The concept of ‘Stored Addresses’ and address books are somewhat unique when it comes to e-commerce account features, because users can both manage the stored addresses while within their Self-Service account area (i.e., in the address book feature), or they can manage their stored addresses directly during the checkout flow.

In practice, this means that most of the addresses in a user’s ‘Address Book’ haven’t been added from within that interface, but rather during the checkout flow. During our large-scale usability testing of Accounts & Self-Service UX this special context was observed to set forth a series of requirements for ‘Address Book’ designs – particularly in regards to editing an existing address vs. adding a new address, and setting a “default address”.

Our large-scale usability testing also revealed that while ‘Address Book’ is the term often used by web professionals for this feature, normal web users have issues recognizing this terminology. Likely as most users didn’t add their addresses themselves, it was automatically added during checkout – hence the feature should generally not be labeled ‘Address Book’ in the account interface.