
Why You Should Use a Text Area for Address Form Fields - dojosensei
http://uxmovement.com/forms/why-you-should-use-a-text-area-for-address-form-fields/
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ryantbrown
Changing the label from "Address 2" to "Apartment, Suite, etc (optional)" and
adding dynamic dropdowns for City, State, Country decreased the number of
incorrect addresses for us by nearly 50%.

Although I can't claim credit I stole it from Shopify's checkout.

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dstroot
This approach seems best to me, rather than dealing with free form text and
then trying to parse and cleanse that.

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Doxin
> trying to parse and cleanse that

But why would you? If you need to send something to the address you can just
print the exact user input on the shipping label.

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quelltext
You might wabt to run some analytics on your data based on city, general area,
etc. Also simplifies fraud detection.

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olooney
This is good advice, especially because anyone who is serious about using the
address will be passing it through CASS certification or geocoding on the
backend before using the address. Such APIs are fully capable of parsing the
full address without you splitting the address lines.

[http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/](http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/)

[https://accuzip.iaccutrace.com/cass/#/app](https://accuzip.iaccutrace.com/cass/#/app)

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/geocoding-
simple)

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paxy
This is especially valid for forms that accept non-US addresses. It is such a
pain to deal with assumed formats, length/charset limits or other restrictions
put in place by devs who clearly have no idea how addresses work in other
countries.

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egiboy
It is virtually impossible to agree on a set of fields - there is always an
exception: [https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-a...](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-
about-addresses/)

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michaericalribo
Yes, ‘two address lines’ is ad-hoc, but a user’s expectations may also not
match the pattern: ‘a multi-line street number, name, apt #, etc; a zip; a
city; a state.’

Should we get rid of auto-complete for state and city, using the zip, too,
then? I don’t think so. But where to draw the distinction?

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King-Aaron
RIP devs that need to sanitize address data from random textarea inputs

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anotheryou
until you need to integrate an api needing it seperated with a db full of free
text

