Address validation is the biggest piece of automation that needs to stop.
You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show. Or the system that suddenly decides to start doing validation doesn't actually accept valid addresses.
Companies think automation can handle it, but it's an absolute nightmare.
> You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show.
I live in a place where the official address changed: as in we got a letter (in 2016 I think) from the town hall saying "your address is now ... and you have to ask everybody to mail you at that new address". Well... Most utility bills' systems have been programmed in a way that make it impossible to keep the same "installation ID" (as in the ID on our electrical install) while changing the address. Somehow "the street got a new name" is a case that had never been planned.
The implications are wild (for example the bank refusing to open an account because the official, legal, address doesn't match the address on the utility bill and then the contry's IRS thinking there are shenanigans going on).
Address validation is not 100% reliable, so systems should have an override "Yes, this is my address" option. Unfortunately many forms assume address validation is foolproof, so there is no mechanism for entering in your actual address. It just gets rejected.
As a customer, I wanted to buy something and the website wouldn't accept my address (since it wouldn't accept any "/" characters). Guess what? There are plenty of addresses in the US with "/", such as 50 1/2 Foobar Street. Address validation does not always work, so companies shouldn't act that way.
Try living in a newly built building. Every developer seems to be under the impression that if an address doesn't exist in the Google maps API, then it doesn't exist at all.
Yes. I’ve stumbled upon some organizations in small towns in the US that want all postal mail going to their PO Box, nothing going to their physical address.
The small-town post office will sometimes _delete_ the physical address in the mail system so the actualy physical address is completely in-valid (or worse gets autocorrected to an address a mile away).
Turns out FedEx and UPS base their address validation off USPS and also don’t ship to PO Boxes.
In "federal-style" countries like USA, it is possible for some jurisdictions to have adequate validation while other jurisdictions (e.g. the rural county where I live) do not.
You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show. Or the system that suddenly decides to start doing validation doesn't actually accept valid addresses.
Companies think automation can handle it, but it's an absolute nightmare.