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Comment by Duff | Hacker News Reader

My #1 pet peeve is annoying address fields.

I live in New York. Why can't I type "New York", "NY", or have the system figure out where I live by zipcode. Instead, I get some sort of pull-down menu.

You already asked me where I live and I filled out the stupid form. So you know that I said "New York". And that I gave you a US-formatted zipcode. And that I came from a US IP-Block. And that my browser language is en-us. So why do you have a mandatory field for "Country" implemented as a massive pull-down with Afghanistan listed first?

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I am still pleasantly surprised by country pulldowns that list the U.S. first. It's like, wow, the author actually tried filling this thing in once or twice.

Which doesn't solve the problem at all. Unless you live in the US.

There's a startup niche for 'user friendly address entry in forms'.

Companies in other countries are free to pick a different default; I just happen to primarily deal with US companies who themselves market to a US customer base.

#1 rule for dropdowns should be to pick a sensible default. If I'm buying a plane ticket from JFK to SFO, and Afghanistan is your best guess for my billing address, you absolutely suck at guessing.

Damn, you're so right.

This sort of data gathering is boring and nobody wants (or has time) to spend time trying to refine it; frameworks try to automate/simplify this sort of development task as much as possible, but that's not their core mission, and we can't all use the same language/framework anyway.

A simple service that works well and packs lots of intelligence (properly auto-defaulting address info, handling shipping/billing/company details, including VAT, automatically linking social networks where possible, etc) must be worth something.

There is surely something to be said for making it a little easier for people in the world's largest single-nation economy to give you money.

There is surely even more to be said for making it a little easier for people anywhere in the world to give you money.

I'm equally annoyed by people (in a non-personal setting) who asks me my birthday (down to the year) and then asks my age. The person asking is almost always some sort of government/healthcare agent (because most other people are not legally allowed to ask birthday in the first place) filling out some administrative form (paper or online).

Any data entry system which cannot eff-ing figure out my age from my yyyy-mm-dd birthday is an idiot, and deserves to have me "oops-I-calculated-it-wrong" my age.

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