Discover Card, Make Magazine, Petsmart, and a few others just took whatever address we gave them.

E-Trade was one that actually popped up a screen that shows the address Sam entered, as well as the the "USPS standardized" address (which is NE 180th 98155) and gives you a radio button to choose one or the other. Of course the default is the wrong one and their line of text says they recommend taking the wrong one. But at least we had the choice.

Charles Schwab's web site changed it to NE 180th and then the only choices are "edit" "accept" or "cancel." Choosing "edit" allows you to enter the correct address, but then it changes it back to the wrong one and gives me again the choices of "edit," "accept," or "cancel." The user can enter and re-enter the correct address all day long, but one can never get past the next step with it without getting sent back. They have expressly disallowed the user from any way to get the right result out of their system.

In the hierearchy of implementations, we would have to rank it like this:

E-trade did the best thing - it has the functionality to normalize addresses, but makes it easy and intuitive to override it. It doesn't insult the user by assuming you don't know where you live.

Discover Card and Make Magazine have (or may have) the next best thing. They take whatever address you give them. If you type it wrong, something suboptimal might happen, but it's your own fault.

Charles Schwab is the next tier down. It's unfriendly and doesn't work. It not only doesn't get the right answer, and it not only doesn't allow me to get the right answer, it's even worse. Rather than "I can't get the right answer because some programmer never thought of this case," it's more like "I can't get the right answer because a programmer went out of his way to think of this case and block me from doing it." But it's still not the worst tier.

The worst tier of all is Verizon and Comcast. Their web sites accept whatever address one types in, but then changes it later without showing that it changed it.

Discover, Petsmart, and Make Magazine may yet prove to fall into this tier too - that's why it's the worst. It's insidious. It's a sneak attack.

I'm sure it all looked so good to the managers at the meeting where the programmers presented their powerpoint and demo for their new state-of-the order/customer/account tracking system - "and we can use the post office's database...that way it will NEVER be wrong!"

The people who paid for these systems and did the decision making probably have no idea about things like this - it's just a low-level implementation detail. Just like having good navigation and not having big red flashing ads is an implementation detail. But that's kind of the point. All it takes is one low-level detail to make the entire site utterly 100% useless and the user utterly 100% bitter.

Of course, you can take just the express bus to 100% Bitter Town by making the horrific mistake of calling 800-ASK-USPS. You know it's bad when there is a chorus of laughter at your post office branch when you mention you did that.