fakelocBuild address forms that travel well
Design a checkout or signup form that welcomes addresses beyond your home country.
Start with the country
Country selection determines labels, order, and which fields are meaningful. Use “State / province / region” rather than assuming every country has states. Keep a flexible address line for buildings, floors and local details.
Do not require a postcode everywhere
Some locations do not use a national postcode system. A required ZIP field with a five-digit limit excludes otherwise useful addresses. Allow an empty postal value where appropriate and preserve letters, spaces and hyphens elsewhere.
Keep the original text
Unicode names, accents and local scripts are useful test cases. Avoid silently uppercasing or stripping characters from the stored input. Separate the raw user entry from any standardized delivery version.
Make failures easy to fix
Give each input a persistent label, show errors next to the field, and retain entered values after a failed submission. Test with a keyboard, a narrow screen, and translated labels before considering the form finished.