Flying share

Another great example of how ignorance affects data quality from web forms (and can lose customers and money!) has come my way, this time courtesy of the site Flying Share. Flying Share are offering their users in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, via this form, a free USB drive.

All well and good until you get to the "ZIP" field (ZIP? Not outside the USA, good people of Flying Share - you probably mean "Postal code"). And there you find that the field will accept five characters and no more. So anybody in the UK or Canada wanting a free drive must either give up at this point, or provide a truncated code.

As drives are being sent out postally, there will clearly be a huge problem of undeliverable and returned drives. I know that this error has been pointed out to the company concerned, but no action has yet been taken, though correcting it would take seconds.

I do wonder at what point anybody at Flying Share will feel the need to act on this. Perhaps when the costs of returns reaches astronomical proportions? How many (potential) customers might they have lost before then?

I made a blog entry in March about Vietnam, where a postal code exists but without the populace knowing about it.

Two more examples caught my eye this week, in both cases where a country announced the introduction of a postal code system: Nigeria and Dominican Republic.

In both countries a postal code exists - in Nigeria's case since 2000 - and in both cases this information has been placed at one time or another on the national postal authority's website. It is very interesting that in all of the comments placed in reaction to these news items up to this point, only one persons suggested that they thought that a postal code system was already in place.

Regardless of the reasons why the existing postal code systems in either country had not been fully publicised before now, this is another indicator of how careful form designers need to be in their use of required fields. Nigeria may have a postal code system, but if nobody knows about it or uses it, requiring that field on a form will only lead to customer loss and data quality reduction.

For more information about web forms for an international audience, download the free e-book for here.

Free web form e-book

I released today my new book: “Better data quality from your web form - Effective international name and address Internet data collection”. The good news is that it is completely free to download and use, so go to http://www.grcdi.nl/book4.htm to download it. Spread the word!

Web forms are a source of immense and continuous frustration for many people as the forms almost universally fail to take any account of variations in personal name and addressing conventions used throughout the world, so that customers have to struggle to clear the hurdles placed in their way by the forms. Reports suggest that almost 9 out of 10 customers have problems when attempting to carry out online transactions, and the result is a huge loss of income from lost custom paired with the collection of very poor quality data.

This e-book (in Acrobat pdf format), which is free to download and use, attempts to fill the gap left by most works about usability by concentrating on the experience that your international customers have with your form, and how it affects them, their relationship with you and your data quality.

This has been done using many examples and without going into too much depth about the idiosyncrasies of international personal names and addresses, and avoids technical discussions – links to get more information are provided where appropriate in the text.

Any feedback is most welcome.

Enjoy!

New product releases at GRC Database Information

We've been busy in March preparing updates for most of our products. These include:

- an update to the Global Sourcebook for Address Data Management

- a new release for many of our data tables: place name/postal codes, address elements, job titles and others

- a new version of our address parsing, standardisation and formatting software GRCTools.

More information on our website.

Now you have your postal code system, how about telling us about it?

My attention was caught today by an online discussion here hosted by the English-language Vietnam News, about introducing a postal code system to Vietnam to resolve the problem of duplicate thoroughfare names within cities.

Of interest to me is that Vietnam has had a postal code system for years, updating it from a 5-digit code to a 6-digit code in 2004. Clearly, though the system has been designed, it has not been implemented to the extent of informing the residents.

This is not as unusual as you might think. Some countries - Bahrain and Nicaragua spring to mind - are coy about their postal code systems, even to the extent of requesting people not to use them because sorting continues to be done manually. I've had people from Costa Rica swear blind to me that their country has no postal code system, even after I've pointed them towards the postal website describing it. Clearly, whilst some countries are happy to design postal code systems, the expense of implementing them - mechanised sorting systems, information dissemination and so on, tends to put a brake on following the projects through.

For the love of web forms!

It may seem to you, faithful reader, that I have become a little obsessed with web data entry forms lately. Apart from being the front end of company databases that we crash into most regularly, it is also a reflection of the fact that I am currently working on a book about .... web data entry forms!

But I am not alone in this obsession. My colleagues across at the Data Value Talk blog have decided to try to think positively and to collect some examples of GOOD web data entry screens. If they get enough, they'll open up a competition for the best examples.

So, if you come across any well-designed (or badly designed!) web data entry forms, take a screen dump and scoot along to the Data Value Talk blog - I, for one, look forward to seeing them.

Stop. Step back. Think.

Has creating web input forms become automatic? Does anybody ever test the forms they put online? Does anybody ever stop, take a step back, and think things through?

Yesterday, faced with yet another clone form expecting of me a typical United States' address, I came to the inevitable drop down requesting (no, demanding!) my state. The company gave no option to clear this field, nor to choose a non-US variant, so, as they had kindly defaulted to Alabama, I moved on.

For the next field, country, I chose "Netherlands". And look what happened:


Those who know me and my work will know that I have hammered on for years about making web forms dynamic, and that input fields should change on the basis of country and language. But why (oh why?), when a company follows this mantra, are the fields that cause this dynamic change ALWAYS added AFTER the fields that they change? Is it a conspiracy to annoy the customer? To make the customer work at their very hardest in order to buy the products?

Or is somebody just not thinking things through?