Entering my address via a traditional form drives me crazy:
- Why do I have to enter my city, state, and zip code when my city and state can be inferred from my zip code?
- Choosing your state from a dropdown list is a pain in the ass -- often you can't tab into it, you have to use the mouse, etc.
alt text http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/7404/traditionaladdressform.png
Because I find this process so repulsive, when I designed my online store (bombsheets.com), I decided to build an auto-complete widget for addresses. As you type, we try to geocode your address (via Google Maps):
alt text http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/9333/addressautocomplete.png
In the best case, this works really well. If your address is "120 W 45th St, New York, NY 10036, USA", you can enter it by typing something as short as "120 w 45th st, nyc".
However, as far as I know, we're the only online store that uses this interface. Rather than pat myself on the back for being such a genius, I'm curious whether its lack of use means that this idea is somehow flawed. A few potential issues:
- Too foreign / unfamiliar. Customers are used to the old form, and switching things up on them is confusing.
- You have to enter your apartment / floor number / whatever in a different field. This is confusing.
- When our store blows up (good problem to have), we'll be hitting Google with too many Geocode requests for this to scale.
- EDIT: This won't work for (the ~5% of) users with javascript disabled.
- There's no significant issue here and this interface is the future. (This isn't so outlandish since,