Capturing international addresses

[jordanbullen-defra]

Looking x-gov, the design system, design system backlog - there seems to be a couple of approaches, none of which are ideal and lots of people seem to have hit the same issues.

The ideas we currently have as a team are:

• Text area (Pro - easy for the user to enter whatever format their address requires. Con - could enter nonsense and impossible to validate)

• Text area + Country field, possibly an autocomplete (Pro - still easy for user. Con - could enter ‘1’ and a country and get through)

• An ‘address line 1, address line 2 etc’ form where postcode is optional (Pro - better validation possible, can make certain fields mandatory. Con - more onerous for the user, less flexible for different addresses and length of addresses, exposes everyone to ‘postcode’ when lots of countries don’t have them)

[jordanbullen-defra]

Linked to: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/addresses/

https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system-backlog/issues/31

https://github.com/hmrc/design-patterns/issues/160

[murfious]

Screenshot showing the identity management non-UK address form with validation errors.

[chris-barrett-ddts]

From what i can remember when looking at this pattern for WRLS. We came across the IDM pattern that was already being used on a live Defra service and wondered why it didn't have any optional tags. After digging in to it a bit we found that because of the many different variations of addresses around the world this version is open to cater for them all.

I think we considered putting the country select as its own question and being able to show the various fields needed based on the country you had selected. But without understanding any of the user issues with this current version we were reluctant to make any changes.