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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?

#181

Post by jacquesm »

nicbou wrote: post #81
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 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.…

It's interesting how in Germany there is so much accent on titles. Every country has their own interface standards and it is always educational to dig in to that for a bit to get acquainted with the local customs so you don't end up making some kind of faux pas. And sometimes those standards are very fluid, someone calling you 'Sir' may do so in a mildly sarcastic manner to get the point across, they don't necessarily believe you to have been knighted. And some people use access to their given name(s) as something to be granted explicitly, even though the company phone book spells out their first name and others are equally offended when you address them by their family name.

It's a minefield!

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

#182

Post by bloak »

jasfi wrote: post #9

You have two fields: full name and the name you want to be addressed by (e.g. in an email). This should cover the requirements of 99% of apps. You can add another field if really needed.

If a message is automatically generated I'd rather it address me as "Dear Customer" or whatever. In general, perhaps it's better to have something nicely written in the manner of a circular than a badly faked personal message which is likely to impress as less human than the honest and straightforward approach.

Spammers and big corporations write "Dear John, Did you know ..."; your local sports club doesn't do that crap.

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

#183

Post by kelnos »

sarabande wrote: post #136
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…

It's your personal preference to be addressed with _Sie_, but languages change and German is seeing shift to the use of _Du_ even for transactional business [1]. Target audience, region, familiarity etc. will all affect which word is used. Claiming the use of _Du_ in customer relationships as "wholly inappropriate" again is an expression of personal preference, not fact. [1] https://www.abendblatt.de/wirtschaft/artic…

Isn't personal preference the entire point, though? If the aforementioned German aunt is offended enough by how a company addresses her, she might stop doing business with them. That's a loss for the company and is something they might want to think about. (Or maybe not, but who knows.)

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

#184

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

Presenting an alphabetically sorted list only really makes sense if you can force everyone to use a single alphabet.

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

#185

Post by messe »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #108
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…

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

> What is on your passport then?

In Ireland, it’s not entirely rare to use different forms of one’s name in Irish and English.

For example, in English our president would be called “ Michael Daniel Higgins”, but in Irish “Mícheál Dónal Ó hUigínn”, and while there’s obviously a correspondence between them, they are pronounced quite differently.

It’s possible to change the version of the name you use on your passport after six months of regular use (compared to two years for any other kind of name change), and in that situation both forms of your name will be listed on your passport.

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

#186

Post by jacquesm »

Renaud wrote: post #174
pmontra wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is something that is easy to do in automation, but much harder to do in personal interaction unless you interact with people regularly. I've seen my name butchered in a hundred different ways and I've learned to simply not care but to respond to the message rather than the mode of address. And obviously I try to get it right whenever I address something. It's akin to the Robustness Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle .

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

#187

Post by lmm »

Scarblac wrote: post #100
lmm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's exactly what I'm advocating!

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

#188

Post by yreg »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #173
leokennis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

That's less friendly.

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

#189

Post by lmm »

jmopp wrote: post #153
lmm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure that? Billions of people would mean over 10% of the world population having exceptional names, which seems very implausible.

...yes? Have you looked at Indian names? Or Indonesian names? Or Ethiopian names

Yes. The vast majority of them follow a small number of simple patterns, and it's really not that hard to find a heuristic that interprets them with high accuracy.

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

#190

Post by kelnos »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #141
ralferoo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in countries where you might assume this is true, it's not always! For instance in China, most names are single character family name followed by a two character given name. Some rare family names are two characters and usually they will have a single character given name. Some people have single character family name and single character given name. Then you get people from different ethnic groups who put the f…

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.
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