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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?

#161

Post by zarzavat »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #150
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 (…

There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

I respectfully disagree with their advice to use “Family name” and “Given name”, over “First name” and “Last name”.

Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated.

Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.

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

#162

Post by midoridensha »

naniwaduni wrote: post #29
goscots wrote: post #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.

You can't do this: what language do you think a name like 金正恩 belongs to, and how do you rule out the others? Given this, what parts do you expect to extract from it?

It's very simple: put a drop-down field on the web form which allows the user to select which naming convention they'd like to use (generally by country, but there can be more for other regions too). This should yield only a few hundred different options to scroll through. Then each option loads a different form specific to that option. Load the whole thing in one giant blob of JS and have it load for every page view.

I've seen lots of websites programmed exactly this way, so it's obviously good web design.

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

#163

Post by tannhaeuser »

Representing names (and postal addressing via UPU S1) are one of the use cases where SGML/XML and other document techniques feels appropriate in internal business data representation, as opposed to storing details in 1NF (a la first/last name) in databases, especially when working with international customer data.

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

#164

Post by physicsguy »

zarzavat wrote: post #161
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

I respectfully disagree with their advice to use “Family name” and “Given name”, over “First name” and “Last name”. Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated. Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.

I have a friend who just married a Burmese girl of Indian origin and she just had a single name 'Jennifer'

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

#165

Post by Toutouxc »

brigandish wrote: post #156
croes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't refer to yourself in private by your own name?

Do you? I only say my own name when I’m introducing myself to someone.

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

#166

Post by qwerty456127 »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #129
msh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you not use POs? Much easier, allows you to approve spend if necessary and means the person paying I voices doesn't need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of your employees and keep up to date with which ones have ledt

POs seem to be very rare in Europe, people who even know what's a PO are rare.

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

#167

Post by meepmorp »

yosito wrote: post #75
splix wrote: post #28

Not necessary Asian btw. As a Russian I can tell that Russians also may use "family name - given name - father name", usually in official documents. Though it it also may be just "given - family", as well as any other variation informally. So you wouldn't make a mistake with UI

Doesn't Russian also have different forms of names depending on their grammatical place in the sentence?

You only need to capture the name in nominative case, though; declined forms are derivable from that.

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

#168

Post by marcus_holmes »

zarzavat wrote: post #161
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

I respectfully disagree with their advice to use “Family name” and “Given name”, over “First name” and “Last name”. Everybody has a First name and Last name (unless they are mononymic), even if this doesn’t correspond semantically to what the writer of the form anticipated. Many people don’t have a Family name and this creates user confusion when filling out forms.

The point is that First Name and Last Name do not correspond to Family Name and Given Name, which is actually what is desired (you can start an email to me as "Hello ", and be reasonably sure of avoiding insult. You can't do that with "Hello ", you will definitely insult some people).

However, I don't do this. If I want someone's name so I can talk to them, I just ask them "what do you want us to call you?" with a single field (and if they enter "Captain HugePenis" then I cheerfully start the email "Hello Captain HugePenis,"). I only use Given/Family if I need their official name for bureaucracy reasons, and then it's very much "what's your name as it is written in your passport/id?", and I don't use it to address them, because it's very easy to get wrong.

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

#169

Post by matsemann »

gandalfgreybeer wrote: post #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 someth…

Eh, the "don't overthink it" is how all tech has become western centric, especially US-centric. In the grand scheme of things it's a small annoyance, but having your culture or norms constantly overwritten by some tech-bros is bad.

Like, my name still doesn't work in a lot of systems that expect ascii characters only. Like, thanks for deciding that names æøåü or similar isn't a valid name.

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

#170

Post by globalise83 »

jasfi wrote: post #9

You have two fields: full name and the name you want to be addressed by (e.g. in an email). This should cover the requirements of 99% of apps. You can add another field if really needed.

Won’t cover all finance apps - your name will most likely need to be submitted for sanctions screening, credit check, KYC checks etc. where understanding first name and last name is very important for cross-checking against other lists which expect the same.
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