Does Anyone Use Address Line 2

Question

So it's a standard in basically every address form out there and I'm questioning why?

Address Line 2. It's in every form that asks for address details. It's never actually seemed necessary to me. It requires another field in the database and all the goofy maintenance that goes with it. Every time you use an address, you have to concatenate it and 99% of the time line 2 is empty. The other 1% of the time you could've just put it into line 1.

Instead of calling it line 2, couldn't it be called something with clearer semantics... like "apartment number"?

It ruins the semantics of the whole address concept. You don't really know what you have in either field. Except maybe that the concatenation of the two fields results in a "plain old address". But "Line 1" and "Line 2" themselves don't really have any meaning. Is something "supposed" to go in each respectively? I've never seen it. Why don't we have address line 3 while we're at it?

I've been thinking about it and realized that as a result, I don't really trust the address data in my database. The whole field is flaky in general because you can't really do validation on it (some addresses have roads and a house number, others have streets and avenues). Except these days you could do something like validate the field against a geolocation api. But simply because of the "Line 2" thing, you can't really be certain what you're doing. Should I combine the (line 1 + line 2), then validate? What do I do with the users original input if I'm correcting them ("did you mean xxx")? Do I just say, "yah, address line 2 doesn't really do anything... I just took your validated input and dumped it into line 1." Why am I even giving the end user (and myself) the chance to be confused.

The way I see it, the field should either be an address (street + house number), or if we're going to split things up, do it properly and ask for the road and house number independently.

Answer 1

It isn't always an apartment number. It could be a floor (single house, multiple residences), or other things.

Answer 2

Address line one is sometimes used by companies for an attention name, which makes address line 2 necessary for the address itself. Imagine something like:

Name: Microsoft

Address 1: Att.: Bill Gates

Address 2: One Microsoft Way

...

Answer 3

Actually, in rare cases a user might even want to have a third address line. The best solution to this is to use a <textarea> that will accept newlines for a more complex address and store the address exactly as entered in the database.

Answer 4

I really like pygorex1's idea of just putting up a <textarea> and let the users write their addresses as they normally would without any translation to a different scheme.

If you want to validate that data, or identify parts of it separately, I think the best way is to do a Google Maps API lookup and retrieve the information you want through a standardized interface now. This is a better approach because if the user entered junk in the field, most likely you won't get any match from the Maps API.

Answer 5

Allowing loose data input is never a good idea. If you must support a multi-line address, use 2 text boxes called address1 and address2. Do not use a non-structured input format (textarea) to collect structured information (an address).