Comcast vs. Verizon
David Norton writes: “I think that a lot more consumers do not have landline phones and therefore must use the address search to determine eligibility for high-speed internet and other services. Check out the difference between Comcast’s form and Verizon’s form…
...Comcast gets it right here with just three fields: street address, apartment # (optional), and zip code. A whole lot of the required information on the Verizon form is redundant—and in the cases when it’s not, maybe a second form could ask the exceptional customers for more information.”
USPS
Adam Gretencord writes: “For the ‘Search by Address’ tab on the USPS ‘ZIP Code Lookup’ page...
ZIP Code field? If I knew what it was I wouldn’t be here.”
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Dave!
on 27 Jul 07Too bad Comcast can’t get anything else right! ;)
Actually, I don’t think they need the “Apt” field, either. If service is available to the street address, why would the Apt number matter?
Julian
on 27 Jul 07I’m not a native so I’m probably wrong, but couldn’t the ZIP Code field be there so you can enter a partial ZIP Code and find the complete one?
Waldo
on 27 Jul 07I believe USPS provides the zip code field because the search could be used to obtain the last 4 digits of the full 9 digit zip code (xxxxx-xxxx). That said, it’s still pointless, as you can easily leave it blank and get the entire zip.
John A Davis
on 27 Jul 07I am moving, just signed up for Comcast broadband, no cable subscription, $41 for 6 months, goes up to $66. 8mbps (so they say). Verizon (who sevices the phone stuff for this area) wanted $51 for the phone and $31 for DSL at 3mbps.
Comcast person was really nice and knowledgeable and they have a POP and SMTP server. Qwest doesn’t, not sure about Verizon. With Qwest I had to use Gmail pop/smtp with my Eudora. Too many extra steps.
I am also proud to be #4 to post to this blog thread. Man, that feels good!
Nate
on 27 Jul 07Although Comcast has a simpler form than Verizon, the color scheme drives me crazy!
Chris Peters
on 27 Jul 07I’m tired of address forms forcing the application’s database structure on end users. Stop wasting our time, talentless designers and programmers!
Ethan Poole
on 27 Jul 07Why cannot they just have you type all your info in one siimple line? Like Google Maps. It just extracts what data it can to formulate an address. It may not be possible, but it seems like it would.
Chris Busse
on 27 Jul 07Part of the problem with this USPS form is that they incorrectly identify City as a required field.
There is a point to having the Zip field on that form because in a scenario where you have two streets with the same names in nearby zip codes in the same state, this is form is useful for determining address and +4 ranges, ex:
Address 1: COX RD State: VA ZIP: 23060
vs:
Address 1: COX RD State: VA ZIP: 23233
Keep in mind the USPS’s consumer may be someone who is doing bulk mailing and needs to look up this type of information to keep their lists clean.
Also interesting to note is that the results returned by this form are in the correct OCR format—it does things like making it all caps and converting the proper address type abbreviations (ie. road to RD).
Peter Hentges
on 27 Jul 07I’m not convinced that Comcast’s version of the form is better. If the less-specific entry turns up incorrect results (e.g., like the form in Minneapolis’ transit route planner often does) then I don’t mind having more specific form to fill out.
Perhaps what these forms reveal is the confidence the folks putting the user interface together have in the programmers that will be making the interaction work.
Ryan
on 27 Jul 07This reminds me: shouldn’t address forms ask you for your zipcode and then auto-fill your state? Nobody likes a huge drop-down list of abbreviated States…
Jameson
on 27 Jul 07I use that USPS code form all the time. Entering a street address and a ZIP code is faster than entering a street address and city and state. (Not a lot faster, but one less tab is one less tab.) Then it gives me the ZIP+4 code I’m looking for, and throws in the Post Office-Approved street address information for free!
When the ZIP+4 was introduced, we were told it actually made sorting and delivery faster. So I specify it on all packages I ship (eBay sales, etc.). Whether it actually helps is anyone’s guess.
Amen on the state auto-fill, but I guess most form authors are collecting a little extra data to do error checking. If you miskey your state, they can catch it on the ZIP code, etc.
John Sutherland
on 27 Jul 07Filling in address forms in the UK is normally super-easy, because there’s (usually) a one-to-one between a postcode and a street. All over the place you’re just asked for “house number and postcode”.
It’s just a pity that keeping an up to date postcode database costs quite a bit of cash!
Paquito
on 28 Jul 07Sweet! :-)
Such a pity we don’t have the same for Europe (time will make it I hope).
Thanks for the post and regards from Spain! :-)
Paquito. http://paquito4ever.blogspot.com
J Lane
on 28 Jul 07Why is apartment number relevant? Are there some buildings where only a portion of the apartments are eligible for high speed Internet?
All you should need is a street address/zip code.
scott
on 28 Jul 07apartment number is relevant because the cable company/telco have no control over the quality of a building’s internal wiring. this is less of a problem for someone in a first floor apartment than it is for someone in, say, a seveteenth floor apartment.
also a bigger issue if you’re renting, as your lease may or may not permit the kind of work required to to run new cable/wire to your apartment from the street.
scott
on 28 Jul 07also, ditto to what a lot of people have already said about the usps.com ZIP code lookup. i’d find it markedly less useful if it didn’t contain the ZIP code field.
perhaps more a problem of naming than of functionality. “ZIP code lookup and/or address standardization tool”?
Michael Chui
on 29 Jul 07Incidentally, some ZIP codes span across two cities or states. I know this primarily because of SQL data for a class assignment that asked us to make zipcode a primary key on a data set and discover why it didn’t work. Maybe that data was old, but I doubt it.
Thus, knowing the city in addition to the ZIP is sometimes useful. Just pointing that out.
JB
on 30 Jul 07Another big problem with Verizon’s “form” that isn’t obvious from the example is that they won’t give you any info about the availability of a service if there is a Verizon phone number at the address and you don’t know it.
When researching possible areas to move, FiOS availability is always a consideration. Since I don’t own the house in question, but do know the address, that should be all I need to give them.
j
on 01 Aug 07for what it’s worth, addressability for cable comes from the phone company’s records (remember how they once always asked for phone #?). at first the phone co charged for the records (as they were proprietary), later they were legally bound to provide them. their database is geared to dump into E911 databases & overly specific in a simple query like this
This discussion is closed.