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.