Why You Should Use a Text Area for Address Form Fields

Changing the label from "Address 2" to "Apartment, Suite, etc (optional)" and adding dynamic dropdowns for City, State, Country decreased the number of incorrect addresses for us by nearly 50%.

Although I can't claim credit I stole it from Shopify's checkout.

This is good advice, especially because anyone who is serious about using the address will be passing it through CASS certification or geocoding on the backend before using the address. Such APIs are fully capable of parsing the full address without you splitting the address lines.

http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/

https://accuzip.iaccutrace.com/cass/#/app

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

This is especially valid for forms that accept non-US addresses. It is such a pain to deal with assumed formats, length/charset limits or other restrictions put in place by devs who clearly have no idea how addresses work in other countries.

It is virtually impossible to agree on a set of fields - there is always an exception: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

Yes, ‘two address lines’ is ad-hoc, but a user’s expectations may also not match the pattern: ‘a multi-line street number, name, apt #, etc; a zip; a city; a state.’

Should we get rid of auto-complete for state and city, using the zip, too, then? I don’t think so. But where to draw the distinction?

RIP devs that need to sanitize address data from random textarea inputs

until you need to integrate an api needing it seperated with a db full of free text