Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 527 posts

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

#191

Post by searchableguy »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #177
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.

Where did you visit in India? You liked it? :D

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

#192

Post by dgoldstein0 »

zarzavat wrote: post #178
marcus_holmes wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the point is it's a single field so you don't do any concatenation

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

#193

Post by numpad0 »

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.

So far the consensus of HN hive mind seems you should just give everyone a mandatory nick and optional full name fields and bypass all the formatting issues. It shouldn't be important if situation allows that.

With that said, the idea behind that recommendation is that, the "first" and "last" names in American mind corresponds to, or SHALL correspond to, the European idea of given names(Gates III or John or Jong-Il) and family names(father's name, name of their home communal village of The Vincis, or whatever for greater identities of an individual) respectively, rather than simply being the 1st and 2nd items of your `struct name` in either cases of American name orders and Asian name orders in use, and hence relevant forms for names SHALL be so marked clearly to avoid systems falsely identifying you with your community identifier that comes first in your culture. Doing this makes sense for this context and purpose.

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

#194

Post by kelnos »

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 middle mashed together, and middle lowercased). That of course doesn't match my ID, but I've never had a problem traveling, even when I sometimes leave out my middle name entirely. (I guess I get less scrutiny most places since I'm an American white male.)

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

#195

Post by shafyy »

msh wrote: post #118
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.…

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?

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

#196

Post by marcus_holmes »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #192
zarzavat wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the point is it's a single field so you don't do any concatenation

This. There's two separate concerns: what you call them, and their "official" name.

What you call them is always better done as a separate single field, rather than trying to concatenate the official name fields.

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

#197

Post by manfre »

zarzavat wrote: post #178
marcus_holmes wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is why you'd use the single "what do you want to be called?" value (e.g. preferred_name). Then it's not an issue because it's the exact text they provided.

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

#198

Post by kelnos »

midoridensha wrote: post #162
naniwaduni wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but that was a direct response to someone who said "just have a single field and run it through a regex to figure things outs".

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

#199

Post by master-lincoln »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #149
yreg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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`.

Don't say hello, just state your business.

You are being downvoted, but I wonder if people really appreciate the politeness on automated communication. If no person interacted with me, why would I want to be addressed respectfully? I think this mainly serves corporations which can humanize automated communication to make customers feel more cared about (by simulating interaction like a real human would initiate)

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

#200

Post by throwaway2990 »

kelnos wrote: post #190
throwaway2990 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t matter if your friend uses an English name at work. It doesn’t matter if the ethnic group writes it last first or first last. If you’re filling in Chinese documentation and writing it in Chinese it will be a single field in Chinese. If you’re writing it in English it will be written in 2 fields as first name and last name as the English version of the Chinese name. The spoken English name of “alice” or “Da…

Sounds like you're overthinking. One field for "full name" and another for "how you want to be addressed" is way simpler than the "rules" you list above. And also consider that you've only listed rule for two cases (and your rules are wrong, or at best incomplete), and have left out the hundreds of other rules for other languages and cultures.

There is no list.

Either you live in China and fill in your name in Chinese.

Or you don’t live in China and you write your name in English.

Post reply on HN