Understand Your Users with positionstack

One of the best things about the Internet is that it (mostly) doesn’t care where you are. The person you’re interacting with might be in Rio or Rhode Island, Bahrain or Birmingham. The Internet opens up the world.

But opening up the world doesn’t mean removing it. The geographic independence loved by users can be a real headache for businesses, because nearly all businesses are constrained by geography. For business, having an accurate picture of where your users are means understanding them, understanding your relationship to them, and can mean the difference between an enviable user experience, and a PR disaster.

[pullquote]Geocoding grants you Sherlock Holmes-like powers of deduction[/pullquote]

One option for understanding a user’s location is Geolocation, which allows you to locate a user via their IP address; it’s not perfect because IP addresses are tricky things. Arguably a better option, thanks largely to the accuracy of the starting data, is Geocoding. Greater reliability than Geolocation makes Geocoding a more useful option for UX designers.

Geocoding grants you Sherlock Holmes-like powers of deduction, to seek out rich data about your users. But where do you start? One of the best ways is to integrate your site or app with positionstack.

What Are The Benefits of Geocoding?

It’s awesome that you can sell your band’s T-shirt to a fan in Vietnam, or ship a used car part to a mechanic in Siberia, but until 3D printing gets a lot more sophisticated there needs to be a way to move objects from Point A, to Point B; step 1 in that process is figuring out exactly where Points A and B are.

Shipping goods, with all the automatically calculated costs, isn’t the only reason you may want to know someone’s location. For example, it’s good manners to present prices in the local currency, or direct customers to a support line that speaks their language. And unfortunately, there are legal issues to consider: national and international bans exist on trading with some nations, accepting certain orders from some users could land you in hot water.

[pullquote]The key to a great user experience is gathering data about your users and then acting on it[/pullquote]

One of the best features of a Geocode API like positionstack is that once your user has disclosed their location you can make an educated-guess at a whole lot more, from their probable first language, to their marketing preferences, and even the time they’re likely to come home from the office.

Imagine you’re offering a callback service on your website. Geocoding not only ensures you can pre-fill the international dialling code in the callback form, but it tells you the user’s timezone—essential if you don’t want to wake them up with a 4am sales pitch.

A user’s location also affects their outlook on the world. Go visit a major international company like Apple, Nike, or Pepsi, change your location on their site, and compare how brands with millions of research dollars pitch their wares differently in North America, France, Indonesia, or New Zealand. The key to a great user experience is gathering data about your users and then acting on it.

Why Choose positionstack?

With just a user’s physical address you can determine dozens of different characteristics that allow you to naturalize your site or app for users. Based on an address—even a partial address—positionstack can determine the user’s currency, dialling code, even their hours of daylight.

One of the best features of positionstack is its ability to translate an address into a latitude and longitude, then plot that position on a map that you can easily embed on your site. Nothing builds a connection like showing a user a place they recognize; it builds confidence, increases conversions, and ultimately means higher profits for you.

And that’s not all. positionstack enables both forward, and reverse geocoding. That means as well as finding a global position from an address, it can also find an address from a latitude and longitude. You can even perform batch queries (multiple searches) allowing you to narrow down addresses from an approximate location.

[pullquote]a super-reliable infrastructure, handling over a billion requests per day, with a typical response time of less than 100 milliseconds[/pullquote]

As you can probably guess, any Geocoding API is only as useful as the data that underpins it. positionstack is run by apilayer, one of the most trusted names in APIs. It boasts a super-reliable infrastructure, handling over a billion requests per day, with a typical response time of less than 100 milliseconds. positionstack’s API is built on a database of more than two billion global locations, sourced from high-quality data sources, and it’s updated on a daily basis.

positionstack is also exceptionally easy to integrate into a site or app. There are code examples provided in PHP, Python, Nodejs, Go, Ruby, and jQuery—you can even use the service with vanilla JavaScript. Data is returned in XML, JSON, or GeoJSON formats.

Perhaps the most appealing feature of positionstack is that it’s completely free for use up to 10,000 API requests per month. So if you’re running a small site, or just getting started, you can make use of professional-grade data at zero cost. Once you’ve grown large enough to need it, premium subscriptions start at just $9.99 per month.

Head over to positionstack.com today, to get started with Geocoding for free.

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of positionstack –]

WDD Staff

WDD staff are proud to be able to bring you this daily blog about web design and development. If there's something you think we should be talking about let us know @DesignerDepot.