Why does the Stack Overflow swag request form have six address lines?

Question

Some backstory: I ran in the Stack Overflow election, and lost. Poor me. The SE gods took pity upon me, though, and sent me a link to a form where I could give them an address and they would send me stuff. Like any sane human would, I wanted the swag.

The form has six address fields and a full name field:

I'm in the US, so I put my name in the Full Name field, my street address (123 W. Anystreet) in the first address field. I put my city/state/ZIP in the second field, and left all the rest blank.

It's been bugging me ever after, though: Why are there six address lines? Do addresses even exist that need six lines?

Why not consolidate it into one big text box, with newlines supported?

Answer 1

As a Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange employee, my guess is that this was a Google Forms doc put together for the specific purpose of gathering addresses this one time. We do this internally a lot to gather information. Using a product like Google Forms allows anyone to get something done without having to involve developers or designers.

I imagine the person creating it needed a form with at 6 address lines and made it as simple as that: a Google Form with 6 address lines. Yeah, it's a bit confusing and I wouldn't recommend this as a practice for most websites or applications, but given the target audience (Stack Overflow users, so internet power-users) and finite purpose (collecting addresses once) going with a quick and simple form works.

Also since is being sent specifically to individual people (and not anyone from the internet), every user knows who to reach out to if they have an issue.

Answer 2

Though I don't have an answer behind why all the fields were named the same, I think the idea was to ensure that all potential international addresses could fit into the form design without designing custom forms for every international address.

Here are some examples of international addresses

Amazon also a generic international format as mentioned in this article

The generic international address format offers an alternative to maintaining multiple address block variations to support country-specific solutions. The generic format lets you manage variations in name and street address by providing a single input field for each element of an address. To accommodate variations in the address block layout and city line, you can use a set of generic input fields.

All this said, a simple answer could be so that it would just be easier to print the address and all they would have to do is to print it out line by line and you have a ready made label in the format which was entered by the user (with no restrictions on what goes in each section).

So if I had entered

Mervin Johnsingh
House No 1
Some apartment block
Some locality
Bangalore,560023
India 

The label would be printed out the same way I entered it and the responsibility of the correct address falls on the user rather than forcing him to specify details such as city,district etc.

For those who are interested here is a good listing of international address formats which shows most of the formats could fit into the 6 fields

Answer 3

6-line addresses (or rather 7-line, including the name of the addressee) do occur.

Consider for example a typical UK residential address:

Miss S Pollard           name
1 Chapel Hill            building number and street name
Heswall                  locality
BOURNEMOUTH              town with a post office
BH1 1AA                  postcode
UNITED KINGDOM           country

If the delivery was to a place of business, the address would need an extra line for the name of the business. I've known places with an institution name, a building name, and a street address, plus the town, postcode and country make 6. Some addresses may need a c/o line. That could reach to two more lines than fit on this form. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses gives an actual example with 8 lines, not including an addressee name or a country (so the total could jump to 11 with a c/o!).

While I'm at it, here are a few things about UK addresses that differ from a US address:

• The postcode contains letters as well as digits. It can be 5 to 7 characters long.
• The postcode is below the city name, not on the same line. (Mixing that one up is unlikely to foul up the delivery though.)
• There is no such thing as a state or province. (Some sites have lost sales to me because I gave up trying to work around their “state field must not be empty or contain only whitespace or contain _ or …” restriction.)

Wikipedia has a list of address formats by country (currently covering only about 1 country in 4). There is considerable variation. The UK example is by no means an outlier in terms of address size. As we've seen above, 7 address lines cover most cases but can be restrictive, though I expect that in practice most addresses can fit with some harmless rearranging.

For extra fun, some countries go from most significant to less significant element, i.e. put the country name at the top and the name of the person at the bottom.

Most post office administrations will work hard to deliver all letters, even with incomplete addresses, though it can sometimes take weeks, and there is a risk of loss if a key element is left out. Parcel deliveries are more iffy: often, if the routing software can't work out where the destination is (a country and postcode is usually enough at that stage) or if the delivery truck can't find the right building, the parcel will be returned. Worse, if the delivery agent can't find the right person, the parcel may be delivered to another person who may not always be trusted to deliver it.

All in all, you should be very liberal when allowing people to write their address in the right format. People know their own address and their local address formatting conventions better than you do.

There's one exception to that rule: for international delivery, the name of the country should be written in French or English (the official and working languages of the Universal Postal Union), and in practice it is probably safest to use English plus the name in the sending country's main language (e.g. “ALEMANIA / GERMANY” if writing from Italy to Germany). This is one area where you as the sender and professional know best, and you should let the user select from a list. Just make sure to keep your list up-to-date.

In summary:

• Yes, some addresses require a lot of lines.
• Precise labeling for the lines doesn't work out because different countries break up addresses differently.
• A single box would be better than a limited number of lines, because 6 isn't enough for everybody. I don't know why the designers didn't use a multi-line text box. I can only speculate: maybe it's because they're used to breaking up addresses using a set format (name, building, street, …) and they only made it more generic when they realized that many addresses didn't fit that set format? Or maybe they thought that users wouldn't know how to enter a line break in a multi-line text box? Or maybe they were using some restricted UI design framework that didn't have multi-line text boxes?

Answer 4

Unlike most forms that give specific labels for City, State, Zip, Country, etc, this one just uses 6 generic lines.