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

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

#101

Post by tommiegannert »

Related: as a Swede, the first times I had to fill out a honorific, it felt very weird. And many times they are required. We don't use honorifics in Sweden. The only difference between formal and informal address, is pretty much whether you use a nickname or not. The idea that there is a single category of "western name" is wonky.

Another is that my spoken/given name is after my "middle" name. Especially American forms don't deal well with that. In Sweden, you usually underline the given name, since it's used to address the person. Now I see a comment here saying that's a thing in the Philippines. That's interesting.

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

#102

Post by pmontra »

nicbou wrote: post #81
muzani wrote: post #67

Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here. Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name. Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (…

This is what I usually do if I need the name at all, but sometimes you need to interface with systems that need that data split. A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person? In Germany, you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person. You can drop the title, but dropping the gender makes the whole thing impersonal.…

Some profile managers or registration forms in European sites asked me how I want to be addressed, including a menu with Mister, Doctor, PhD etc. American sites usually have at most name, middle name and family name and mails start with Dear Name. English is easy because Dear is OK for all genres. Other languages need a different word for male and female people so their either end up collecting personal information that they wouldn't need for the service they are offering or they have to find some impersonal way to address you.

An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.

So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.

Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.

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

#103

Post by Scarblac »

lmm wrote: post #87
JimDabell wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about literally billions of people, not “occasional edge cases”.

How do you figure that? Billions of people would mean over 10% of the world population having exceptional names, which seems very implausible.

It's not implausible if you consider that you're taking a rule that usually but not always works in the US and try to apply it to the whole world.

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

#104

Post by CMCDragonkai »

froddd wrote: post #73
realusername wrote: post #69

It's not only and ansian thing. In France thr convention is LASTNAME Firstname (with that casing)

I was going to say that. It’s amazing how often French users get it wrong when filling in forms. It can result in online services trying a more informal tone calling people by their last name only (“Salut, DUPONT!”), which can be seen as a bit rude. People don’t read form labels with great attention.

Funny in some cultures calling people by their last name is actually respectful.

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

#105

Post by vintermann »

wmeddie wrote: post #14

Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet. Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names. Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything? A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1…

It's not just programmers. Plenty of genealogists, do things like automatically give a wife their husband's (male!) patronym. Even though they see it doesn't work that way in the sources, they seem to feel that it "should" work that way.

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

#106

Post by sundarurfriend »

croes wrote: post #79
wmeddie wrote: post #14

Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet. Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names. Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything? A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1…

Is there an article showing a solution because listing problems is the easy part? And maybe it's just me but >because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition. isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity.

In this case, "listing problems" - as you dismissively call it - takes a lot of care and effort, the article is a distillation of experience and knowledge that very few possess. It's up to you to use this understanding of the problem space to decide which aspects you're willing to trade off. The article's job is to help people make these tradeoffs consciously, instead of designing based on simplistic assumptions made in ignorance.

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

#107

Post by michaelt »

masklinn wrote: post #27
wenc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not do this. For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title). Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude (I personally find it rude too, e.g. "Hey John R. Brown, this is your order"), so it's useful to split up "given name" and "family name" into 2 fields so that you don't have to depend on name ordering which varies by culture. If…

> I would not do this. For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title). Just add a field for the desired form of address, or a nickname. > Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude Stuffy, Maybe, but rude? Calling people by their first name is rude. Calling people by forms of address which don’t exist is rude.

> Just add a field for the desired form of address, or a nickname.

For westerners you might want sunny, good-news messages to say "Hi John" but for an apology for a problem (like a delay or cancellation) you might want to use the more respectful "Dear Mr Doe"

On the other hand, this discussion has plenty of examples of why separate 'first name' and 'last name' fields don't work in all cultures. And I think we can all agree that asking people for a name and two desired forms of address ready to e-mail them in two different tones would be a very unusual sign up process.

I'm not sure there's any universal, fully respectful way of doing this across cultures.

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

#108

Post by dontupvoteme »

wmeddie wrote: post #14

Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet. Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names. Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything? A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1…

Very interesting however

>People have exactly one canonical full name.

What is on your passport then?

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

#109

Post by msh »

fy20 wrote: post #80
muzani wrote: post #67

Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here. Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name. Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (…

In most cases you don't even need the users real name. If I sign up for an account, but the invoice is going to the billing department of my company, why do you care what my real name is?

If the name on a bill to my company does not match the name of the employee who ordered the product, the bill will certainly not be paid.

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

#110

Post by pmontra »

jzwinck wrote: post #50

I lived in Asia for many years and worked with people from many places there. It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea). There are people with only one name. Don't make them double it (Ananda Ananda). There are people with several given names. But they may only want to be called by the first, or the first two, or the last. There are…

Imagine if the name on a tomb does not match the one that the person preferred to be called with, and everybody used all the times. I know one case but I don't know the reason.
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