en-AU locale creates poor UX for address fields

This is a suggestion, to do with the en-AU (Australian English) locale in Snipcart v3.

The address labels for this locale are set as such:

“address1”: “Unit Number”,
“address2”: “Street number and name”

This is the reverse of the default locale (“en”), in which address1 is “Street address” and address2 is “Apt/Suite”.

In Australia we do specify unit/apartment number before the street number and name when writing an address. However switching the labels causes a couple of UX problems:

  1. Although the labels have been switched, the form fields have not, so the user is presented a large field for entering the unit number, and a tiny field for the street address.
  2. The field address1 is a required field, so if the customer’s address does not contain a unit/apartment number then they cannot submit the form!

Problem 1 can be solved by overriding Snipcart’s CSS to change the size of the form fields. But problem 2 is a serious UX defect!

In my case I solved the problem by overriding the address labels and resetting them to what they were in Snipcart v2: “Street Address 1” and “Street Address 2”. These generic labels don’t make any assumptions about which field will be used for the unit/apartment number. I used CSS to make the two address fields identical in appearance: full width and stacked vertically instead of side-by-side.

But Australian users should not have to resort to these measures. The form should work out of the box.