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Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

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Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#1
Our app is designed to be used across the Asia Pacific.

We have members who follow western naming conventions as well as members following common asian naming conventions.

Turns out there can be alot of variation on what is the convention.

https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/a-guide-to-using...

How would you handle different naming conventions, so users see their name in the order they would like?

Family, Given

Given, Family

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#2
Could you just have a single field for name and allow anything in that field? The only downside is you can't do something like "Hi ${FIRST_NAME}" in your emails, but the upside is that it basically handles any name or name order, e.g. Indonesian single names, Spanish names with the mother's surname included, etc.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#4
One interesting approach would be to use a regex to detect if the name is written in Hanzi, Kanji or the Korean or Vietnamese alphabets and write the name in whatever format is appropriate for the locality. The Asian people I know would be be unsurprised to see their name rendered western style when written using whatever romanization format their native language uses.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#5
Personal opinion.

As an Asian person, don’t overthink this.

Just have fields for family name and given name to distinguish between the two.

Sure, when there’s a text field saying hello “first name last name” it might be flipped but this shouldn’t be a deal breaker or offensive in any capacity.

Worst case is you can have a toggle they can click but from a developer standpoint, that might be over engineering for something that might cause headaches later.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#8
post #2

Could you just have a single field for name and allow anything in that field? The only downside is you can't do something like "Hi ${FIRST_NAME}" in your emails, but the upside is that it basically handles any name or name order, e.g. Indonesian single names, Spanish names with the mother's surname included, etc.

That's probably a good way to deal with interface issue, but do you really need their family names? It is a perhaps a good time to look at which data is needed vs what data collection from users is normalized

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#10
post #6

Use a single text field for the full name.

This. I'd also add "How would you like to be called" as sometimes people go by their second given name, not the first given name. For example, you might have a common first name like Muhammad or Ketut.
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