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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?

#361

Post by alexvitkov »

ghaff wrote: post #335
johneth wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> "Avoid asking users for their title. It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do." I'm always a bit surprised when I see some e.g. tech conferences still insisting on title as a mandatory field (or really asking at all). It's not just the gender and the marital status but some people attach a lot of significance to all manner…

If you plan to only do English forever that's acceptable, but there's _a lot_ of languages where you need to know someone's gender to be able to use their name in a sentence.

Weird thing to look over in a thread about internationalization

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

#362

Post by Tainnor »

kypro wrote: post #357
Tainnor wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Germany, titles are still rather important. I agree that it's silly but if you have a PhD you're very likely to put "Dr." on your doorbell name plate.

What do you mean by, "important"? That it's impolite to not refer to someone using their preferred title, or that people tend to expect them?

Depends on the person, some people do get insulted if you don't use their title in a formal setting. As said, it's rather silly IMHO.

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

#363

Post by muzani »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #226
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't say hello, just state your business.

I here this trope so much. It is tiring and closed-minded. Are you Western culture and male? Probably. I have seen whole blog posts dedicated to this matter. Really? This matter is so stressful that people need to write 100s of words about it? Sheesh. Are you aware that it is polite to start a convo with people from South Asia with a small greeting? They wait for you to ack. If you don't ack, they will not continue.…

Also some cultures put the pressure of communication on the listener.

Say, you're in the same town as a friend and want to meet them. The American approach might be to ask, "Hey, I'm in town. Want to hang out?" The sender has done their job of delivering a clear message.

But some cultures would just say, "Hey, I'm in town."

That removes the pressure from the other person to say no, I don't want to see you.

You can also bat it back and say, "Joe's is a nice place to eat if you like burgers," which hints that you're available to have lunch together, but it could also mean a polite "ok".

But the ack is there to make sure the other person is paying attention before delivering the message, so they don't misinterpret it.

I don't necessarily think one is better. TCP vs UDP. If it's an important message, an American might still say, "We have to talk."

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

#364

Post by rsynnott »

smeej wrote: post #345
Semiapies wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not universally, no. The closest for English-language use is to put a spurious comma between family and given name (e.g., "Cixin, Liu" for Cixin Liu). In an ebook management system I've been developing, I use a full_name and a sort_name field for authors/editors/contributors, because books are a reasonable thing to want to sort by author names.

Even this has some culturally confusing elements, doesn't it? For example, in my studies I had cause to read many books by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."

> Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."

I'm pretty sure I've seen a by-name sorting scheme that excludes these sorts of prefixes for alphabetisation purposes. Of course, then you have to second guess whether you are using such a sorting system :)

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

#365

Post by stevekemp »

rsynnott wrote: post #316
dontupvoteme wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting however >People have exactly one canonical full name. What is on your passport then?

What's on your passport may not be canonical. In some countries (Ireland and the UK, for instance) your name is, for practical (and generally legal!) purposes, whatever you use day to day; it wouldn't be _that_ uncommon for someone to have name X on their passport but have been going by name Y for years, and in this case name Y would probably be considered their legal name in most contexts.

I'm in that situation now, my UK passport/birth-certificate name is not the one I'm known by.

After several years of getting queried on mismatching ID, now I've moved to another country, I'm going through the process to "rename myself" - and mostly that's a matter of saying "Here's the name I've used for a long time, please make it official".

After the renaming goes through I'll be updating everything to match which will no doubt be a pain. But once it's done I'll have a much easier life.

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

#366

Post by IlliOnato »

After reading that document and the comment section, it seems that the really distinct name variants are:

1. Full legal name (as it appears in a passport, e.g. William Robert Smith)

2. Full formal name (this is how you want to be addressed and/or referred in a formal context, e.g. Dr. Professor William R. Smith, MP".

3. Abbreviated formal name (e.g. W. R. Smith)

4. Informal name (how you want to be referred/addressed in less formal context, e.g. Bill Smith)

5. Highly informal name (how you want to be addressed in close circles, e.g. Bill)

6. Nickname (e.g. Chuck)

It seems that (more or less European) convention of having first name(s) and a last/family seems have this goal: being able to store just one variant and to generate other variants (except the nickname) according to fixed rules, in other words, automatically.

Of course you should ask a user only of what you need. So if the only reason you ask for a name is to be able to address them in messages, you should ask "how you would like me to call you?" or something like this.

You can give users an option to, say a check box, to indicate their names follow the "European" convention, and then give them the fields that allow to auto-generate name variants, allowing them to override if necessary.

Just my 2 cents :-)

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

#367

Post by mrcgnc »

Other things I've had to deal with: in Myanmar people usually don't have a concept of first and last name, just two (females) or three (males) words that form their "name" (as far as I can remember).

Also, often names in Sri Lanka look like this: Rajapaksha Mudiyanselage Siril Ariyaratna. Two family names and one or two given names. Regardless of the number of fields used, displaying long names like that needs some special considerations.

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

#368

Post by streetnoodles »

mastax wrote: post #292
zamalek wrote: post #284

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. 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?

Interfacing with external systems which require first/last, I suppose.

This, we recently had to break up our "name" field into first/last name because we work with banks that require first/last name as separate fields. When we reference an account it has to match their records exactly.

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

#369

Post by IlliOnato »

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?

People already mentioned sorting.

Another reason is being able to generate various forms automatically: i.e. from "Fstname:William Robert, Lstname:Smith" to generate "William Robert Smith", "W.R. Smith", "Bill Smith", or just "Bill" without storing any of these variants separately.

Of course this may fail if "William" prefers to be called "Will", not "Bill"...

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

#370

Post by Kiro »

eptcyka wrote: post #271
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`.

It doesn't matter, it should always be `Hello $theirPreferredName`.

It should not. It should be "hello" and nothing else.
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