At 1/5/2010 06:19 AM, tee wrote:
Was making a web form for a commercial software which clientele are
mainly from EU countries, in the original form the order of the
Country field. The order looks like this:
address/street
country
state
city
zipcode
Maybe I'd been making too many web forms for US and some Asian
countries' clients, I find it creates a tiny usability issue for user
to have the country field places above state, city and zipcode. From
my own experience, I always use tabbing to navigate web form, in a few
US sites that I did shopping and that has country, city, state and
zipcode setup in a non-US format, I find them to be a usability
problem because I didn't read carefully but out of habit (and this is
something I expect many web users would do), entered my address
expecting them to be in standard US format.
My client thinks otherwise:
...
from a usability standpoint it seems weird to me to for example show
the "Country" field AFTER the "State" field. Why? Because the "State"
field is depending on the Country field.
I have often placed the nation before the state/province for exactly
this reason, but nearly as often my clients protest that it's just
too weird and unconventional and they don't want to confuse or put
off their customers.
One solution is to ask the nation first, perhaps in a form by itself
or before the rest of the address fields are revealed.
Another solution is the make the state/prov field a plain text field,
not a drop-down, and then validate it after the nation is entered (or
the default nation is accepted through form submission), and if
invalid present a drop-down based on the nation.
Another solution is to combine nation & prov in the same drop-down:
Afghanistan
Albania
...
Aruba
Australia - ACT
Australia - New South Wales
Australia - Northern Territory
Australia - Queensland
Australia - South Australia
Australia - Tasmania
Australia - Victoria
Australia - Western Australia
Austria
...
This wouldn't be egregiously unwieldy unless you broke out a lot of
nations rather than just a few. The most common break-downs I do are
for Australia, Mexico, UK, and USA.
Many nations don't require or prefer a state/province/canton as part
of a mailing address. Has anyone here done the leg-work to determine
which nations do?
On quick google I found this chart of mailing address formats around the world:
http://www.bitboost.com/ref/international-address-formats.html#Formats
I don't know how up-to-date it is.
On the note of US-myopia it's worth pointing out that in many
countries (particiularly Europe) the postal code precedes the city, e.g.
00-940 Warszawa
Poland
...and some countries such as Russia are "big-endians" and sequence
the address as nation, postal code, city, street address, recipient
(although naturally they cope with the little-endian format when
processing international mail).
Also, remember that "ZIP Code" refers to the US only; everyone else
calls them postal codes or equivalent. "ZIP" is an all-caps acronym
for Zone Improvement Plan coined by the US Postal Service in 1963.
Yet more reasons to query the nation first~
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
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