You are in charge of the order form on your web-based store. And you’re wondering why I’m screaming and shouting, flipping you the bird and throwing feces in your general direction.
Here’s why: In Denmark, and I’ll go out on a limb and say, in large parts of Europe and probably the rest of the world, sans the US, we do not have ‘states’ or ‘provinces’!
So stop forcing me in to filling out it out with something as redundant as NA. It’s easy, here’s how you do it: If I pick Denmark or any other non-state/provincial country from the dropdown, make the state/province input field non-required.
You’ve got dynamic pages and everything, it’s not that hard.
Denmark is a province of northern Germany! What on earth are you talking about?
“in large parts of Europe and probably the rest of the world, sans the US” and Portugal! We have states, or districts as we call it!
And so does Britain. Leicester, Leicestershire is where I live. Having said that, I totally agree. Making it required is like writing dates in a non ISO, or non friendly, format.
Aren’t all countries just a (second class) part of the USA? I’m sure that’s what they think.
In Britain we have counties. Not states, nor provinces. Keep that in mind Bjørn ;)
It would be pretty cool to see someone come out with a pluggable component to handle proper internation address entry. I think it would need a database schema and a nice JavaScript interface to show and hide various components.
Alex, someone already has… It’s called Addressbook, and it’s accompanied with every OS X installation =D
Belgium, the Netherlands and France also have provinces. Germany is also divided in counties/provinces/whatever else there might be out there…
NA, is that the 53rd state of the US?
I would just always use Maine. It’s closest to you, and its “code” is ME – works on a couple levels…
At least you could type NA. What happens if it’s required and they only give you a dropdown to choose from ?!
So if you don’t have Provinces or States, what do you have? How would someone go avout sending you a letter?
I guess if people used “Region” then that could apply to everyone.
Name:
Address:
Region:
Country:
would that work?
In Italy, we have provinces, but it would be a smart thing to do for everybody else who hasn’t got provinces…
Well, is it too much to also ask for everyone to switch to the dollar too? This is because exchange rate programming is a real pain if you have ever had to do it. Oh, what’s that? It’s currently worth what against the Euro?
If it makes you feel better I’m an evil American and I have trouble when forms ask for my place of birth. The forms assume I was born in the US and that I was obviously born in a state. But, I wasn’t. I was born in the U.S. but not in a state as Washington D.C. is a federal district. So, it’s not just people from Denmark that get screwed over on these things.
By “evil American” do you mean an evil person from the western hemisphere, either North or South America, or are you an “evil American” in regards to the self discribed United States of America that seems to reflect the nature of the entire western hemisphere.. :p
I think we all agree that there are problems with the generalization of forms on the internet (and forms in general I would say). But not one group wants to adopt the system of another group, everyone wants everyone else to change, thats just crazy if you ask me.
Let us all choose one system, I don’t care what system it is.. if its base 12 math and we all write in celtic I don’t care as long as we are all doing it. But really you should all adopt the Canadian system because clearly its the best! :p
I live in the US and have had forms (from the LARGEEST of American companies) that would not fit my street address, that had a 15 character limit, which was not enough to put the necessary “Street” or even “St”. I had to put “S” and pray.
I did keep it in mind, actually, and assumed that “province” was seen as a generic term. Having thought about it, it probably is meant to describe the Canadian provinces, not any kind of “province” in general.
Honestly I would appreciate just a big box saying “address”, but naturally that won’t do for the data-mining goody two-shoes wanting to impress: “Sir, indeed, Sir, 3.533254% of our sales come from Buttfuck, Nowhere”. Has someone seen a good regex to actually parse international addresses? Seem to me that it would remove the need for separate entries.
Brendan, I think you overestimate the size of Denmark. We’re a mere 5.5 million people :) Our addresses look like this:
Michael Heilemann
Ørnevej 80
2400 Kbh. NV
Denmark has no state/provinces, that is true, but IMHO and with a little bit of fantasy you could call Jylland, Sødderjylland, Fyn, etc. a state/province.
For me that works, and it is not troubling at all.
That’s like differentiating between 51st and 42nd street in New York, the population density is that low! :)
And another thing… I live in Ireland. We don’t use postcodes (or zipcodes, or whatever you want to call them) here. The Country is so small just about everybody knows everybody else by name. Now try and buy something off the web without having to invent a postcode EVERY time. gggrrrrrr!
You know what I would love, that you put your country and then your zip code, so there, you have your state and your city, and you will only need to fill the street field. That would be great.
Ireland sounds awesome, with the “everyone knowing your name thing”. You know, we have something like that here in the US. I had an ex-girlfriend once so bad, that if I just wrote “bitch” on a postcard and dropped it in any mail box, it would get delivered to her.
My USA-based company serves an international audience, so we do our best to accommodate the wide range of differing address and currency formats. For example, we first ask for a country from a drop-down menu. If the customer selects a country that has provinces defined in our database, Javascript code then populates a second drop-down list with that country’s provinces. If the selected country does not have any defined provinces, a text field will appear instead that can either be filled in or left blank as required. Does this not sound like the way things should be? Please let us know whether we’re getting it right.
Unfortunately, we often get international customers who are accustomed to being forced to enter something into these fields, and thus we get plenty of “NA” responses for this field — even though it’s not required!
We also supply a currency selector, so customers can see product prices in euros and Canadian dollars.
I empathize with John regarding the lack of postal codes in Ireland. I’ll have to see if there is some way for us to make that field non-mandatory if the customer’s country does not have postal codes.
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Exactly, and within US states they have, unless I’m very much mistaken, counties. And they don’t require you to put in your county. Although the population density there is a lot lower. But I still don’t see why it’s so hard for the form to be customised based on your chpice of country. As well as the state/province field being removed they could change ‘zipcode’ to read ‘post code’ or whatever’s used locally (if anything).