When null is your legal address

A roller coaster in government service UX.

When your legal address, as provided by the chip on your government issued ID, is null, null, null (that being street, zip code, city), you’re at an elevated risk of making IT systems do weird things. Here’s what I encountered the other day, when trying to get a birth certificate.

First a bit of context: The German ID card (“Personalausweis”) can be used with a card reader for authentication when using online government services (German Wikipedia article). Side note: the necessary client software has an open source variant with ready to use Linux builds for many distros — awesome!

When I set out to get a birth certificate the other day, I was pleasantly surprised that the service portal of my home state Baden-Württemberg, service-bw.de, offers an online service for this and makes use of aforementioned ID card authentication. So, in terms of UX, we start on a high.

Put the ID card in the card reader, enter the PIN, and all relevant personal data is automagically read — awesome. After entering a few details like how many copies I want, I’m asked where the certificate should be mailed to. “Is it an address within Germany?” I select “no”, start entering my address in Japan, but the very last form field, a drop-down menu to select the country, says there are no available entries?!

The UX roller coaster looks like this at this point.

I’m required to specify a country, but there are no countries to choose from. The browser’s dev tools show no errors … trying to ma­nu­al­ly set the form field value does not seem to work … Fortunately, I notice, there’s an optional comment field at the very end of the process. So here’s my plan:

• Answer “Is it an address within Germany?” with “yes”. That’s not true and the address fields will automatically be filled with the null values from my ID card, but it’ll prevent the unfillable country dropdown from spawning.
• Fill out the rest of the form as usual.
• Use the comment field at the very end to tell them my Japanese address with an explanation.

So I write my message in the comment field, doing my best to explain everything in a succinct, comprehensive way. I submit, but get an error. “There are unsupported characters in the field. This might be due to German smart quotes („“).” I actually did use German smart quotes, so I remove them. I submit, the error persists, still just saying it might be due to German smart quotes! … so I get to guess the supported character set.

I try removing em dashes, then brackets, colons, even German umlauts … the error persits. Even when I strip down my message to just letters, numbers, and periods (“.“), I still get the error. Is there a length restriction maybe? I try removing parts of the message … no luck. Eventually I figure it out. The validation of this TEXT AREA field does not allow LINE BREAKS! 🤡

I remove all line breaks, think of a way to unambiguously convey an address without using line breaks, go through the online payment part of the process, and get a final nice confirmation screen with my null values. I hit submit, … it fails. And the failure message provides no indication as to what the cause is.

The UX roller coaster looks like this at this point.

Frustrated and exhausted I file a bug report with their technical support and go to bed. The next day, just out of curiosity, I look at the form again, and the country dropdown works. °_° I fill in the forms, do the payment, send … and it actually goes through! Props to everyone involved for fixing it that fast.

The UX roller coaster emerges from the sub-zero depths it was at.

Playing around some more on the platform, I later noticed that the forms are not the same for all cities. I found other places where the birth certificate address form looks like this. Street, zip code, and city are taken from the ID card and put into non-editable fields, then you’re asked to name a country if it’s not Germany. That makes no sense?! Or do some people have their address abroad (sans the country) saved on the ID card and my null values are an exception?

Oh well .. much UX roller coastering still to be experienced.