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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?

#301

Post by generic92034 »

shafyy wrote: post #195
msh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to address your politeness questions, it can only be done if you handle each language/country split separately and the app creators have detailed cultural knowledge for each country/language. I come from a country right next to germany and addressing a person with a gender specifier like Frau would be seen as extremely old fashioned and potentially sexist. So I guess it also depends a lot on to which degree t…

Which country is that? And how would you address a person called Martina Müller in a written document? "Sehr geehrte Müller?" Or is it not a German-speaking country you're referring to?

Is it not a similar issue in the US or UK? In a formal setting, e. g. communication from a company representative to an unknown (except for the name) representative from a different company, I would be using "Dear Ms./Mr. ". If that is the correct way (please let me know!) you have to commit to one of only two genders and sometimes also the last name is a guess.

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

#302

Post by bpicolo »

kelnos wrote: post #194
saltymimir wrote: post #57

Ohh boy, as someone who works on a travel booking, service serving customers in Asia, this problem hits hard. I guess the answer depends on how you plan to handle the names once they got submitted. I happen to be handing that data over to airlines, which has some of the less forgiving, yet fragmented name requirements. If you handle this incorrectly, your customer can't fly, even after they paid for the flight. And f…

Why not just have a single field for "your name as it appears on your identity document"? Or do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale? I've always found it weird how broken this is. Some US airlines have separate entry fields for first, middle, and last names. But then they jam it together on the boarding pass as "Last, Firstmiddle" (yes, with first and m…

> do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale

Bingo. I've had this problem dealing with insurance carriers. They want a very wide degree of name formats, and to make it worse some don't support unicode, some don't support apostrophes, and some don't understand names longer than 22 characters (had multi-hour discussions on exactly which part of the names I needed to cut out in this scenario). They were bewildered that these were problems for data which could include anybody in the US...

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

#303

Post by dgb23 »

johneth wrote: post #247
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 (…

The GOV.UK design system[1] agrees with you: > "Use single or multiple fields depending on your user’s needs. Not everyone’s name fits the first-name, last-name format. Using multiple name fields mean there’s more risk that a person’s name will not fit the format you’ve chosen and that it is entered incorrectly." and > "Avoid asking users for their title. It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially…

This has to be one of the best design systems I ever looked at...

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

#304

Post by rsynnott »

As others have said, there's a lot to be said for having a single name field and not trying to second-guess how people expect this to be presented. There's huge variation here, and some cultures don't even have a concept of a single last/family name.

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

#305

Post by lmm »

JimDabell wrote: post #96
lmm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They aren’t exceptional names, that’s my whole point. They are just unfamiliar to you .

I don't know what you imagine I'm unfamiliar with (and you're probably wrong, but never mind that), but familiar or not, it's quite easy to handle the unexceptional cases, almost by definition.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #299

Even in England, you would have to consider King Charles III's name. His given names are Charles Philip Arthur George. No family name. Of course, now his name is even a bit longer: "Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith". So, if you think he might sign up for your…

[deleted]

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

#307

Post by rsynnott »

zamalek wrote: post #284
weinzierl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same." This is the way to go. "The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here." It doesn't make much sense in many places all over the world. In Germany technically speaking our given names are a set and we can have many of them. While it is practically necessary to write them out in a certain order in our documents, from a legal s…

> "Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same." > This is the way to go. Agreed. Does anyone know of any reason to care about first/last, apart from it being part of My First SQL Database and sating our inner desire to create pointless taxonomies?

Sorting. Though I don't think there's a culture-agnostic way to do this, either.

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

#308

Post by tectec »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #299

Even in England, you would have to consider King Charles III's name. His given names are Charles Philip Arthur George. No family name. Of course, now his name is even a bit longer: "Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith". So, if you think he might sign up for your…

He's from the house of Windsor so wouldn't he use that as his last name where it's needed?

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

#309

Post by paulmooreparks »

tectec wrote: post #308
paulmooreparks wrote: post #299

Even in England, you would have to consider King Charles III's name. His given names are Charles Philip Arthur George. No family name. Of course, now his name is even a bit longer: "Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith". So, if you think he might sign up for your…

He's from the house of Windsor so wouldn't he use that as his last name where it's needed?

No. It's not his last name. It's not even in his name anywhere.

Edit: Technically, his family name is Mountbatten-Windsor. Still not a last name, though.

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

#310

Post by rsynnott »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #251
cge wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roman naming conventions[1] technically did have a personal first name that came first and was called that: first name or forename is a reasonably direct translation for praenomen. The complexity is that by the late republic praenomina were largely from such a small set of names that they were not particularly useful to distinguish anyone, and they became somewhat of a formality that would often be omitted. Julius Ca…

Hereditary cognomina were used to distinguish different major branches of large, powerful clans. Some sort of device to specify which subbranch of an enormous group you're talking about appears to be necessary in every place that has such enormous groups; in imperial China, then as now, vast swathes of the population were covered by just a handful of surnames, but the practice developed of referring to notable famili…

They _sometimes_ did, I think. Here's one (non-Julian) example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Caecilius_Metellus_Num...
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