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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?

#171

Post by regularfry »

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 isn't that it's first and last, it's to avoid an implicit assumption that they are in a particular order. That semantic correspondence is exactly what changing to given/family is supposed to preserve.

Yes, there are people with only one. There is/was a fairly well-known example in UK network infrastructure circles. That's a problem in either system if you make the fields required.

Given/family removes ambiguity for a larger number of humans than first/last, but you're always going to run into something from the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names list so unless you can get away with just a single "name" field (and you can't always) it's the better option of the two.

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

#172

Post by Hackbraten »

alkonaut wrote: post #98

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 rar…

> It would rarely be acceptable to produce lists of people sorted by their given names in Western Europe for example.

Luckily, it has become a bit uncommon to manually search a printed document by name.

In times of GDPR, the days of printed lists of personal info posted on some bulletin board are pretty much over. For a list that is non-public, chances are you already have it on a device with a search feature.

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

#173

Post by KptMarchewa »

leokennis wrote: post #121
manlobster wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do `Hello @TheirSlackHandle`.

This is what I do too. Basically, we are deflecting the awkwardness and/or blame to the software.

Or just "Hello, $reason_for_this_message"

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

#174

Post by Renaud »

pmontra wrote: post #102
nicbou wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

One way to address the issue with gendered grammar would be to ask the user to chose between which of ‘benvenuto’ and ‘benvenuta’ should be used when corresponding with them.

That way, you don’t strictly know their gender, you don’t have to ask for it, just what grammar construct they prefer you use.

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

#175

Post by kelnos »

danbruc wrote: post #145
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…

This list would have been so much better with examples or a short explanation how or why the assumptions break in case it is not obvious. The author offers examples on demand [1] but while I would be interested to know them, it seems not important enough to bother the author. Maybe the author sees this comment and has some time to spare, then it could benefit everyone and not just one person asking. [1] If you need e…

Someone else decided to write a follow-up with examples: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...

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

#176

Post by BurningPenguin »

jval43 wrote: post #112
MandieD wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an elderly German aunt by marriage who considers it an affront that Vodafone sends her chirpy business letters starting "Hallo >!" and continuing in the familiar second person instead of the more (to her) respectful "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. >," and formal "Sie" (grammatically third person plural, but also the formal second person). First names and familiar second person grammar are very much reserved for family…

It is an affront though, a butchering of the language and just generally disrespectful. The distinction is an integral part of the German language and it's wholly inappropriate for a telco provider to address someone like this. Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain. German companies often spend a non-trivi…

I'd say it depends on the area and the type of business. In Lower Bavaria it's quite common to use informal language even with strangers. Any mechanic, plumber or other craftsmen will use "Du" the moment they see you. Formal language is usually used in a more formal environment, like banks or maybe some fancy restaurant or fancy shop.

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

#177

Post by devoutsalsa »

jll29 wrote: post #133

This is not just an Asian thing, Hungarians put their family name first (another reason not to call it a "last name"). Not to forget the special case that people may only have one name (for which some immigration offices had to invent the rule to repeat the single name twice, as first and last name, to comply with online and offline forms that have these often mandatory fields). So we may add two patterns to your pat…

I was recently in India. When using Zomato to order a food delivery, I was confused why the address form was asking for a PIN code. It took a moment to realize that PIN code was referring to what I think of as a zip/postal code.

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

#178

Post by zarzavat »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #168
zarzavat wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

Okay but say a person with an East Asian name fills out your form and dutifully fills out your form with their name in reverse. i.e. if their name is the Chinese equivalent of “Smith John”, they fill it out as given name: John, family name: Smith. Aren’t you going to be rendering their name in the wrong order for all your interactions? How do you know which order to concatenate it?

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

#179

Post by Glawen »

jval43 wrote: post #112
MandieD wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an elderly German aunt by marriage who considers it an affront that Vodafone sends her chirpy business letters starting "Hallo >!" and continuing in the familiar second person instead of the more (to her) respectful "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. >," and formal "Sie" (grammatically third person plural, but also the formal second person). First names and familiar second person grammar are very much reserved for family…

It is an affront though, a butchering of the language and just generally disrespectful. The distinction is an integral part of the German language and it's wholly inappropriate for a telco provider to address someone like this. Same goes with names: missing accents, umlauts, special characters, wrong ordering, wrong titles/gender etc. is aggravating. And customers do complain. German companies often spend a non-trivi…

I speak both german and french, and I don't like being addressed with "Du" or "Tu", be it in letters, email or whatever. It is for me a lack of respect.

In France the etiquette requires that you ask permission to use "Tu", and there are people who refuse you the right (it basically signals that they see you as a servant).

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

#180

Post by cybervegan »

I was wondering when someone would cite this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

But since nobody else seems to have done so, I will. Globally, names don't follow any common format or concept at all that you can reduce to a formula. My takeaway is that it's best to have a free-format "full name" field, and another "preferred name" field so you can allow people to choose how to be referred to.

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