Geo Pulse #70 — Phone and address fields that reject real users

Geo Pulse #70 — Phone and address fields that reject real users
Theme: the form-validation mistakes that geo-block by accident.

→ Hardcoding US phone validation. A regex expecting 10 digits and a US format rejects perfectly valid numbers from Germany, India, or Brazil. Fix: validate against the user's country dialing format, or use a library (libphonenumber) instead of a homegrown regex.

→ Mandatory ZIP/state fields. Required US-style ZIP and state blocks countries that don't use them. Make address fields GEO-aware.

→ Name field assumptions. Required 'first/last' breaks for mononyms and many naming conventions; some users abandon rather than fight it.

→ The hidden cost. These failures look like 'low-converting GEOs' in analytics — really they're users your form refused to accept. Source: Google's libphonenumber and the W3C 'personal names around the world' write-up.