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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?

#91

Post by JimDabell »

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…

> In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.

I have a completely “ordinary” name from a western perspective – first (given), middle, last (family). I live in Singapore, which has a few different popular naming conventions from a few different cultures. I’ve received documents with my name in every single variation possible. I‘ve been Mr First Name, Mr Middle Name, Mr Last Name, and so on. Often I can’t even determine if they have my name correct in their records – it could be recorded correctly but used incorrectly, or it could be recorded incorrectly and used correctly. Sometimes I suspect it’s recorded incorrectly but also used incorrectly in a different way.

Normally it’s not a problem, but like you say, airline tickets can cause issues. I think I’ve been demoted from “check in online” to “check in at a counter because we need to check your paperwork” a bunch of times because my passport doesn’t match my name on my ticket. Often it’s not even the name order – the airline will only sell my ticket with a first name and last name field (meaning I have to drop my middle name, which is on my passport) or they ask for all three and then concatenate first and middle with no space and truncate the last few letters.

Everything would be so much easier if I could just enter my name.

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

#92

Post by grardb »

Shameless plug: I gave a talk on names and the problems that arise when you give them special treatment - https://youtu.be/NfKhY3sAQ9E

But the tl;dw is to do this:

I don't know what kind of app you're building, but unless it's 100% impossible (from a business perspective) not to separate people's names into multiple fields, you really should just make it one field.

If it's a true requirement for the business—due to a third-party vendor's requirements, for example—then I suppose you could simply ask the user which order they prefer and display their name accordingly.

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

#93

Post by efitz »

yreg wrote: post #85
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 (…

Slack does this and I don't like it. I have Hungarian colleagues and some (but not all!) of them have entered the family name first. I always feel awkward responding to them, because I don't know if I'm typing `Hello $FIRSTNAME` or `Hello $LASTNAME`.

This is why you should always ask for a preferred name. There’s lots of reasons why people don’t use their legal given name; I use my middle name and get annoyed when forced to use my first name. Many societies (ex: Thailand) use nicknames instead of legal given names.

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

#94

Post by manlobster »

yreg wrote: post #85
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 (…

Slack does this and I don't like it. I have Hungarian colleagues and some (but not all!) of them have entered the family name first. I always feel awkward responding to them, because I don't know if I'm typing `Hello $FIRSTNAME` or `Hello $LASTNAME`.

You can do `Hello @TheirSlackHandle`.

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

#95

Post by lemper »

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. and if they don't use latin alphabet,"local name" addition would really be nice. that's what my paycheck giver does.

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

#96

Post by JimDabell »

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.

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

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

#97

Post by nicbou »

masklinn wrote: post #61
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.

And in others the formality feels off and a tell-tale sign that the sender is not from here.

I get a lot of mail from foreign readers. Indians and Pakistanis are pretty formal, and most Africans even more so. On the other hand, some people from those same countries will write stream of consciousness emails that look like a text message to their dad.

The Western countries are a lot less formal, but and frequently drop the polite form which I was raised to use with all strangers.

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

#98

Post by alkonaut »

So first of all everyone has read "falsehoods programmers believe about names". And of course everyone knows we should just use "name" and that's it. Perhaps a greeting/displayname if we need to do "Hello $customer" in an email.

But still. There are often hard requirements that are impossible to reconcile with the "just store one name" idea. As an example: you need to produce alphabetically sorted lists. It would rarely be acceptable to produce lists of people sorted by their given names in Western Europe for example. So as an example if you really do need to have BOTH "Doe, John" and "John Doe" what do you do in case you know at least 99% of users will have names following this format? Do you force people to enter their name twice? In that situation I would:

- Store it as a single name column, with more columns as required (greeting, sortable, ).

- Present a UX that is appropriate for the region of 99% users. So for western Europe show a "first name", "last name", but don't store that: just set the name column to "$firstname $lastname" and the index name column to "$lastname, $firstname" and greeting to "$firstname" for example. That way I at least let 99% of your users only input the name once.

- But (and this is important) offer an alternative way of specifying it for those who don't have a name that conforms to the format. You let just that small fraction of users enter a name/indexname/greeting instead.

And yes: the above ONLY applies if it's really a hard requirement to separate them, because the last name sorting was really a requirement. Of course there are other requirements that force other solutions. The "just one input" is the correct solution for all the cases where it is possible.

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

#99

Post by dmurray »

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…

To be fair, if you only have one name, then it is both your first and your last name.

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

#100

Post by Scarblac »

lmm wrote: post #74
zinekeller wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? As the app is apparently developed for use in Asia-Pacific, no, it isn't.

I guarantee that if someone vaguely familiar with the countries they operate in spends half an hour actually trying, they'll come up with heuristics that are correct for 95%+ of the target population.

So use the heuristics to set the initial value for the second field based on the first. Just let the user edit it as they wish.
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