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Best practices

For the best performance and greatest user experience:

  • Minimize the number of interactions between your website and the API e.g. search after a number of characters or after a period of inactivity.
  • Make sure that you delete / over-ride any previous searches that you captured.
  • Prevent browser auto-fill pop up, as this can cover up suggestions or input incorrect data.
  • For Autocomplete, inform your users to separate address elements by commas.
  • Make sure it is clear to users that more suggestions are available, they just need to continue to type to refine the search.
  • Don't store any of the unique address and suggestions identifiers as they are not persistent.

Auto step-in and auto format functionality is designed to make the address capture process more efficient by reducing the number of interactive steps that the user has to perform to capture an address.

When a search has been performed by our service, the list of suggestions that is returned contains many properties and flags, the can_step_in and full_address properties can be used to simplify the address validation process for your user. The flags should be checked after the search has been performed, but before the results are presented to the user.

  • Should your list of suggestions contain a single match, with a high match score and the can_step_in property set to true, we suggest that your integration automatically steps into that single match, without displaying the suggestion to the user.
  • Should your list of suggestions contain a single match, with the full_address property set to true, we suggest that your integration automatically formats that single match to produce a final address, without displaying the suggestion to the user.

Experian Address Validation can sit behind a multitude of different user interfaces to create the best user experience for your website.

Display function

Whether you choose to display your results in a dropdown, predictive style, rolodex style or another function, Experian Address Validation can integrate seamlessly into your website so that the results are displayed to suit your website design. Check out our sample code. to get started.

Search suggestions

You can also decide what results are searched for when a user types in an address.

  • Program the search to only look at addresses within a specific country.
  • Ask the user to select a country first, then program the search to only look at addresses within this country.
  • Program multiple searches to occur simultaneously – each search a different country, for example your top 4 most used countries, and combine the results before displaying them to the user.

Custom layout suggestions

When creating a custom layout, there are things to consider:

  • The layout name needs to be unique.
  • The name of the layout needs be between 1-100 characters in length.
  • Layout names only allow the following characters (no other special characters are allowed):
    • Uppercase & lowercase letters
    • Numbers
    • Spaces
    • Dashes & underscores (- and _ )
Experian Address Validation

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