Both customers and companies want a quick and easy checkout experience. From what I've seen, a big UX bottleneck at checkout is the billing and/or shipping address(es) because there are so many input fields per address.
The traditional way of typing an address is something like:
Street address: 123 main st
Unit: 101
City: Schenectady
State: NY ▼
Zip code: 12345
Country: United States of America ▼
This is usually frustrating for me, because some addresses are "edge-cases" and don't necessarily fit into the format required by the web page.
And often, these fields are duplicated to populate both shipping and billing addresses. My question isn't how to prevent that duplication (there are "Ship to my billing address" checkboxes for that), but it's about reducing the number of fields on the form from 6+ to just 1:
Address: 123 main st #101, schenectady, ny 12345
(could be a small, multi-line textarea too)
Is it a more positive user experience to combine all the fields for an address into a single input field?
Answer
If you have a reasonably foolproof way to parse freeform addresses or (more likely) only need the address as entered by the user then I'd go for the single text box.
In a lot of cases you just need the address to print out on labels etc. for posting, so there's really no need to split the address into separate fields. At most you might want to extract the post/zip code, but that should be relatively easy to parse.
I get annoyed on sites (particularly American ones it has to be said) that assume that your address conforms to a single standard and they force you to enter the data in their format when it doesn't. So if they say "City" and "County"/"State" and both are marked as required, but in the UK we only usually enter city.
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