Comment by Animats
2 days ago
It's reasonable, but it belongs to the era when the world ran on tracks of printed paper.
A useful line for process improvement today - "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows." That was a Steve Jobs line that got lost somewhere.
It would still be useful for Germany then
I think paper is a good test for complexity: Never let administration become so overarching that you cannot do it with the same amount of people and purely based on paper.
Right. Amazon, run like Sears pre-computer.
And yet we still enter zip code after the rest of the address.
Huh. In the UK we usually enter postcode plus house number and have the computer look up the rest of the address (even though that's a paid API).
A UK post code is much more specific than a five digit zip code which might be one reason why.
Good point, but because the postcode database was privatised it will always have to be a paid service which is why not everyone uses it.
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A lot of sites these days have some sort of live search functionality that apparently knows about all addresses. There, I can type in my house number and maybe the first three letters of my street name and it somehow manages to find me.
FTFA:
> it centers on citizen experience rather than administrative convenience
There is not paper, real or implied, involved in that goal.