pay taxes incorrectly if the address is written incorrectly? What about laws (say privacy, wiretapping/call recording, etc.) where people make assumptions based on the city and state - what if they're wrong because the written city isn't the actual city? Who's criminally liable then?? Does every business have to perform a jurisdiction lookup to make sure an address isn't misleading?
Likewise, if you live in another state, there's little confusion because state lines appear on maps and are well marked on all major roads.
Businesses and individuals are responsible for knowing which state they reside in and paying the appropriate taxes, regardless of where their mail is sorted.
As for elections, electoral districts don't generally align with city limits in the first place, so this has to be sorted out by the election registration system based on the full address in most cases anyway.
As for what city name appears in legal documents, the answer is that "preferred" doesn't mean "mandatory". A warrant to search the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 4790 W 16th St, Speedway IN, 46222, would be perfectly valid, despite the fact that the USPS prefers mail to be addressed to "Indianapolis" rather than "Speedway". For there to be any possibility of confusion, you'd need to have a scenario with two distinct addresses with identical ZIP codes differing only by city name, which for obvious reasons the postal service will not allow.
What I want to know is: Why isn't this preferred city+state mapping dataset for zip codes publicly available from USPS? It would be like 40kb of data for the entire thing. Why is this not public domain from the US Government?
Edit: or is this what I'm looking for (the "Physical City", "Physical State" columns? https://postalpro.usps.com/ZIP_Locale_Detail
It's missing 00501 at least (which zippopotam has), and military zip codes (which zippopotam doesn't have). Military zip codes are included in this file: https://postalpro.usps.com/areadist_ZIP5
Also fun fact 88888 is for "Operation Santa" uspsoperationsanta.com, which zippopotam is missing, but appears in the areadist_ZIP5 file.
Do zipcodes change for example? Can your drop-down quickly go out-of-date? You'd need a way to manually enter a city so people are able to tell the system an address. Do you want to bother making an auto-updating zipcode feature just for a form?
Is it going to confuse people because nobody else has bothered to make this superfancy selection feature thing?
Is this USA only? There are postal codes/zipcode-equivalents in other countries.
It starts to feel it's likely not worth the time and effort to try to be smart about this particular feature. At least not if I'm imagining this us some generic, universal address web form that is supposed to be usable for USA-sized areas.
To me it feels similar to that famous article about what you can and cannot assume about people's names; turns out they can be way more complicated and weird than one might assume.
Although maybe zipcodes don't really go that deep in complexity. But on the spot I would not dare to assume they are.
This is where the real problems start - postcodes exist the world over.
Speaking as someone that has dealt with countries that have postcodes, but no states, so it's just Street Address (if applicable) | City (if applicable) | Country | Postcode
Inputting a "zip code" first would result in every country being in the drop down.
In Australia, addresses too are wild, they should be considered "free form"
https://blog.melissa.com/en-au/global-intelligence/australia...
Gives this as an example address The Smith Family
'Willow Creek' Station
via Winton
QLD 4730
These are reasons you cannot deduce the Zip from the city, not the opposite. A ZIP+4 actually encodes all other information for a US address.
I have a 4 digit postcode, I have to look it up every time I have to fill in an address form for delivery.
I've had people screw 1 digit up in that postcode and their items (a laptop in one case) went to the completely wrong city.
A code sounds foolproof, until you realise most people don't engage with them for most of their lives - you don't tell the uber driver the zip/post code you are waiting in, and travelling to, nobody does.
edit: just to add - Magic numbers are bad. Software engineers know that a number that's undocumented in code is unmaintainable, a zip code is worse.
Basically everyone in the US knows the first 5 digits. It's really easy to memorize them. If you can remember your city, you can remember your zip code. And in the US you use it all the time, so it stays memorized.
Your complaint about magic numbers is completely off base. Magic strings are just as bad in software. "Beverly Hills" and 90210 are equal sins on the magic front.
Let me uh just grab my utility bill...
Proof: a post office has its own zip code, for PO Boxes.
The +4 is the last four digits of the post office box.
If the Post Office has more than 10,000 boxes, the +4 will be duplicated.
This was news for me. I know the few zip+4 I memorize never change.
I think the source for the parent is AI slop. See [1].
> Due to an increase in population or to the improve postal operations, the US Postal Service® will occasionally add a new ZIP Code or change ZIP Code boundaries.
The plus four digits encode:
> [67] : Sector or Several Blocks
> [89] : Segment or One Side of a Street
Note that this contradicts the parent.
[1]: https://faq.usps.com/s/article/ZIP-Code-The-Basics
You can do relatively complex forwarding that would only appear to the end users if they can decode the barcode.
The fact that "A city can also exist in multiple zip codes. And there can be multiple cities with the same name in the same state" is a good point IN FAVOR of asking for the zip code first (NOT to avoid it) because you certainly can't do it the other way round.
And if you just leave it to the user to free-type all that info in, you have to verify it after... Users are going to make typos, and the USPS will kick your butt if you don't correct it (and credit card payments won't go through, either). So it may be less work for web-form creators, but pushing the verification down stream just makes it all worse for the company using it.
I.e. using something like https://ipinfo.io/json and then typing in a full postcode and street name + number should work well in most cases.
Autofill solves all of that with an implementation cost that approaches zero.
Sure but a zip code belongs to only one city and one state, right?
Is that an issue? Who cares that new york city has 20+ zip codes? Just fill autofill "new york city, new york".
>for example, some zip's are just for Post Office Boxes.
Again, is it bad except for some joker who wants something sent to an invalid address?
Funny that the best solution is circa-1997 Netscape 2.0-level technology, while everyone iterates on how we can make everyone's life worse with even more unnecessary JavaScript. Like we all collectively forgot what the <FORM> tag does.
To type an address on a letter, something a 5 year-old could do with a crayon.
Address forms, with unnecessary and unhelpful drop-downs, many of which reject keyboard input and require use of a mouse to scroll through them, are the bane of my existence.
These tools are more than often wrong, and cause more grief for the user than any potential help it could provide.
There is no developer in the world that knows this data better than the person typing it into the form.
if it's not unique, a trivial fallback would be to not populate anything, and that's where we are today
that way it's faster and easier for 90% (just a guess) and no different for folks that have multiple cities on that zip
I've had them tell me I need 5 digits for my postal code in Norway, which uses 4 digits. I selected Norway in the shipping web form.
Or when they tell me special characters aren't allowed, yet the "special characters" are just letters in the Norwegian alphabet. My address contains ø. These aren't even unicode, they're in the extended 8 bit ascii set. Why are you linting these!?
These happen all the time. Thankfully our postal system recognises this and allows some substitutions (å=aa, ø=oe, æ=ae).
I learned from a cashier to type 00000 and it has always worked.
Would be simple enough to have someone type the zip or postal code first, then move the countries that are known to have that zip code to the top of the drop down (still in alphabetical order), and all the other countries below that (also in alphabetical order).
Leave all the fields editable, i.e. the postal code only suggests, ranks, or prepopulates.
Seems like that would handle all the edge cases, including those where a zip code doesn't refer to one and only one city, or where a zip code has changed or been added to a country.
Include a field for the country that is autofilled via Geolocation API or geoip if that's unavailable.
Or just don’t try to be too clever.
> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country.
You can't infer the country from a postcode.
I did a very brief search, and none of the commercial offerings I could test recognised the postcode of the Eastern European neighbourhood I was born in. Also, like half of African countries don't have postcodes. It's just not a good system.
Even if they fixed that, there are other issues. (You pretty much need to cross-reference it with a database, which assumes said database even exists.)
But the author has a point. Combine it with some approximate country-level geolocate of the web client and this would work perfectly 99% of the time modulo edge cases like VPN users.
That said, the obvious solution is <country> <post code> where <country> is prepopulated from geo-ip or browser signals or similar.
I have seen websites that more-or-less takes the author's advice though. They are country specific. They are backed by the postal system's database. They present a list of addresses that match up with the postal code. They do not work very well when a particular address does not have a postal code. And yes, that happens.
When I look for a part for my car, I pick “Honda”, “Model Year”, “model”, “trim”.
With address forms, if I type “U” in a keyboard aware field, it defaults to “US Minor Outlying Islands”. Places that try to accommodate will put the US and Canada first.
If you asked country, first, you could utilize the postcode method. Some sites try to autocomplete street address which I personally find annoying as my street is a common streetname.
United Kingdom
Great Britain
Britain
England
Proposing UX improvements is great, but please don't forget the other 95% of the planet.
I don't disagree with reordering the entry by relevance, but you have to start with country. That can also be a nice search - it will be a very short lookup, even if you put every country name in every language. Only after that is postal code (of whatever kind - it's only ZIP in the US) relevant.
It works great, except my address is for some reason not in whatever databases these websites use. The building number is on the list, but not the individual flats. So I have to put in the postcode, choose something like "My address is not listed", then fill in the form manually. A few times it wasn't even offered as an option.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcode_Address_File [1] https://www.royalmail.com/personal/receiving-mail/update-you...
“I type 90210. You now know I'm in Beverly Hills, California, United States. You didn't need me to tell you that. You didn't need a dropdown. You didn't need me to scroll past Turkmenistan.”
The point stands that this doesn't "just work" for global services.
I find you rude so I won’t reply to you anymore.
I think auto full suggestion should be just that -- a suggestion, not validation.
I eventually had to dig through a bunch of USPS documentation for their Address Element Correction database to find their helpdesk. Apparently places like Fedex use that database.
So I agree as well, and I would be pretty angry if someone forced me to pick from a list instead of just trusting that I know my own address.
Also as another aside I was a shipping clerk for a while and occasionally came across an address like “across from such-and such store halfway down the alley.” So the author is making a pretty bold assumption that there is such a thing as a standard address that can be auto-filled.
What happens to customers not in the United States? They have no zip to enter. Or if they have a postal code of some stripe, it has a different format.
What about folks who are in Turkmenistan, that you’re grumpy about having to scroll past? How are they signing up?
Zipcode is easy, the platform likely wants my postal code.
You have to be a little bit more creative with state, sometimes "We don't have any states" is fun to see printed on your address label on a parcel, other times "Denmark" could be considered a state in the EU and that can be an answer, but most times "N/A" is enough.
This person bought a whole domain for something that doesn’t work for 90% of the world, claiming it does, never even testing their assumption. Great job!
And the country field is completely useless as you can’t change from USA.
And even if you knew that, the only thing you could have known from the zip code is the city. At least roughly, because multiple small villages share one zip code.
Or, to cut it short: This doesn’t work at all on a general and global level, so I guess there’s a reason why websites do this differently…
“This is is a terrible idea, you’re telling me you will make 99% of cases way faster but completely ignore the 1% that will be slightly slower? Unbelievable.”
If you have SA that mast of your customers are in USA, this is a good idea. If not, maybe use your brain a bit and figure out if it can be adapted to something which will work for your customer base.
* correcting myself, some zip codes do cross state lines
https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/index.ht...
I would have assumed that you knew that. I know people whose ZIP code belongs to a neighboring town (because mail works that way) and it basically becomes their de-facto address.
I just looked it up and apparently there's some cases of zip codes that do go across state lines too, but it's rare.
My experience living in towns that received mail from other towns is your canonical address IS the other town.
There are zip codes that map to more than one city.
There are zip codes that map to more than one state. (42223)
Line houses are even more interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_house
It is possible to do this properly, e. G., DHL and UPS do a somewhat okay job of it but isn't easy.
08036 Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
08036 Hainesport, New Jersey, USA
It does make some sense to go from most general (country) to more specific (address) instead of the opposite, so the form can implement better auto completions.
However in practice postal addresses are not that clean so simple dumb forms are usually better, because it's easy for exceptions to be missed by auto completion algorithms. I would be very pissed if I had to type the zip code above and then correct the wrong guess on every website.
Either you are helpful and guess correctly or you don't guess at all.
All zip codes are postal codes, but not all postal codes are zip codes.
At my last gig, this sentence was said a lot, and people kept confusing the two, both in code and in daily speech, so maybe colloquially they are the same :)
You’d absolutely have to determine that you’re in the US before asking for zip code.
Even in forms where I've designed this it breaks my flow as a user. I'm used to suburb state postcode order (I'm an Aussie). It's how we were taught to write the address in school. It's been a pattern for a long time, and the reversal of the fields slows my brain down.
IMHO The better user experience isn't changing the order of the fields. It's honouring auto-complete so the user doesn't have to enter this data in the first place.
JRandomCustomer enters street-number, apt-number, city, state, code ... in that order.
Also, many websites seem to have a negotiation with the browser, where, given: a street address, -> they can populate the other fields.
Definitely not perfect
For the US you can use zip-5 to prefill bunch of data and zip+4 practically fills it all out for a lot of addresses.
Each country has some particular nuance though, so it's only as simple as "zip first" or "postcode first" in some locations.
Does this work for zips? Some zips have a leading 0.
That would have all the desired properties and then some, and would work everywhere on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
All that said, free-form entry is a hard sell. My _customers_ expect field data entry, so I implement field data entry. I just re-order my checks to be more forgiving until the data entry is complete.
I was implementing a customer service address entry using significance order 25 years ago. As I already _knew_ that I had a US-centric customer base (we sold long distance to sorority and fraternity members), entering US ZIP first saved a lot of time and more highly leveraged the US postal address cleaner that we had already purchased for our mass marketing mailers. The people working the call center _loved_ it, as they could focus more on their call turn-over than on data entry.
Like the author I cannot stand how stupid some checkout processes are!
I've encountered websites that take the zip and won't let me change the wrongly-assumed city
The fact that mail gets to its destination when it does, as soon as it does, with overall minimal error, is nothing short of amazing.
But some web dev blogger has it All. Figured. Out.
Right.
I'm sure your way is better.
This is big "I could code it in a weekend" HN energy.
The USPS owes you a debt of gratitude for buying a snarky domain and bringing this to their attention after 63 years.
> A US ZIP code is 5 characters. From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country. That's 3 fields. Autofilled. From one input.
I guess this is par for the course in Trump's America, but I still feel embarrassed for the creator.
See: https://peter-horton.com/2022/12/30/zip-codes-zctas-and-zcta...
This is not new. Some checkouts do start with zip code and they feel much more efficient. (US only delivery, so country already assumed)
Just kidding xP
This works within a country, but not between countries.
For example 77520 is the zip code of Cancun, Mexico and Baytown, Texas.
---
Needs to be country + zip code (postal code).
PD: if you don't get the reference, a classic: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
This guy just keeps digging himself into a hole of ignorance - is he aware of Mexico? Canada?
- Put the country first
- Put the zip code second
The trick, then, is that you don't remove anything from the alphabetical list. With modern computer technology, we can have two places to find something! So if I miss your fancy shortcut, or it's not applicable to me, everything will still be in the regular old familiar place. It just works.
Zip codes map to postal routes, not polygons
Nope! Didn't see that. Seems the zip code registry doesn't have a number of German zip codes.
Zip codes repeat across countries, you know.