I absolutely do not understand the benefits of a user-friendly interface.

Yes, he is beautiful, it is easier to work with him. But how to calculate the material benefits?

Five years ago, a synthesized voice sounded at the airports, announcing arrivals and departures with a broken intonation after each word. Sometimes speech speed was even different for different words.
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And a couple of weeks ago I heard new announcements of departures. There was a feeling that they were entirely recorded by a professional speaker who had studied for this role all his life. The interface has become better, it has become more natural.
Did I fly more from this? Hardly.
Maybe I have a preference between airports? I do not think this is such an important point.
However, for some reason, people have spent time and money on bringing advertisements to a natural appearance. And this is very cool!

I like the natural presentation of information by automated systems, as if a real person is talking to you. It seems to me that these are small details that form the attitude towards your product as a whole.
And if this attitude is positive, then you will be chosen further and recommended to friends.

In the article I will tell you how to show the address in one line as if it were written by a person. I can not say with certainty that by reading the article, you will increase profits.
But I would really like as many systems as possible to write addresses beautifully.

All the rules described below, we have developed ourselves. Most of them are used or will soon be connected to dadata.ru .

A year and a half ago, we thought about how to write addresses like a human being. Google did not give the answer, how to simplify the address, so we began to communicate with linguists, conduct tests and experiment.

We sought to develop rules for the formation of a clear address with a minimum length, written as people write it.

Materiel

To automatically generate addresses, we need an address source. If you know about KLADR or FIAS , skip this item. For the rest, I’ll tell you that addresses in Russia are formed hierarchically:

1. Each address has a subject. There are 85 subjects in Russia. For example: Moscow region, Komi Republic, Moscow.
   According to the administrative division, Moscow is not in the Moscow region, it is an independent city-region.
   Khimki located in the Moscow region, and not in Moscow. But Zelenograd, on the contrary, is in Moscow.
2. Subjects have areas and cities.
   A city without a district in the subject is an urban district. For example, Novosibirsk is subordinated directly to the subject “Novosibirsk region”.
   In FIAS there is a sign of the status of the center for cities and towns. This information will be useful to us later in the formation of the address one side.
3. In the areas there are cities and towns.
4. In the cities there are streets and settlements. According to the FIAS, there are still additional territories: usually these are garage-building cooperatives, garden-non-profit partnerships, etc.
5. Often in the address indicate the area of ​​the city, for example, “Moscow, Alekseevsky district”, or “Novosibirsk, U”. Unfortunately, intracity districts are absent in FIAS and KLADR, so we will not use them in the automatic construction of the address.
6. In the settlements there are streets, additional territories (the same as in paragraph 4) and houses. There are houses that are not on the street, but simply in the village.

We use the usual word order

First, consider the entire line. In Russia, they are used to writing addresses from the most upper level of administrative division to the lower level. The usual order of the elements is:

1. subject;
2. area;
3. city;
4. locality;
5. the outside;
6. house;
7. expansion of the house (building, building, staircase, floor, apartment, office, ..).

For example, “Moscow Region, Mytishchi District, Mytishchi City, Ulyanovskaya Street, House 3”

In addition, the word order within each level is important. For example, correctly write “City of St. Petersburg” instead of “St. Petersburg City”, or “Altai Krai” instead of “Altai Krai”. The order is determined in its own way for each type:

• Region, region, region, autonomous region: first name, then type.
• Republic, city: first type, then name.
• Elements in cities: districts, streets, squares, etc. The order of the elements can be either “name type” or “type name”. We use our own order for each type depending on the termination of the name and frequency of occurrence. For example, we write “Moscow, Aviation Lane” and “Moscow, Alexander Nevsky Lane”.

Do not forget about exceptions:

• “Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug - Ugra” is written without type, since “Autonomous District” is in the name of FIAS / KLADR. Example: “Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug - Yugra, Khanty-Mansiysk, Anna Konkova Street, 1”
• The Chuvash Republic has a remarkable type of Chuvashia (that is, the name of the region is “Chuvash Republic -”, and the type is “Chuvashia”); and delete the dash at the end of the name: “Chuvash Republic, Cheboksary, Admiral Ushakov Street, 2”

Address from FIAS:

Russia, Tatarstan Republic, Kazan City, Brothers Kasimovs Street, house 64

after rearranging the elements in the correct order turns into

Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, City of Kazan, 64 Kasimov Brothers Street

Read easier. But you can make it even better and shorter.

Separate types and names using formatting.

A simple thing that will help make the address more readable is the visual separation of names and types with the help of capital letters.

All types are written in small letters, all names - with a large one. See for yourself, the second option reads faster:

Before:

Kamchatsky Krai, City Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Bering Street, House 90, Apartment 61

After:

Kamchatsky krai, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky city, Bering street, house 90, apartment 61

We reduce types and names

The type cuts are in FIAS. We use them, add our own rules based on customer comments, and leave some of them as they are:


If you want to create your own rules for type abbreviations, then pay attention to two points:

• When reducing types, you can not be afraid of losing uniqueness within the address line. All types are next to the names, and a person can easily determine what is meant by the abbreviation. For example, in the address “Rep. Tatarstan, d Naberezhnye Morkvashi, d 45” without explanation it is clear that the first d is the village, and the second d is the house.
• However, the abbreviation should be understandable. For example, instead of the address “Moscow p Turchaninov”, where “p” can be either a lane or a prospect or square, it’s better to write “Moscow, Per Turchaninov”.

In some cases, people shorten the words “Big”, etc. in street names, for example “B. Ordynka ”. But it’s scary to do it automatically, because you can lose the uniqueness of the name.

Address to type reduction:

Russia, the Republic of Tatarstan, the city of Kazan, 64 Kasimov Brothers Street.

Address after:

Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan, 64 Brothers Kasimovs St.

Remove everything you can remove

The next step to an ideal address is to remove redundant information.
If the address is used for the delivery of correspondence, it is better to leave redundant information to simplify the sorting of packages and letters.
If the address is needed only for identification of a place by a person or courier delivery in the city is supposed, then the removal of redundant information will make the address more natural and readable.

We offer the following rules:

1. We delete the country if it is Russia. Rare cases like the village of Paris will not affect the perception: “Chelyabinsk region, Nagaybaksky district, the village of Paris”.
2. Remove the type from the city. The name of the city is unique within one district, so this information is not critical. It was “Mr. Voronezh”, remained “Voronezh”.
3. We delete the region from urban districts (these are the largest cities in the regions, I wrote about them above). These cities are famous and unique in Russia. For example, we do not write “Novosibirsk region Novosibirsk”, but simply “Novosibirsk”.
4. We delete the district at the centers of the districts (there is a sign in FIAS and KLADR). They are unique and fairly well known within the region. For example, we write not “Moscow region, Mozhaisk district, Mozhaisk”, but “Moscow region, Mozhaisk”
5. We remove the city, if it is clear from the context. Poster concerts in Yekaterinburg? Stop writing the word “Ekaterinburg” in the address of each site.

While I was writing an article, the idea was to delete the word “street”. It seems to me that if this type is not specified, it is perceived as the default. Let's conduct an experiment: “Moscow, Tverskaya”. What did you think about the street? However, there is still Tverskaya Square. However, this is still an unsupported assumption, and this should be done at your own peril and risk. It would be interesting to hear comments on this.

After removing the obvious entities, the address from the example will look more readable:
It was:

Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan, 64 Brothers Kasimovs St.

It became:

Kazan, Brothers Kasimov, d 64

or, if context allows:

Brothers Kasimov, d 64

We do not remove the type from the house, as usually the address also contains an indication of the apartment or building, and then the absence of some types seems strange to us. But this is a matter of taste:

Brothers Kasimov, 64, building 1, square 1

or

Brothers Kasimov, d 64, building 1, apt 1

If there is only a house in the address, then without the word “house” the address will only look better:

Brothers Kasimov, 64

We split the address into two lines

Our address is already good and beautiful, we can display it in the interface.
There is one know-how, how to simplify it even more with the help of formatting: we divide it into two lines, in the first we write the city, district, subject (exactly in this sequence) and in the second - the settlement, street and everything else.

Initial address from FIAS:

Russia, Tatarstan Republic, Kazan City, Brothers Kasimovs Street, house 64.

Let's write this:

Kazan,
Brothers Kasimov, 64

That's all. I hope the information will be useful to you and you will teach to “speak” your programs in natural language.
If you have questions on the addresses, please contact. We love this topic and always try to help.