Cognitive Friction

The excellent Luke Wroblewski is currently writing a book called Web Form Design Best Practices for Rosenfeld Media. I’m really looking forward to reading it, and so I was interested to see Luke’s blog post on Zip codes and locations. Having read it, I hope that Luke remembers in his book that not everyone lives in the States, and that many people have no postcode of any sort at all.

This is a bugbear of mine, because I live in Ireland, in County Dublin, just outside the only city in the state that has any sort of post code system. In urban Dublin, the city is divided up into areas labelled D1, D2, D3 and so on. All of the even numbers are on the south side, all of the odd ones on the north side. In Northern Ireland, still part of the UK, the excellent British post code system is in place, which assigns a seven-letter code to groups of no more than 25 street addresses. Everywhere else on the island, though, there is no postcode system at all. Indeed, in rural areas, addresses look positively inadequate, like this:

If you look for Cornaglea on Google maps, you’ll just see a road running through a big blank area of map. It’s farmland. There may be 3 or 4 houses scattered around the area. How do you find such an address if you are driving? How do you deliver mail there if you are a delivery driver? Well, you either know your way there, or you don’t. If you don’t, you ask directions. Now, let’s get back to web forms, and eCommerce in particular.

It drives me nuts when forms require either a ZIP code or a postal code and call me out with an error message if I don’t provide one. I don’t have one to provide! Worse, some forms even try to ‘validate’ whatever I type as a workaround (usually a hyphen) and inform me that my postcode is in error because it must contain only alphanumeric characters. Says who? Don’t these people know the Internet is available all over the planet? I shop online a lot, and have for years, and I still email the owners of forms with this irritating characteristic every time I come across it. It’s so easy to fix this, especially when your form knows which country I am in.

All of this is to say nothing of French or Italian street addresses, where the door number may come at the end of the first address line, not the start. And let’s not even venture into Asia at all. But Luke, please tell me you have a section in your book on international addresses, calling attention to the wide world of sports outside of the USA. Please tell me it is so. Because people will read your book, they will learn, and in some small number of cases, they’ll take the trouble to do this address thing well. And who knows how far best practice may spread from there, as those who couldn’t care less simply copy forms from some other site.

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