Is an autocomplete text box for entering addresses a good idea?

Question

Entering my address via a traditional form drives me crazy:

• Why do I have to enter my city, state, and zip code when my city and state can be inferred from my zip code?
• Choosing your state from a dropdown list is a pain in the ass -- often you can't tab into it, you have to use the mouse, etc.

alt text http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/7404/traditionaladdressform.png

Because I find this process so repulsive, when I designed my online store (bombsheets.com), I decided to build an auto-complete widget for addresses. As you type, we try to geocode your address (via Google Maps):

alt text http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/9333/addressautocomplete.png

In the best case, this works really well. If your address is "120 W 45th St, New York, NY 10036, USA", you can enter it by typing something as short as "120 w 45th st, nyc".

However, as far as I know, we're the only online store that uses this interface. Rather than pat myself on the back for being such a genius, I'm curious whether its lack of use means that this idea is somehow flawed. A few potential issues:

1. Too foreign / unfamiliar. Customers are used to the old form, and switching things up on them is confusing.
2. You have to enter your apartment / floor number / whatever in a different field. This is confusing.
3. When our store blows up (good problem to have), we'll be hitting Google with too many Geocode requests for this to scale.
4. EDIT: This won't work for (the ~5% of) users with javascript disabled.
5. There's no significant issue here and this interface is the future. (This isn't so outlandish since, for example, many online stores force you to enter both your credit card number and your credit card type, when the latter is inferrable from the former).

Anyway, basically I'm curious if this is an area in which I should be trying to innovate, or whether I should just use the traditional approach. (Thoughts about improving the usability of this new approach are of course appreciated as well).

Answer 1

The multiple drop downs vs single text field discussion raises some interesting usability discussions. The separate state and country fields are commonly used. So you may be breaking the rule of "don't make me think" but the auto complete helps explain what is required.

Jakob Nielsen argues that single text fields for addresses are easier for users to use:

Such information is often hardwired into users' fingers, and having to select such options from a menu breaks the standard paradigm for entering information and can even create more work for users (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001112.html)

On the other hand selecting the information from fixed lists will mean less room for errors and some people prefer to use the mouse (for instance, those people go to the edit menu to access commands like copy and paste).

You need to judge your target audience and make a call.

Answer 2

One concern is whether it works without JavaScript or not. If your customers for some reason or other (there are several of them) do not have JavaScript enabled, or doesn't even have browsers supporting it (e.g. on a cell phone), you could get malformed input that your site may not handle correctly.