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Comment by Nycto | Hacker News Reader

At a previous company, we also found it to be a usability issue. Customers were confused when they were looking for a place to put their name, but couldn't find one. Incidentally, we encountered the same problem when we removed the "State" field from the address section (we could glean it from the zip).

Sample size of one company, so take this for what it's worth.

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FWIW: Getting state from ZIP would break some edge case users.

zip->state is not a many to one mapping, it's many to many.

Example: Zip code 19973 spans both maryland and delaware.

https://www.google.com/maps/vt/data=Ay5GWBeob_WIPLDYoIWcfVXx...

The dashed vertical line is the maryland/delaware boundary.

You can see there are people both in maryland, and delaware, who have that zip code. The post office is in seaford, de.

This actually came up in the real world in some elections stuff, because these folks often list their mailing address as in seaford, de, but vote in maryland ;)

I like having the city and state filled from the zip code. That way the user can see that it is being used and will not be confused. Plus, pushing a button to enter text that you normally would have to spend time filling out feels like a reward.

>pushing a button

Why doesn't it auto-fill when the user types a valid zipcode? Seems like cheap satisfaction.

Still not common enough that it would confuse most people.

This actually wouldn't surprise me. Similarly, not asking for the card type is confusing to some people (even though the card type is identified in the first characters of the card number).

Good call. Being able to fill out a form in my sleep is more important to me than 50% fewer keystrokes.

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