I have said this before, and I will say it again

[conuly]

Once, many years ago now, I filled in a form that called for my zip code first and then filled out the city and state based on that.

And ever since then I've actively resented having to find my state on a drop down menu, like, even more than I already did. Inevitably, if I try typing I go "NY" to find out that all states are done in full, or else I go "NE" to find out that they're all abbreviated.

Anyway, my point is obvious. If you have any pull at all, ever, encourage whoever makes these forms wherever they make them to populate the state and city from the zip code. It is vastly superior, and I hope that form maker got a bonus for that stroke of brilliance.

Comments

[spiffikins]

As someone who uses forms - I totally agree!

As someone who WRITES software, that users can then use to create "state" and "zip code" fields - it is NOT STRAIGHTFORWARD to set that up!

On a static website - totally doable. In my particular application, where there are no "prebuilt" lists for State and zip code - ahahahaha the customer administrator is NOT going to sit down and manually figure out which zip codes belong to which states and set up that relationship - even if it would make things SO much easier!

[conuly]

New suggestion: Somebody should make this list so that it can just be automatically inserted into, idk, lots and lots of forms on the internet.

I believe that if we can put people on the moon, we can definitely make my life trivially simpler.

[rebeccmeister]

I totally agree, all around.

[spiffikins]

Well, it does exist - but you have to pay for access to it :)

[conuly]

And I'm sure it's worth every penny. No sarcasm.

[spiffikins]

Mostly we use it for address validation - verifying that in fact 123 First Street in Sometown, Somestate is a Real Address and that the user didn't mistype something - mostly only for customers who are having to snail mail something to the person filling in the form.

It is interesting though - that in 20+ years of building applications for customers - this really hasn't come up - only one customer was interested in paying for a subscription to the address validation service!

And it's not even *that* expensive!

[conuly]

Maybe not enough people making forms know about this, because omg, I want everybody to know about this.

[kengr]

As I recall, deriving *state* from zip code is pretty simple. It's getting city that is a royal pain.

[angelofthenorth]

How do Zip codes work in the USA? Because the UK's postcodes allow you to populate a form down to a choice from 15 addresses or so.

e.g. SA31 3JG (my post code) - SA is Swansea, and it's a postal district that covers most of south and south west Wales.
31 is the 31st district, which is most of Carmarthen
3 is the West Ward, and JG localises it to the first 15 houses of Nant yr Arian.

[conuly]

Well, there's zip codes, which are five digits, and then there's the longer zip codes which are... longer and more precise? But hardly anybody knows their longform zip code, so we all just use the five digit ones which can definitely not narrow down the form to 15 addresses.

[andrewducker]

Yup. Most address searches I give them my post code and then pick my address from a drop-down.

[frandroid]

I've never seen it on a form, but I had the idea independently, and yeah it would make so much more sense.

[lovelyangel]

While often better, prepopulating city from Zipcode isn’t infallible. My zipcode has two cities associated with it, and one form I filled out (many, many years ago) populated the city field from the zipcode and wouldn’t let me change the wrong city name in that field. It was a utility company, and for years I would get a monthly bill showing the wrong city in the address. The mail was delivered anyway as all other info was correct.

[conuly]

Okay, well, obviously that was maliciously bad design. If you can't fix errors then I do not want.

[redbird]

I live in an apartment building that was built in 1940. Someone in the distant past entered the wrong city/town name for our gas meter, and there seems to be no way for either the landlord, the utility company, or the tenant to fix this, or even to put in a redirect that says "the meter for this address in Boston is filed under Brookline."

Nor, apparently, is the management company willing/able to include a note on their records about the building, to give new tenants along with notes about things like air conditioners and laundry. Instead, when trying to set up gas service, you have to hope that either a friend of yours, or someone who works for the utility, will both know and remember that some systems list some addresses in this part of Boston as being in Brookline.

[redbird]

Some of the online forms I fill out autopopulate the state from the zip code, but only the state. This makes sense, because there are zip codes that overlap city or town borders, but none that include parts of more than one state borders. And some of those are state government websites, so most of the addresses they're recording will be in-state.

All I really want here is for the systems to treat the zip code as an arbitrary string, not a number. It's never going to make sense add, subtract, or multiply zip codes. And I know there are systems that are treating them as integers, because they take my input (say, 02474), strip the leading zero, and then reject the resulting address because the next piece of the program knows that zip codes have to be at least five digits.

[kengr]

A post on comp.risks many years back described a lovely bit of mis-programming based on an very wrong assumption.

The poster had looked up the "nearest store" at home and got an answer that wasn't all that near. On a whim, he tried it from work and got a much closer store.

After some investigation, it was discovered that the programmer for the app thought that *numerically* adjacent zip codes were *geographically* adjacent.

Not even close. When assigning a new zip code (usually because the area has grown) the area that gets the new code gets the next available zip code for the state. So 97201 could be next to 97299 or even 97999

[loligo]

I believe there are a few zip codes that cross state lines, so I think you'd need a validation list with street addresses and zip codes to be able to fill in city and state precisely.

[fred_mouse]

Huh. Fascinating reading the replies on this. Putting in postcode and then having the two possible suburbs show up for me to select is my standard experience.

[kareina]

Here in Sweden, pretty much every time I order something on line the form first asks for the postal code, at which point the page can now tell me what shipping will cost. If I choose not to give the page my Swedish personal number, the form has my city pre-filled in from the postal code information. If I give it my personal number the form pre fills in with the correct spelling of my name and my physical address automatically. If I move I register my new address with the Swedish tax office, and from that day onwards, if I give a web page my personal number, the new address comes prefilled into the form. (Also everyone, from my employer to medical providers, and the people I pay bills to all get the new address info straight away. When I changed my name the new name went into the system for all of these places promptly, too. I really like this convenience.

[silveradept]

Ah, that would be excellent to have. And especially a system that presented options when you put in a ZIP that could potentially refer to three or more cities or towns.