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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?

#61

Post by masklinn »

joegibbs wrote: 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.

> The only downside is you can't do something like "Hi ${FIRST_NAME}" in your emails

Which might be an upside, because there are cultures and contexts where it’s incredibly rude. You’re a glorified ledger, not a family member or life-long friend.

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

#62

Post by freddie_mercury »

Saigonautica wrote: post #47
freddie_mercury wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't do this. In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common. The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong. And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outsi…

Yes please! My wife and I constantly struggle with this kind of thing. When there's just a "name" field that permits some high number of characters, it's fine. Which name is my "first name" or "last name" also depends on what identity document I'm using. I immigrated to Asia and switched to the family-name-first convention, but my birth certificate and so on are the opposite. So it's conceivable that a system requiri…

Not to mention you always have to second guess the designer.

Does "last name" mean "family name" even though it is my first name?

And what counts as "middle name"? Is it "Thi"? But my "first name" isn't Anh Mai. It is just Mai. But "Thi Anh" isn't my middle name, either, that's just nonsense.

And, yes, we have the "multiple documents with different name order" depending on whether it is the Vietnamese birth certificate, the US Consular Record of Birth Abroad, the Vietnamese passport, or the Australian passport....

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

#63

Post by lnxg33k1 »

Canada wrote: post #19
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #12

Seems more of a stackoverflow question? But: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans#... https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-enum.html I'd have multiple classes handling each one a use-case, and a enum on user's record in order to specify which class to use for each, so that you can compute it from the nationality, but you could also potentially give each user the chance to set it for…

Is it really worth using enum in postgres over a plain string, and optionally a check constraint if you're super concerned about strictness?

Probably you're right, a simple string would work well enough

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

#64

Post by masklinn »

wenc wrote: post #60
masklinn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me and my people, it's perceived as rude (it sounds infantilizing). Just because you don't perceive it that way doesn't mean it is not. So what you’re actually saying now is that any inferred form of address may come across as rude, which means you original suggestion is plain incorrect: splitting given name and family name does not allow generating a genetically never rude form of address, because you can’t kn…

> So what you’re actually saying now is that any inferred form of address may come across as rude, which means you original suggestion is plain incorrect: splitting given name and family name does not allow generating a genetically never rude form of address, because you can’t know whether the user’s culture favours given names, family names, full names, or even none of the above. No, that is not it.

> No, that is not it.

Yes, it very much is. You’re declaring that one form of address is rude to your culture, while acknowledging that it is proper to an other culture.

This means the two cultures are completely incompatible on that point, and thus no generic munging method can satisfy both.

And yet your original suggestion was to do exactly that, just in a form suited or at least compatible with your cultural sensibilities.

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

#65

Post by wenc »

masklinn wrote: post #64
wenc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what you’re actually saying now is that any inferred form of address may come across as rude, which means you original suggestion is plain incorrect: splitting given name and family name does not allow generating a genetically never rude form of address, because you can’t know whether the user’s culture favours given names, family names, full names, or even none of the above. No, that is not it.

> No, that is not it. Yes, it very much is. You’re declaring that one form of address is rude to your culture, while acknowledging that it is proper to an other culture. This means the two cultures are completely incompatible on that point, and thus no generic munging method can satisfy both. And yet your original suggestion was to do exactly that, just in a form suited or at least compatible with your cultural sensi…

No that is not right at all. I won’t continue.

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

#67

Post by muzani »

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 (given name only)

Malaysian name: Sharifah Azizah binti Syed Ahmad Tarmizi, (honorific surname: Sharifah) (given name: Azizah) (patronym) (father's honorific surname: Syed) (father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi)

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

#68

Post by jameshush »

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 mean well so I gave you an upvote :-). I'm a Westerner living in Asia. The name my British parents gave me is James Hush. Every family member calls me Jamie. My legal Chinese name is 許杰, if you tried to write that the "Western" way the closest thing you could do is write xǔ jié, but even then there's multiple Chinese characters that represent "xǔ" and "jié" so it would make no sense.

Names are hard hahahaha.

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

#70

Post by lmm »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #42
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…

Don't do this. In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common. The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong. And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outsi…

> You don't need to try to infer one from the other.

So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?

By all means make it possible to override, but you should absolutely default "what would you like to be called?" rather than making everyone enter their name twice.

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