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by ZeroGravitas 5473 days ago
Just to be clear about what I thinking, because I'm not sure I expressed myself well:

If I type in a postcode and house number on a site using the Royal Mail PAF, then it goes and gets my address. Currently, your service won't. But if I enter my full address once on one site using it, it'll then be keyed against my postcode and house number and appear automatically on others.

That very first time I enter a new address you could probably do various clever things to make entering my address easier. It shouldn't be difficult to map any postcode to a country (Scotland, England etc.) and other larger regions. In cases where it's not 100% possible you could probably return a (potentially incomplete) list of nearby streetnames, towns etc. which could trigger an autocomplete when the user starts typing the first letter. Once they've chosen a streetname then that may in turn dictate the rest.

Most of this data could be extracted from OpenStreetmap or directly from the Ordnance Survey Open Data, particularly Code Point and OS Locator, meaning you'd only need users to confirm a street name, and enter a house name or number to get a full record.

(It would be nice to allow users to report errors in the OS Locator street names too. There's been a few errors found in both sets by comparing the OSM data against the OS.)
1 comments
charlesmarshall 5473 days ago
sorry, i was getting the wrong end of the stick on that.

That is a good idea but your original point might be right, empty fields could be a bit strange. I'll give it a try and see how how it looks (probably not till the weekend - client work to do).

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ZeroGravitas 5473 days ago
Yeah, the interaction design is the hard bit and probably needs tested on "normal" people before you could be confident that it's actually helpful.

Maybe just having the autocomplete's available to save typing (and typos) and then only completing the rest of the form once you have the user enter enough that you're sure you can finish the rest of it (which sometimes might be the street, but other times the town/county) might work?

I've just realised that unless you know your data was 100% complete you'd not be able to do a guaranteed correct lookup from the post code and house number alone, since there may be clashes with houses on nearby streets you don't yet know about, and even if you present a dropdown list you still need a fallback form for new data entry. So that's a pretty tricky UI challenge regardless.

Do you have any example data that people can try to see how it works when your demo recognises postcodes?

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charlesmarshall 5473 days ago
Yes, from a front end point of view you can give the demo page a try - http://localyser.com/demo.html - using B1 1BB

Is that what you mean (still tired, shouldn't drink on school nights!)?

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ZeroGravitas 5469 days ago
What happens if someone else lives in "B1 1BB"? It's not obvious that they can click and then edit the current single entry that it returns.
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