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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?

#481

Post by junar »

numpad0 wrote: post #381
kelnos wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Airlines are always weird. I remember myself consistently being FIRST/LASTMR on tickets; all caps, no space, with a slash, no comma. I suppose it's some canonical encoding that everyone working in commercial aviation just knows.

That reminds of an issue with a passenger whose given name ends in the letters "MR".

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490850

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

#482

Post by pharrington »

lmm wrote: post #479
pharrington wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What everyone is saying is that you do less work, use 0 heuristics and guess absolutely nothing, to get 100% accuracy.

100% accuracy but a substantially worse UX for the overwhelming majority of users. A heuristic doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.

You say the heuristic is simple. Would you mind writing out the heuristic you have in mind for deriving "name you'd want to be called" from "official name for administrative purposes"/"full name"?

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

#483

Post by newaccount74 »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #428
newaccount74 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do you care what my real name is Because the billing department verifies bills before paying them, and needs to know who to ask about the bill?

That's an internal matter. The supplier needs to include the customer's order number anyway or no one in the company will know how to deal with the invoice. That number will be linked to the person who raised the order.

What if you mistype the order number, or forget to provide it? Or when an employee makes a small order that they can just pay immediately with a corporate credit card without first getting approval? Or when a customer pays for something with their personal card and gets reimbursed later by the company? It just makes life a lot easier for everyone involved when the name of the person who made the order is printed on the invoice.

And if people really don't want the supplier to know their name, they just type "IT Procurement" into the name field.

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

#484

Post by lelanthran »

david-gpu wrote: post #474
lelanthran wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like many folks in Latin America, I have two given names and two surnames (no hyphen). I run into IT systems that choke at my two surnames every now and then and it's a pain. You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames. So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? Does your countries revenue service address you as…

> You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames. Yes, that's right. That is my full legal name. > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? Same as my full legal name: A B C D. > Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether? Well, there is no…

> > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID?

> Same as my full legal name: A B C D.

Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there.

You're sorted for those forms that ask for firstname/lastname, not for those forms that ask for given/family name.

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

#485

Post by rvba »

alentred wrote: post #394
alexvitkov wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If this is why a website or a form asks for it, and there is no way around it, better just ask for it directly ("How would you prefer to be addressed? He/him, she/her, or neutral?") instead of a choice of 25 historical titles.

I always choose the clergy titles! (Monarch ones are never available)

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

#486

Post by kyleee »

djur wrote: post #115
o11c wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 4 main name forms that I often see: * Full name (John Smith) * Index name (Smith, John) - mostly for meatspace compatibility. * Preferred name (John Smith) - used in lists with other people's names * Personal name (John) - used in direct communications

Index vs. preferred name can get a bit wonky. I used to work on software that had a lot of attendee/speaker list functionality. Different types of customer had strong expectations about how names should be displayed and ordered, sometimes even in different contexts (attendees might be listed by last name but speakers by first, etc.). We had medical conferences where everybody would be listed as "Dr. Fredrica Bloggs,…

it is really something to be dealt with via locale settings but the lack of standardized data underlying what the locale logic would display really throws a wrench in things

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

#487

Post by danparsonson »

croes wrote: post #441
danparsonson wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition. >isn't true, my name is for the outside world, inside I'm just I, that's my identity. What happens in your head when someone calls your name? Surely that's a feeling of identity?

>What happens in your head when someone calls your name? Surely that's a feeling of identity? I realize that someone is talking to me, but that has nothing to do with my identity. I doubt that that person and I have the same perception of who I am.

>..someone is talking to me..

I think the discrepancy here is just different definitions of the word 'identity'. If someone is talking 'to you' then you are identified by that. It's not about your unique internal world, but about your uniqueness among humans (like a primary key identifies a database row).

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

#488

Post by kyleee »

leokennis wrote: post #125
jval43 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this is the issue. There is not one way to do it right. My ideal message from my telco would be this one line: "Hi Leo, your monthly bill for is available. Get it here: "

going further i have a strong preference not to be named at all in an email from my phone company. let's keep it simple; if i want the email at all then i want to go right to the bill URL, in your example

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

#489

Post by jholman »

vultour wrote: post #266
throwaway2037 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Who decides which side should do the adapting?

Oh, that one's easy.

You are entitled to no adaptation from others. Your reactions to their "errors" are your problem, and your responsibility, although of course you can choose to start a fight over whatever you want.

On the other hand, if you do not adapt to them, sometimes they will choose to start a fight over it, or be offended, or whatever. As such, if you want to improve your social outcomes, consider allocating energy to adapting to others.

See? Simple. No centralized decision-making necessary. Each person can ruin their own life however they choose.

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

#490

Post by freddie_mercury »

skissane wrote: post #277
pmontra wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In way you are right. From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family. It's about 330 M people vs 8 billions, 4%, which is less than 10%. But then you add the exceptional cases for every country or culture. From the other comments we already know that even in Western Europe there are many differences. So if you sum all those exceptional cases you get the 100% of the world po…

> From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family. That’s not really “American”. Most other Anglophone countries are mostly the same. Maybe it should be called “Anglophone” not “American”? To a certain extent, even “West European” There are some subtle differences - my impression is the US is more accepting of generational suffixes (Jr, III, etc) than Australia is, for insta…

Is it really true that most Anglophone countries are the same? Is that how they do it in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Botswana, Ghana, South Africa, and Fiji?

There are a lot more Anglophone countries than just the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.

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