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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37332126

by evolve2k • 3 years ago

270 510 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Our app is designed to be used across the Asia Pacific.

We have members who follow western naming conventions as well as members following common asian naming conventions.

Turns out there can be alot of variation on what is the convention.

https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/a-guide-to-using...

How would you handle different naming conventions, so users see their name in the order they would like?

Family, Given

Given, Family

joegibbs• 3 years ago

Could you just have a single field for name and allow anything in that field? The only downside is you can't do something like "Hi ${FIRST_NAME}" in your emails, but the upside is that it basically handles any name or name order, e.g. Indonesian single names, Spanish names with the mother's surname included, etc.

kaeresten_dit• 3 years ago

That's probably a good way to deal with interface issue, but do you really need their family names? It is a perhaps a good time to look at which data is needed vs what data collection from users is normalized

hairofadog• 3 years ago

Re: hi {first name}, I’ve had pretty good luck with a name field and then a “nickname” field that explicitly asks, “how would you like us to greet you?”

masklinn5• 3 years ago

The only downside is you can't do something like "Hi ${FIRST_NAME}" in your emails

Which might be an upside, because there are cultures and contexts where it’s incredibly rude. You’re a glorified ledger, not a family member or life-long friend.

nicbou9• 3 years ago

And in others the formality feels off and a tell-tale sign that the sender is not from here.

I get a lot of mail from foreign readers. Indians and Pakistanis are pretty formal, and most Africans even more so. On the other hand, some people from those same countries will write stream of consciousness emails that look like a text message to their dad.

The Western countries are a lot less formal, but and frequently drop the polite form which I was raised to use with all strangers.

_darkmatterdev_• 3 years ago

I'm reminded of this blog post: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names ( https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... )

Good luck designing your system! Sorry I don't have any advice.

goscots• 3 years ago

One interesting approach would be to use a regex to detect if the name is written in Hanzi, Kanji or the Korean or Vietnamese alphabets and write the name in whatever format is appropriate for the locality. The Asian people I know would be be unsurprised to see their name rendered western style when written using whatever romanization format their native language uses.

naniwaduni• 3 years ago

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?

midoridensha• 3 years ago

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.

I've seen lots of websites programmed exactly this way, so it's obviously good web design.

jameshush• 3 years ago

You mean well so I gave you an upvote :-). I'm a Westerner living in Asia. The name my British parents gave me is James Hush. Every family member calls me Jamie. My legal Chinese name is 許杰, if you tried to write that the "Western" way the closest thing you could do is write xǔ jié, but even then there's multiple Chinese characters that represent "xǔ" and "jié" so it would make no sense.

Names are hard hahahaha.

jack1243star• 3 years ago

Please don't do this. Like with western names, it is impossible to discern nationality/culture from written names alone.

gandalfgreybeer3• 3 years ago

Personal opinion.

As an Asian person, don’t overthink this.

Just have fields for family name and given name to distinguish between the two.

Sure, when there’s a text field saying hello “first name last name” it might be flipped but this shouldn’t be a deal breaker or offensive in any capacity.

Worst case is you can have a toggle they can click but from a developer standpoint, that might be over engineering for something that might cause headaches later.

spicybright• 3 years ago

Well, if the app is designed for the asia pacific region then last name first name should be default to fit the majority of user's expectation, no?

gandalfgreybeer3• 3 years ago

This is lumping Asia Pacific into one big group. For example in the Philippines, its first name - last name that’s the standard. And then there’s a minority of Chinese-Filipinos that sometimes have traditional Chinese names.

It’s more complex than what it seems that I think a razor would work rather than going through all cases.

ralferoo• 3 years ago

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 family name at the end. Often these are characterised by a long given name and then an interpunct joining that with the family name, but that's not always done. For instance a popular singer at the moment has the Chinese name 希林娜依·高 where 高 is a fairly normal Chinese surname so it's easy to identify as such. A very popular actress is named 迪丽热巴·迪力木拉提 so it's not always the case you can easily tell which name is which.

Even for those with simple construction, so the characters are FAB (family name, and 2 characters for given name). You'll find that within a family, where you might expect pet names, it's common instead to call each other by AB, except when they're annoyed and use the full name FAB. In a business context, someone with a higher rank might be F先生 (Mr F), F总 (Manager F), F董 (Director F), but close colleagues might call you AA, BB, 小A, 小B etc - but typically they won't get to choose that, they'll be told by the person "you can call me ___" and they might allow different people to use different names or react with their official title if someone uses too informal a name with them.

I've got Chinese friends who exclusively use an English name at work in China. I've got a friend who later moved to the UK, and most people in the UK know her by her Chinese name, but except for a few close school friends, nobody in her working life in China even knew her real name because the company she worked for only used English names (this isn't very common though).

In other countries, many people don't use their first name much. In the UK, I've known quite a few people who've primarily used their middle name, and others (including me) are generally known by others with a name that isn't among any of their given names. Sometimes these are common transformations, e.g. David to Dave, David to Dai (in Wales), but other times people just use initials or nicknames (e.g. I've got a friend who pretty everybody calls Danger, it started as a joke with friends, but now even his parents sometimes use it!)

Anyway, that was a long diversion, but it's always safer I think to ask for the full name as one field that not try to change it, but use it exactly as provided for official purposes, and to also ask for a preferred name for your communication with them. In cases were you share the name to other people, e.g. an online community, you might want an additional display name which might well be different again.

evolve2k3• 3 years ago

Yes assume I have a Family name field and a Given Name field, the question is how to display them in the right order.

Im considering having a select field next to the name something like

Name Order: "Western style", "Eastern style"

Name Order: "Given Name, Family Name", "Family name, Given Name"

With a bit of extra work I can detect the country set a default for this field, while allowing users in places like Pakistan to still get the display order they want.

But I've never seen it done this way before, hence my curiosity to ask everyone.

chrismorgan• 3 years ago

Country isn’t adequate; different parts of India use different conventions. To list the two states I’m most familiar with: West Bengal is mostly “Given Family” <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_name>, while Telangana largely uses “F. Given” (family name normally abbreviated, in my experience; the initial can also be more than one Latin letter for some Telugu consonants, mostly “Ch.”, and can be initials for more than one word) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_names>.

Seriously, just avoid splitting name fields if you can help it. Do you absolutely have to have split names? Begrudgingly do so and acknowledge things will never be right for everyone. But if not, just don’t (and don’t make the mistake of assuming a format in order to do things like surname sorting—with a unified field you simply can’t do surname sorting).

gandalfgreybeer3• 3 years ago

Minor thing, don’t call it “Western style” or “Eastern style”. I’m not sure what the correct term is.

There are plenty of Asian countries that don’t follow last name - first name so it’s not necessarily an “eastern” thing.

another opinion from me about automating based on country. It’s a cool thing to implement but might not be worth the effort.

An example I have is in the Philippines, majority of people go First Name Last Name. However, there’s a Chinese sub population that has last name first name. But then most of this sub population also have “Christian” names that they use in Most official documents or websites. I’m pretty sure other countries will also have similar nuances.

Maybe a screen name or username will be the razor.

e63f67dd-065b• 3 years ago

As others have mentioned, this is impossible to get right -- for the simple reason that there is no consistent order -- not for the same country, the same geographic area, the same culture, or any other marker you can possibly think of.

Example: in Malaysia and Singapore, Chinese people can have traditional Chinese names -- SAA for surname and 2 characters that's their "given name" so to speak. Some have an English name -- but it's written ESAA. Some only have one character names, so it's ESA. Some surnames have 2 characters, so ESSA/ESSAA.

When filling out US forms, ESAA usually turns into Englishname Surname, and SAA turns into Givenname Surname. So the display order for the first is firstlast, but the second is lastfirst. Same country, same culture, different display order depending on whether their parents gave them English names or they chose one later in life.

When there's a middle name field, often ESAA names turns into E AA S - first middle last. This display order is wrong. It should be first last middle.

As you can see, even within the same country, same culture, same neighbourhood, you still don't have a consistent order. It's simply not possible to do this in a consistent way.

freddie_mercury4• 3 years ago

Don't do this.

In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.

The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong.

And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outside name (so that ghosts can't follow you home). Or you have your real name and an unofficial English name (for reasons both good & bad) that literally everyone at work calls you.

In the Philippines people have names Anna Katrina Gomez. But you don't call them Anna. You call them Katrina because that's how it often works in the Philippines.

The solution is simple:

One field is "what is your full name?"

One field is "what would you like to be called?"

You don't need to try to infer one from the other.

silisili• 3 years ago

Are you missing a name from your PH example perhaps?

Everyone I've known there has their mother's maiden name as a middle name, and father's last as last name. Then on marriage sliding the original last name to the middle name.

But one thing I did notice is that very few go by any given name, usually a play on it or a nickname instead.

Saigonautica• 3 years ago

Yes please! My wife and I constantly struggle with this kind of thing. When there's just a "name" field that permits some high number of characters, it's fine.

Which name is my "first name" or "last name" also depends on what identity document I'm using. I immigrated to Asia and switched to the family-name-first convention, but my birth certificate and so on are the opposite. So it's conceivable that a system requiring two forms of identification has both name orders, and both are correct.

Names are awful.

SanderNL• 3 years ago

Interesting. Indeed, why not just ask “what would you like to be called?” and maybe for administrative(?) purposes ask the full name.

Naming is a tar pit and even Westerners might like to be called John when their name is Winstonshire. Let’s not even bother.

What is the downside? I’m not seeing it. I see people here recommending to implement logic to handle this fully and I’m not seeing why this would be preferable.

lmm8• 3 years ago

You don't need to try to infer one from the other.

So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?

By all means make it possible to override, but you should absolutely default "what would you like to be called?" rather than making everyone enter their name twice.

Scarblac3• 3 years ago

And maybe you don't need the full name.

And don't limit it to Asia either, it's relevant everywhere.

__rito__• 3 years ago

This is the most sensible answer here.

My name is Ritobrata Ghosh (Given Family). But my friends, teachers, colleagues always called me Rito. I have a different short name that is used by immediate family and close relatives.

Rito is also easier for western people's tongues. So, that is what I almost always use. I use my full name only in legal and financial documents. In every other place, I am just Rito. I like to be addressed as "Rito" and appear as "Rito Ghosh" in badges, documentation, slack, any non-legal/non-financial documents.

So, the best way to go, in my opinion, is having two fields- one for full name, another for preferred name. Do not _assume_ anything.

This is also consistent with western names, like: William Henry Gates III as Bill Gates.

There is also another field in many places where there are badges and such. "This field will appear as is in your badge" is wise in such cases.

throwaway29905• 3 years ago

No.

Either the name serves some legal purpose and they need to write it in full and 2 fields supports that.

Or the name serves no purpose and they can write what they want in those 2 fields.

seszett4• 3 years ago

In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.

Which reminds me of this problem: she might have sisters called, say, Nguyen Thi Anh May and Nguyen Thi Anh Minh, and in quite a few countries this will result in them having identical names on their identity cards and most communication, either "Nguyen Thi", "Nguyen Thi Anh" or even "Nguyen Thi Anh M."

lawgimenez2• 3 years ago

Born in the Philippines, you forgot the middle name or mother’s last name is also important.

matsemann• 3 years ago

Eh, the "don't overthink it" is how all tech has become western centric, especially US-centric. In the grand scheme of things it's a small annoyance, but having your culture or norms constantly overwritten by some tech-bros is bad.

Like, my name still doesn't work in a lot of systems that expect ascii characters only. Like, thanks for deciding that names æøåü or similar isn't a valid name.

chomp• 3 years ago

Use a single text field for the full name.

djpr• 3 years ago

This. I'd also add "How would you like to be called" as sometimes people go by their second given name, not the first given name. For example, you might have a common first name like Muhammad or Ketut.

wenc5• 3 years ago

I would not do this. For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude (I personally find it rude too, e.g. "Hey John R. Brown, this is your order"), so it's useful to split up "given name" and "family name" into 2 fields so that you don't have to depend on name ordering which varies by culture.

If they only have one name, like many people in Myanmar, then it's just the given name. If they don't have family names (some cultures use patronymics) then it's just a long given name. If they have double-barreled last names like Hispanic names, then it's just a long family name.

Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.

masklinn5• 3 years ago

I would not do this. For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

Just add a field for the desired form of address, or a nickname.

Addressing a person by their full name can come across as rude

Stuffy, Maybe, but rude? Calling people by their first name is rude. Calling people by forms of address which don’t exist is rude.

seszett4• 3 years ago

Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.

I'm just French (where we often use "FAMILY Given" in a formal setting, but "Given Family" is common otherwise) and I still need a moment to think every time I see "first name" "last name" fields instead of "family name" "given name", after decades of being online.

My parents just fill these forms in random order, basically.

The other problem is:

For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

This often doesn't translate well between cultures. American websites will often use the given name in any setting and this is weird. If they want to be friendly-informal they should address me with "Hello Given Family, this is your order".

krisoft• 3 years ago

For reasons of respect, you may need to address a person by either their first or last name (with a title).

It is really curious to hear that your decide to disrespect huge populations because you worry about respect.

Most people in the world have filled out forms on U.S. sites. They'll know what to do.

Sure. People will mange. It is still communicating that the developers' head is stuck in their own context.

Will we manage? Sure. Is it respectful? Not at all.

viraptor• 3 years ago

Yes. Unless you have a really good reason to split the name (legal documents), you should think really hard about why you're attempting to get a full name in the first place, instead of "a nickname for this account". And if you really do want the name, why can't you use whatever the user puts in a single field "name" instead.

paulmooreparks5• 3 years ago

And make it a rather long text field. And make it accept pretty much any character. But watch out for Little Bobby Tables. (https://xkcd.com/327/)

Names are HARD.

MAGZine• 3 years ago

Have you looked at how the tech giants before you have solved this issue?

evolve2k3• 3 years ago

Seems many tech giants have taken a western colonial view and expect anyone different to just suck it up.

nicbou9• 3 years ago

The tech giants often don't account for EU customs, let alone non-Western ones.

Instead I would look at how the relevant governments handle it, if they have something like the UK's component catalog.

jasfi2• 3 years ago

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.

est• 3 years ago

the name you want to be addressed by (e.g. in an email)

In fact, I don't want my full name to be addressed anywhere at all. Just call me by the alias I provided.

jasfi2• 3 years ago

The full name is typically used for billing, or just for record keeping. Your SaaS itself may not need it.

vintermann3• 3 years ago

Substitute "full name" with "legal name". Then it's the government's problem.

Of course if you don't need the legal name it's best not to ask for it.

globalise83• 3 years ago

Won’t cover all finance apps - your name will most likely need to be submitted for sanctions screening, credit check, KYC checks etc. where understanding first name and last name is very important for cross-checking against other lists which expect the same.

bloak• 3 years ago

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.

playday• 3 years ago

It depends on the purpose. Here you say it’s just so you can call them by their name properly, so just use a single text field “What name would you like us to address you as?”. If there’s legal or other issues that might not be good enough.

lnxg33k12• 3 years ago

Seems more of a stackoverflow question?

But:

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans#...

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-enum.html

I'd have multiple classes handling each one a use-case, and a enum on user's record in order to specify which class to use for each, so that you can compute it from the nationality, but you could also potentially give each user the chance to set it for themselves

Canada• 3 years ago

Is it really worth using enum in postgres over a plain string, and optionally a check constraint if you're super concerned about strictness?

lnxg33k12• 3 years ago

Probably you're right, a simple string would work well enough

jimbobimbo• 3 years ago

Here's CLDR work on that: https://cldr.unicode.org/translation/miscellaneous-person-na...

wmeddie2• 3 years ago

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 and either John Doe or something cute as default) And a Nickname or Display Name field if your app needs to show something on screen.

neoCrimeLabs2• 3 years ago

Thank you for reminding me of this article!

More people designing applications need to read it.

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

And read this, you can learn a lot about names from it:

https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/sevis-help-hub/sevis-basics...

nottheengineer• 3 years ago

That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?

That made me laugh out loud. It's a great reminder why being conscious of the assumptions you make is an important part of development and one that LLMs can't really do.

o11c• 3 years ago

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

djur• 3 years ago

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, MD" but the sort order would be by last name. And that was just for English-speaking customers.

jltsiren• 3 years ago

The name used in direct communications can depend on the level of formality and on the context. For example, John / Mr. Smith / Dr. Smith.

Then there is the difference between the "full" name and the legal full name, with all names spelled out. The latter is sometimes necessary, but it can be awkward or inappropriate to use it in most places that expect a full name.

croes3• 3 years ago

Is there an article showing a solution because listing problems is the easy part?

And maybe it's just me but

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.

nhinck2• 3 years ago

There is no "a solution" and never will be. Design your solution to be maximally relevant to your scenario and accept that it can't be perfect.

sundarurfriend• 3 years ago

In this case, "listing problems" - as you dismissively call it - takes a lot of care and effort, the article is a distillation of experience and knowledge that very few possess. It's up to you to use this understanding of the problem space to decide which aspects you're willing to trade off. The article's job is to help people make these tradeoffs consciously, instead of designing based on simplistic assumptions made in ignorance.

brigandish5• 3 years ago

You don't refer to yourself in private by your own name?

danparsonson2• 3 years ago

>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?

vintermann3• 3 years ago

It's not just programmers. Plenty of genealogists, do things like automatically give a wife their husband's (male!) patronym. Even though they see it doesn't work that way in the sources, they seem to feel that it "should" work that way.

fer3• 3 years ago

In France married women, if they let their guard down, will be given their husband's last name as "nom d'usage" upon almost any sign-up paperwork, without being asked, at least in my experience.

Nom d'usage technically has no legal value, it's just a last name you might want to be addressed as, normally that of your husband but it can be a pen name and whatever. It's optional, and technically only at the request of the relevant person. Men can have nom d'usage too (égalité, after all).

Still, immigration offices, banks, insurances... they often slap the husband's last name if that field is left empty, just because. Why would you want something else, right? She probably forgot!

We started crossing those fields to make it clear she doesn't want a nom d'usage.

Delk• 3 years ago

To be fair, most of the stuff in "falsehoods programmers believe about $concept" lists are really falsehoods almost everyone believes. Software is just one of the places where the limits of those implicit beliefs might actually become apparent.

Most people never need to think about the details of how names might work in a different culture across the world, let alone work that into any kind of a rule-based mechanism or a rigid information model. If some random person working at a construction site in Europe or the US has no idea that first names and last names aren't a universal thing, that has exactly zero direct effect on anything. In most cases that's probably even true of lawyers or other high-level white collar work.

I'm actually inclined to believe lots of programmers know more about e.g. time [1] than a non-programmer Joe Random does on average, exactly because software developers may actually end up coming across at least some of those issues.

[1] e.g. https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

dontupvoteme• 3 years ago

Very interesting however

People have exactly one canonical full name.

What is on your passport then?

westernpopular• 3 years ago

I can tell you that in my passport, my name appears in two different places and it's spelled differently been them.

Also, a lot of people in the world don't have passports.

po• 3 years ago

depends... which passport are you asking about?

jmopp3• 3 years ago

The magician Teller just has 'Teller' on his passport, and if you refer to 'Raymond Joseph Teller', people won't know who you're referring to.

andreareina• 3 years ago

Dual citizenship frequently results in different names in different passports.

bowsamic• 3 years ago

My wife has an extra first name that she doesn't always use, and my mum has two different but both correct spellings of her name.

seszett4• 3 years ago

What is on your passport then?

See my other comment on Vietnamese names, actually if you have a Belgian passport and a Vietnamese name, your actual given name (the third part for women with the "Thi" middle name) is not shown on your passport or identity card, only the first letter of it.

For French people who have three given names it's the same, although the two last ones are generally not used (you could say they're little endian compared to Vietnamese big endian names, I suppose) so it's not as important.

I have no idea why, and Belgium is the only country I know that does that, but it means your passport name is absolutely not your canonical full name.

messe• 3 years ago

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.

Muromec• 3 years ago

My passport has two of my names in both Ukrainian Cyrillic and Latinized form, neither of which is my full legal name per Ukrainian law. My id however has a legal full name in Cyrillic, but not in Latin. To make matters worse, the same set of Cyrillic characters can be represented by different Latin characters and it's somewhat up to me to decide how it's spelled when the document is issued. Since I can have more then one passport at the same time, the names in Latin don't even have to match.

Then I have a residence permit in a different country, where my full legal name is spelled in Latin characters based on what is written in my birth certificate (which you guessed -- is in Cyrillic). So the Latin rendering there is entirely based on what I asked the translator to write there.

In the end, out of three documents I can id myself with, no pair has the same combination of characters for my name.

add:

To make matters even worse, my original birth certificate (not the one I have now) was issued by the soviet union and uses russian cyrillic and the same name there is both spelled and pronounced differently.

Macha2• 3 years ago

I'm from Ireland, an English-speaking country in Western Europe. I have a name that is a typical Western name. In theory, I should be the happy path for any name system.

But even I don't have one canonical full name. Even with just the government, the name on my birth certificate, passport, and tax documents is different.

Name 1: I was named by my parents after a friend of theirs. That friend commonly went by a short version of the name (think "Jessie" vs "Jessica", though that's not the real example). Anyway, since I was born in Ireland in the 90s, my parents had me baptised by the Catholic Church, which expected you to name your kids after saints. In the form which the saints used. This was less about any strong faith on their behalf, and more of the fact that it made it easier to get into any of the 90% of schools run by the Catholic Church. I think even then, it depended a little on which priest you were dealing with as to how strict they were with the name rules.

But anyway, the extended, "saint's" form of my name was needed for the baptism, so my parent's put it on the birth cert, plus a middle name. They (and consequently I) never used the extended version of my name, but my birth cert reads "ExtendedFirst Middle Last"

Name 2: Anyway, then my teenage years came and I went abroad and I filled out a passport application form to get one for that. It had fields for first name, middle name, and last name. So I put in the first name I actually use, dutifully filled out the middle name field even though I never use that, and then put in my last name. So my passport has "First Middle Last".

Name 3: Then when I came to actually paying tax as an adult, I had to provide details to the tax office and my first employer that lined up. At this point my middle name was well and truly out of use, so both got just "First Last". This is also the form of my name that appears on most utility bills, professional correspondence, etc.

Name 4: And then on top of that, I have a nickname I'm commonly known by. This is what's on a lot of personal correspondence (sometimes as just Nickname, sometimes as Nickname LastName), what people call me face to face, etc.

Now a lot of countries have a concept of a singular "legal name". In some countries it may be at least procedurally incorrect or sometimes even legally fraud if you were to use something else in passport applications, tax documents, etc. But Ireland does not. If you use something as your name, it is your name. Most government interactions will accept evidence (such as utility bills, employment contracts, etc.) that you've been using it for 6 months to update the above documents.

For any of the 4 variations above, I could provide enough evidence to the government to get them to update the other documents in line, but it's just not important. But if I was to bother I'd use "First Last" as the target name, and I'd actually rather not update the passport as I travel to the US frequently enough and "your name is different to last time you were here" strikes me as the kind of thing to make US immigration unhappy.

Alternatively, you can register a deed poll to get a piece of government paper stating effectively "X Y Z has informed the government they're now known as A B". But this is not a prerequisite to changing your name, just a way of short circuiting the process if you're stuck getting documentary evidence that you have changed your name via other mechanisms.

And that's all before we get into marriages, gender transitions, Irish vs English names, immigrants who anglicise their names, confirmation names, etc.

rsynnott5• 3 years ago

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.

fer3• 3 years ago

If you obtain French citizenship you can "francify"[0] your name; you'll end up with two full canonical names. Nothing really forces you to change your original name in your original nationality.

[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10528

danbruc• 3 years ago

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 examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.

brigandish5• 3 years ago

I live in Japan (as does Kalzameus), my name will regularly cause problems in computer systems. In fact, quite often I'm not using my name but what I am called in Japanese, and even then it will often fail. Number 1 problem - not enough characters, because most Japanese people only use a few characters for their entire name, don't have middle names, and don't have spaces in their names. And that's just for starters. Should I use what I consider to be my name, my full name, the name on my passport or the name on my residence card…?

It's just not that hard to find problems with name inputs.

kelnos5• 3 years ago

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

hardstyle• 3 years ago

Fun fact: some cultures only have one name, i.e. no first or last name.

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

Don't some Asians use an alternate name too, a more Westernized version of their name, alongside their native name?

splix• 3 years ago

Not necessary Asian btw. As a Russian I can tell that Russians also may use "family name - given name - father name", usually in official documents.

Though it it also may be just "given - family", as well as any other variation informally. So you wouldn't make a mistake with UI

yosito• 3 years ago

Doesn't Russian also have different forms of names depending on their grammatical place in the sentence?

meepmorp• 3 years ago

You only need to capture the name in nominative case, though; declined forms are derivable from that.

ggm2• 3 years ago

Indonesia: Single name is common. Therefore only one field filled in should be legal.

mcmoor• 3 years ago

It's half funny and sad that for passports one has to repeat their names for both fields or not fill the second field at all (which may be not allowed) or have to make up new name.

ggm2• 3 years ago

Yes. and for things like KYC/AML the 100 points test can get very literal about "as written on the passport"

beojan• 3 years ago

In English, if the names are separated by a comma it generally indicates that they're in surname, given names order.

I think this is to make sorting easier, since names are sorted in alphabetical order by surname then given names.

deprecative• 3 years ago

Alot of Variation is a new one. What's it look like?

latchkey• 3 years ago

I built an ecommerce system where we shipped hundreds of thousands of tshirts to people. They used a bazillion variations of browsers. It took a while for us to get the form 100% correct across everything.

One field.

Also, don't use type=number fields... the browser UX is terrible across many devices. Just make everything type=text and be done with it.

irjustin• 3 years ago

Don't over think it. Either:

- Label the fields FAMILY, GIVEN, MIDDLE (then put them in the order you desire) - Or simply put NAME

For a LOT of use cases, FULL NAME side-steps the issue and works out great. Sure your emails that go out are "Hi {{ full_name }}," but that's okay.

wtmt• 3 years ago

Does your “Asia Pacific” presence include countries like India? As others have pointed out, it’s better to read that article “Falsehoods programmers believe about names” [1] and then figure out how you’d like to deal with it. Looking at “Family, Given” or “Given, Family” is shortsighted and may cover only a few east Asian countries.

In India there are patronymic names with initials, mononyms (no “family name” or initials), names with just a given name (one or multiple words) and no “family name”, names where the “last name” is a place, etc.

If you truly want to cater to all kinds, just have one field for name and another for what they’d like to be addressed as.

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

numpad08• 3 years ago

If it is just for e-commerce, just steal signup form from local e-commerce websites. Or if there are local competitor platforms that does as good as yours, look into theirs.

But the question sounds like there are already substantial asian users in divergent conventions without frictions. If that is what your app is trying to fix, I'm not completely sure how it will work out.

jzwinck• 3 years ago

I lived in Asia for many years and worked with people from many places there.

It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).

There are people with only one name. Don't make them double it (Ananda Ananda).

There are people with several given names. But they may only want to be called by the first, or the first two, or the last.

There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.

Finally there are people who go by a name which is not part of their legal name at all. Short forms like Bob instead of Robert, but also freeform names for various reasons, perhaps the most sensitive being that some government official may have determined their legal name contrary to their own wishes. Imagine your mother named you Sue but someone decided that must be short for Susan and put that on your government documents.

Related: when people want to show which part of their name is the family name, they either make it all uppercase or underline it. You can see this on some CVs but it happens elsewhere too when a full name is going to be read by people who don't know the addressee.

masklinn5• 3 years ago

It's common to hear "How should I address you?" This is equivalent to the people here suggesting a "nickname" field (good idea).

It’s not uncommon in the west either and it’s weird how much we ignored it in software e.g. “I’m John Q. Smith the Third but call me John” or “May I call you j-dog?”

There are people who wish to be called by their full name. They may find it jarring to be addressed by just one piece of their name.

There’s also the issue of honorifics which you usually can’t get from names alone, as well as titles (whether professional or nobility) which can be very important to people’s identity.

ozim• 3 years ago

Web apps great equalizer. No one cares if you are knighted or have phd, put in your name and you can watch funny cats same way as the rest of pleb.

MandieD2• 3 years ago

I have an elderly German aunt by marriage who considers it an affront that Vodafone sends her chirpy business letters starting "Hallo <<first name>>!" and continuing in the familiar second person instead of the more (to her) respectful "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. <<last name>>," 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 and friends in that generation.

Is there a similar sentiment among older people in parts of Asia?

jval43• 3 years ago

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-trivial amount on software engineering time and data cleanup to get these things right. And the French take it even more seriously.

Non-native speakers may not understand it, but that's no excuse and you will alienate people and customers. Even younger generations notice.

And just fyi I'm a millennial and per "Du" with everyone I know. Not my telco provider though.

karatinversion• 3 years ago

You would likely get a similar reaction in Japan by addressing letters to <given name> rather than <surname>, using plain style rather than polite style, and omitting keigo.

pmontra6• 3 years ago

Imagine if the name on a tomb does not match the one that the person preferred to be called with, and everybody used all the times. I know one case but I don't know the reason.

Minor49er• 3 years ago

Loved ones sometimes pay to have nicknames engraved on tombstones. I think those things are often left off unless the nickname had strong significance to the closest friends and family members of the deceased

saltymimir• 3 years ago

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 for those who say that this doesn't matter as much: It absolutely does. People do get confused by this more frequently than you think. I've seen people losing an entire trip that they saved for, all because of unclear naming requirements.

The way I deal with this is to provide a country and locale specific name fields. You don't have to detect the geolocation or track the user for this, just let them choose whatever locale setting they want, and give them the "sensible" layout. Here are some examples:

- In Vietnam, we use last name then first name.

- In Indonesia, we use first name, then last name, but also give an option to declare that the person doesn't have a last name.

- In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.

Even when you've handled the layout convention carefully, the 3rd party you're handing the data to, if one exists, might not give the same care and attention that you do. In my case: some airlines just haven't gotten around the idea that some people simply don't have last names. When a person with a single name wants to fly, airlines want the customer to use the name for both first and last name (e.g. If the person's name is David, then the airline expects "David David"). If you require First Name and Last Name as the input, and don't elaborate on how to fill them, the customer might simply fill the last name with a dot (".") character. The airlines / any other 3rd party won't accept that. For this, I suggest to detail out the ways in which you handle the data and go talk to your providers, if any.

All in all, it's a pretty tough challenge, and the wisdom around this isn't going to fit inside a single HN post. I do commend you for actually thinking about this problem. Good Luck.

JimDabell3• 3 years ago

In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.

I have a completely “ordinary” name from a western perspective – first (given), middle, last (family). I live in Singapore, which has a few different popular naming conventions from a few different cultures. I’ve received documents with my name in every single variation possible. I‘ve been Mr First Name, Mr Middle Name, Mr Last Name, and so on. Often I can’t even determine if they have my name correct in their records – it could be recorded correctly but used incorrectly, or it could be recorded incorrectly and used correctly. Sometimes I suspect it’s recorded incorrectly but also used incorrectly in a different way.

Normally it’s not a problem, but like you say, airline tickets can cause issues. I think I’ve been demoted from “check in online” to “check in at a counter because we need to check your paperwork” a bunch of times because my passport doesn’t match my name on my ticket. Often it’s not even the name order – the airline will only sell my ticket with a first name and last name field (meaning I have to drop my middle name, which is on my passport) or they ask for all three and then concatenate first and middle with no space and truncate the last few letters.

Everything would be so much easier if I could just enter my name.

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

It seems that with things like ticket there should be explicit "as in passport" instructions. Not that people will follow those...

dmurray• 3 years ago

To be fair, if you only have one name, then it is both your first and your last name.

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

In Singapore, we use a single field to input the first name and last name.

How do you handle this when passing the data to the airlines?

kelnos5• 3 years ago

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.)

lifthrasiir• 3 years ago

There may be multiple identity documents with different names. This particularly happens a lot when the name itself is not written in Latin script and has to be romanized---one of my credit card had a different romanization (that I couldn't control) compared to what was written to my passport (that I had a control). Of course it is also possible that there is no canonical romanization available in any of those documents as well.

bpicolo• 3 years ago

do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale

Bingo. I've had this problem dealing with insurance carriers. They want a very wide degree of name formats, and to make it worse some don't support unicode, some don't support apostrophes, and some don't understand names longer than 22 characters (had multi-hour discussions on exactly which part of the names I needed to cut out in this scenario). They were bewildered that these were problems for data which could include anybody in the US...

numpad08• 3 years ago

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.

tekkk• 3 years ago

I wonder if you could circumvent some of this with the default first/given & last/family name with two checkboxes to choose the preferred name to be called with. Of course it wouldn't be bullet-proof if you wanted to substring the name, like using only the 2nd part in Vietnamese names, and you probably would have to make filling both of them optional.

Or just having a preferred name and full name, duplicating data but probably it wouldn't be a big deal in most cases.

This would be a nice GitHub project for someone to showcase name inputs in all languages.

minebreaker• 3 years ago

IMHO as a Japanese, the western convention is preferable if the app is English. It's less confusing.

At least it should be consistent across the app.

muzani6• 3 years ago

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 (given name only)

Malaysian name: Sharifah Azizah binti Syed Ahmad Tarmizi, (honorific surname: Sharifah) (given name: Azizah) (patronym) (father's honorific surname: Syed) (father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi)

fy20• 3 years ago

In most cases you don't even need the users real name.

If I sign up for an account, but the invoice is going to the billing department of my company, why do you care what my real name is?

newaccount742• 3 years ago

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?

msh2• 3 years ago

If the name on a bill to my company does not match the name of the employee who ordered the product, the bill will certainly not be paid.

numpad08• 3 years ago

A little suspicion I get from this post is it sounds like they have bunch of users under believable names in English, as well as many name-sounding local names that may or may not have to do with names, and they want to regularize the hell out of it to real names only, and looking into coding a machine readable data scheme to enforce a policy.

Otherwise there should be not a lot of reasons to parse and format Asian names, as suggested plenty times over here. If the incoming invoice has to go through legal checks first, the requirement shall be as codified and supplied, whether it's that the name shall be written back to front or in purple on red.

Maybe I'm just overthinking, likely I am.

muzani6• 3 years ago

If you don't need a legal name, a "name" field suffices.

There are plenty of situations where you need their full legal name as per passport or other form of identification. In here it's often some form of anti-money laundering laws. The first time I came across it was for a game show where you could win money, but to take the money out of the app, the law required some legal identification.

nicbou9• 3 years ago

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. Using the full name feels off.

In my case, it was to address a resignation notice, so it was a bit of a nitpick with no legal consequences. However in other cultures and scenarios it can matter a lot more.

pmontra6• 3 years ago

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 that they wouldn't need for the service they are offering or they have to find some impersonal way to address you.

An example with Italian. Welcome is benvenuto for men and benvenuta for women. Welcome back is either bentornato or bentornata. It's impossible to use them unless we ask for the genre of the customer or use a DB / AI to infer it from the name. We still need a way to let the customer fix any mistake, a mistake which would probably be unwelcome.

So the common workaround is to use words like ciao, which is informal and possibly not well received by older people, or buongiorno which is OK for most of the day but not in the night (good morning vs good evening) or just use the name.

Best solution, if you don't need names to serve your service or because of regulations, don't ask them, use only the email address and make GDPR happier.

msh2• 3 years ago

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 the app is localized.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

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!

IanCal• 3 years ago

A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person?

This is I think solved with asking how people want to be addressed. It also helps deal with situations where someone's legal name isn't how they are usually referred to.

sinuhe69• 3 years ago

As a general case, you can ask for the full name in the printed order as the user wishes and ask for a preferred calling name, in this case "Frau Dr. Musterfrau", then problems solved!

kwhitefoot2• 3 years ago

you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person.

No it doesn't. Just ask how they want to be addressed. You can't encode all the possible variants, not everyone in Germany will want to be addressed in that way even if they are both a woman and a doctor.

yreg6• 3 years ago

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`.

efitz2• 3 years ago

This is why you should always ask for a preferred name. There’s lots of reasons why people don’t use their legal given name; I use my middle name and get annoyed when forced to use my first name. Many societies (ex: Thailand) use nicknames instead of legal given names.

manlobster• 3 years ago

You can do `Hello @TheirSlackHandle`.

GoblinSlayer2• 3 years ago

Don't say hello, just state your business.

eptcyka• 3 years ago

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

lemper• 3 years ago

this. and if they don't use latin alphabet,"local name" addition would really be nice. that's what my paycheck giver does.

worrycue2• 3 years ago

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.

Really? Your parents named you the exact same name as a famous politician?

Edit: Really? Downvote me for the OP’s bad English?

dkdbejwi3832• 3 years ago

The famous Singaporean politician Lee Kuan Yew to whom you refer was given the English name Harry by his parents. The poster you're quoting isn't themselves claiming to be LKY.

ghusbands• 3 years ago

The poster you're replying to is not claiming to be four different people or even any one of them, and your challenge does not contribute anything. In the case of Lee Kuan Yew, he did indeed drop Harry from his name, with varying stated reasons.

The fragment "Hated the name Harry and got it removed" probably means "[He] hated the name Harry and got it removed", not "[I] hated the name Harry and got it removed". The grammar is acceptable in many contexts.

leokennis3• 3 years ago

I feel like this is the way. If you want, include fields for all types of names (given, honorific, father's surname, whatever is imaginable) but also add the field "how should we address you" and use that for messages.

So:

* honorific surname: Sharifah * given name: Azizah * father's honorific surname: Syed * father's given name: Ahmad Tarmizi * address me as: Zaphod Beeblebrox the 4th

muzani6• 3 years ago

It's not very useful to include most fields. Often parts of a name are not in use at all, unless you're doing legal identification. I'd never include my patronym where possible.

weinzierl5• 3 years ago

"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 standpoint they are all equal. There is no first and second given name and most certainly no middle name. Consequence is that in everyday life today I can be Hans and tomorrow Fritz. I can be Hans Fritz or Fritz Hans too, but not Hans-Fritz (with a hyphen) except if it's written like that in my birth certificate and then the order is fixed and I can't decide to be Hans, Fritz or Fritz-Hans.

The trade-off in this system is that it is much harder to change your name here then in most other places.

In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first, exactly like in Asia.

toyg• 3 years ago

In Bavaria where I live, the informal convention is also last name first

It's probably a Roman thing. Julius Caesar was actually "Caesar, of the gens Julia", so last-name first.

In Italy we also used to list last-name first, particularly in official and military communications. This has changed significantly in the last 40 years, particularly in everyday bureaucracy, but it's still used by police and other bodies.

rob743• 3 years ago

In Hungary it's also last name first, both officially and informally - not sure if it's some Asian influence or something else...

FearNotDaniel• 3 years ago

Agreed. Currently consulting for an org which is having this very debate; the consensus is leaning towards replacing FirstName/LastName with FullName (i.e how are you generally identified) and PreferredName (how do you like to be addressed).

Some additional observations from the German-speaking world (both Vienna and rural Austria):

- yes, we also often refer to people, even in everyday speech, as LastName FirstName

- often when referring to someone by name they are also given a definite article (equivalent of English "the"), e.g. "die Maria" or "der Gruber Hansi"

- some people I've encountered with a background in the German aristocracy (not Austrian, where such titles are technically abolished) have extremely long legal names with multiple prince/duke/von X und Y etc clauses. This will be their full legal name that appears in the passport and must be used when booking flights etc, but is not what they would use as "full name" in an everyday business context. So "Full Name" might not always be "Legal Name".

Also in a South Asian/Indian diaspora context, it is very common for people to be addressed by a semi-formal nickname that does not appear anywhere in their legal name. Come to think of it, I know one or two Austrian aristos* who use the same approach.

* yes, technically the aristocracy is abolished but they still live in their castles and know each other's pedigrees...

usrusr2• 3 years ago

Germany used to be extremely restrictive about the set of character sequences that were allowed as given names. Some of that is probably still in place. When everybody was called Fritz or Hans or Gundula plus some word describing an ancestor's profession (it's all following the pattern of Smith and Miller), the order didn't really matter and that freedom was liberally abused: contexts that use the formal as identifier (Schmidt, Müller) and the given name only as a tie-breaker on collision will happily put the family name first, despite the reverse being specified in the terms themselves (Vorname and Nachname translate to pre, post, they really don't leave anything open to interpretation).

But those informal regional order conventions? I read them as formalized disrespect for the individual: "you're not Hans who happens to be a Müller, you're a Müller who happens to be Hans. And the Müllers, they are part of us, so subsume!" Those regional things can be quite peculiar: a childhood memory of my mother (northern Germany) is that as a child she was sometimes referred to as given name + name of the family farm, I suspect not in that order. With that farm's name still being the name of the family that ran ran it before her family took over, at some point between the thirty years war and the industrial revolution.

zamalek• 3 years ago

"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?

bryanrasmussen• 3 years ago

right - if you have a first name, last name and then switch on the locale you will have welcome text like Congratulations Rasmussen when I'm using a website while in Japan.

GoblinSlayer2• 3 years ago

There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

austinjp• 3 years ago

Nice, although the pertinent quote is:

"This article doesn't provide all the answers – the best answer will vary according to the needs of the application, and in most cases, it may be difficult to find a 'perfect' solution."

zarzavat3• 3 years ago

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.

delta_p_delta_x• 3 years ago

For the record, traditional Indian names are far more complicated.

Consider the name of a famous violinist, Lalgudi Gopala Jayaraman Radhakrishnan, also known as Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan. From a Western perspective, 'Lalgudi' isn't strictly a 'name' per se: it is a toponymic surname, and is the name of a taluk (or administrative subdivision: it is a third-order division after state, and district) in Tamil Nadu.

Gopala is an avonymic, i.e. his grandfather's name, and Jayaraman is a patronymic, his father's name. His given name is Radhakrishnan, but frequently rendered as Krishnan.

muzani6• 3 years ago

Thanks for the clarification. Not that familar with Indian names, and interesting to know it's as complicated as others.

jzb• 3 years ago

I wish we had world culture education as a part of grade school, including things like how to address people / naming conventions. I've learned a lot (and continue to) in the last 10-15 years through working with people and reading things in dribs and drabs, but it'd have been nice to know these things before I needed them and not ad hoc.

throwaway20374• 3 years ago

Many Indonesian Javanese people only have a single name. It is more rare these days, but certainly not zero, or only old people who don't use computer. I've met people in their 20s with a single name.

Also, in (South) Korea, depending upon the person's preference, they may choose to do family name first or last. It's crazy. I don't know why. (Can someone explain it to me?) As a result, most will write their romanized family name in all uppercase. Then, it can easily be identified as first or last. The easiest place to see it is in movie credits. When the screen is full of romanized Korean names, you see a mix of family name in all upper as first or last.

South Indian names can be incredibly long. Many people will shorten to use a single character from either first or last name.

Just have a single free text field. That should work for all cultures. Allow for 64 chars minimum (hello Spaniards!) and possibly 128 chars. Also, you might try a second field for "nick name". Lots of people with very long names use a shorter form in less formal settings.

gottorf• 3 years ago

Also, in (South) Korea, depending upon the person's preference, they may choose to do family name first or last. It's crazy. I don't know why. (Can someone explain it to me?)

In Korean, the family name comes first, then the given name. (There are no middle names.) It is almost always a single-character surname (Kim, Lee, etc.) and a two-character given name, though there are exceptions, with a small minority of surnames being two characters, and a small minority of given names being one character.

Romanization rules have changed over the years. The first president of the modern Republic of Korea was Syngman Rhee, with his given name Syngman first (with no spaces or hyphens) and family name Rhee last. Then take Park Chung Hee, the third president, in office in the 60s and 70s; his family name is Park, and his given name is Chung Hee. A few presidents later, you have Roh Tae-woo, in office around the 90s, with family name Roh and given name Tae-woo; notice the hyphenation. The current president is Yoon Suk Yeul, back to not having a hyphen to join the two characters of his given name.

Sometimes it depends on when it was that someone was first issued a passport, because the government is loathe to change the way someone's romanized name is spelled after the first issuance.

mcv3• 3 years ago

I used to know an American guy in Amsterdam who only had a single name. His explanation was always that his parents were a bit weird. It was a short 4-letter name too. He might well be in the running for the shortest name ever.

lawgimenez2• 3 years ago

Middle names are also equally important in the Philippines. The website that the OP included is lacking.

Either in the format:

- given-name middle-name surname

- surname, given-name (note there is no comma here) middle-name or middle initial

johneth• 3 years ago

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 reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do."

and

"If your service stores personal information, you should allow users to update their details, including their name. Allowing users to change their name helps your service respect their personal identity. It also means they can continue using your service without having to start over. People change their name for many reasons. For example, because of a change in marital status, family situation or gender. Avoid making it hard for users to change their name. As well as causing them distress, it may make them reluctant to use your service."

[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/names/

dgb232• 3 years ago

This has to be one of the best design systems I ever looked at...

ghaff6• 3 years ago

> "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 of honorifics.

When I last registered for some conference put on by The Economist, it must have had 25 titles to choose from including a whole bunch of aristocratic and clergy-related titles.

Seems a lot easier just not to bother today.

Hamuko3• 3 years ago

Title is the one that always confuses me since titles are basically non-existent here. It seems really like a really important thing in the Anglosphere and I have no idea why. I just always pick "Dr" when I'm forced to pick one. So far it has never made any difference.

sigwinch28• 3 years ago

On the other hand, HM Passport Office absolutely loves titles:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/titles-included-i...

My personal favourite is if you change your first name to “Sir” and you are not actually a “Knight”, then you get the note “THE REFERENCE TO SIR IS TO THE HOLDER’S NAME AND NOT TO THE HOLDER’S TITLE” printed in your passport.

Context: I wanted “Dr.” to be added to my passport.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

That's what we do, in our app.

People can write whatever they want, there, in whatever order they want. We only allow 255 characters, though, because we use classic VARCHAR, and index the field.

Some Spanish (as in Catalan) names can be downright legendary.

I support non-Roman character sets.

richie_adler4• 3 years ago

Some Spanish (as in Catalan) names can be downright legendary.

Not only.

Argentinian national hero Manuel Belgrano had as full name Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano González.

Chilean painter Pablo Picasso's full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.

toastal• 3 years ago

We should emphasize the “preferred name” option because it can be very expensive & arduous to change a legal name. Also using real names in UI/messages should be considered a bad practice because you risk leaking info to shoulder snoopers or dead-naming folks that don’t want to expend the time/effort/money for a legal rename. Just don’t.

WesolyKubeczek• 3 years ago

The difficult bit is how you sort them.

I have this problem that some software which doesn't readily discern what should be first name and what should be last name gives me a list of all Johns followed by all Lisas and then Peters, which is less than helpful. Other software thinks it got it right but then for Hungarian names, it gives me all Istváns followed by all Józsefs, which, again, is less than optimal.

Having a "sort key for bloody sorting" field may be a way to go, I personally would use it, but making it user friendly is a bitch, and heuristics will get it wrong more often than not. Sorry but I've run out of nice words for this problem.

(A bibliographer enters the chat, I cower in fear)

generic920342• 3 years ago

Oh, and make sure you can handle long names. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Blaine_Wolfeschlegelste....

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

Don't forget:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden#Brfxxccxx...

david-gpu3• 3 years ago

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.

Introducing a hyphen isn't great: it doesn't match my legal name and it's awkward because some people do have a hyphenated surname plus another surname.

I've also met several people whose legal name doesn't include a surname.

lelanthran5• 3 years ago

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 "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether?

YesJustWolf• 3 years ago

And don't forget people with just a single name. Filling in computer forms that require two names is the bane of my existence.

registeredcorn2• 3 years ago

I would be interested to hear, how do you feel about simply entering "None" or something to that effect? I realize it may not be the literal correct version of your name, but do you feel like that is a reasonable compromise? I work with a system that makes exceptions for the circumstance you're talking about, but do wonder what you do in other platforms.

I would also mention that I feel your pain to a degree. My wife has an extremely uncommon female name, but the spelling is very close to a common male name. Many times she has run into people "fixing" her name for her without saying anything only for it to cause issues months later, or people calling her by the name they assumed she meant to type. It's incredibly aggravating to deal with. Lots of missed emails. Lots of phone calls of helpful people informing her of the "error".

At times, I wish the entire naming system were replaced with something that had no room for error or miscommunication. Everyone is called Larry or something.

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

How do you fly?

I had a friend with a single letter first name and the booking forms would never accept it, so he would add another couple of letters, but then at the airport he would be fucked because his ticket never matched his ID.

And how did you come by such a name?

eloisant• 3 years ago

Yes, basically:

- one "full name" field. (English speakers would use Firstname Lastname) - one "how should we call you?" name. (English speakers would use their first name, in some other cultures people would preferred to be called by their last name)

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 3 years ago

Would it be better to have "full legal name" and "preferred name"?

To clarify the purpose of the two

realusername• 3 years ago

It's not only and ansian thing. In France thr convention is LASTNAME Firstname (with that casing)

froddd• 3 years ago

I was going to say that. It’s amazing how often French users get it wrong when filling in forms. It can result in online services trying a more informal tone calling people by their last name only (“Salut, DUPONT!”), which can be seen as a bit rude. People don’t read form labels with great attention.

CMCDragonkai• 3 years ago

Funny in some cultures calling people by their last name is actually respectful.

nicbou9• 3 years ago

It's worth noting that this convention is also applicable in Francophone African countries, but not in Quebec.

efitz2• 3 years ago

Is there any reason why you need to specifically know the first and last name, or the family and given name? I think there is a lot of inertia in the idea that you must have two name fields, but why?

Why not just have one name field, and let people type what they want in it?

Or better yet, have one field for “what should I print as the name when I send you a package or letter”, and “what would you like me to call you?” (e.g. preferred name)

Ekaros2• 3 years ago

Also even in west the first name + last name doesn't capture the whole effect.

For example my credit card has last name, first name and middle name. And should probably be passed as such. In some addressing you want all three. But for most communication and even mailing things only first + last is enough or if more formal last + first.

In the end it is huge mess with no clearly applicable rules.

grardb• 3 years ago

Shameless plug: I gave a talk on names and the problems that arise when you give them special treatment - https://youtu.be/NfKhY3sAQ9E

But the tl;dw is to do this: <input type="text" name="name" />

I don't know what kind of app you're building, but unless it's 100% impossible (from a business perspective) not to separate people's names into multiple fields, you really should just make it one field.

If it's a true requirement for the business—due to a third-party vendor's requirements, for example—then I suppose you could simply ask the user which order they prefer and display their name accordingly.

alkonaut3• 3 years ago

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 rarely be acceptable to produce lists of people sorted by their given names in Western Europe for example. So as an example if you really do need to have BOTH "Doe, John" and "John Doe" what do you do in case you know at least 99% of users will have names following this format? Do you force people to enter their name twice? In that situation I would:

- Store it as a single name column, with more columns as required (greeting, sortable, ).

- Present a UX that is appropriate for the region of 99% users. So for western Europe show a "first name", "last name", but don't store that: just set the name column to "$firstname $lastname" and the index name column to "$lastname, $firstname" and greeting to "$firstname" for example. That way I at least let 99% of your users only input the name once.

- But (and this is important) offer an alternative way of specifying it for those who don't have a name that conforms to the format. You let just that small fraction of users enter a name/indexname/greeting instead.

And yes: the above ONLY applies if it's really a hard requirement to separate them, because the last name sorting was really a requirement. Of course there are other requirements that force other solutions. The "just one input" is the correct solution for all the cases where it is possible.

Hackbraten• 3 years ago

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.

nitwit005• 3 years ago

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

alkonaut3• 3 years ago

Yes. What I’m talking about is of course a system where 100% use the same alphabet and 99.99% the same name format.

ttepasse• 3 years ago

Even sorting alphabetically sorted lists by last name differ in western cultures, in the case of particles in the last names.

Some countries file “de Rohan”, “von Ruhr”, “van Rotterdam” and similar under “R”, others just under the first character of the string.

alkonaut3• 3 years ago

How does that work in countries where it is common (like in the Netherlands)? I imagine software handles it by pattern matching as when sorting artists as “Beatles, The”? To just match some known “de”, “van” or “van der”!

Anywhere I know van der Whatever would just be sorted on “v” but that only works because almost no one has such a last name.

tommiegannert• 3 years ago

Related: as a Swede, the first times I had to fill out a honorific, it felt very weird. And many times they are required. We don't use honorifics in Sweden. The only difference between formal and informal address, is pretty much whether you use a nickname or not. The idea that there is a single category of "western name" is wonky.

Another is that my spoken/given name is after my "middle" name. Especially American forms don't deal well with that. In Sweden, you usually underline the given name, since it's used to address the person. Now I see a comment here saying that's a thing in the Philippines. That's interesting.

vintermann3• 3 years ago

You used honorifics in Sweden too until fairly recently. Don't need to go further back than Pippi Longstockings (Herr Nilsson, Fröken Prysselius). And in genealogy I see plenty of Magisters, Profosses, Dragoons etc.

But Swedish naming traditions are great evidence that there's no such clean divide between "western" and "eastern" naming schemes: There have actually been dialects/areas where they put the genitive form if the family/farm name first, e.g "Dals Olof" even in Swedish, and in Finnish-speaking areas this was very common.

Findecanor• 3 years ago

I find that while public Swedish records always store my full name, the "underlining" has often been lost. Many times I have been addressed by nurses or civil servants who assumed that my first given name was my spoken name.

meitham• 3 years ago

Another case you might want to accommodate is Arabic speaking countries where the names goes like name son-of father-name son-of grandfather-name son-of great-grandfather-name tribe name. In most cases, such as when dealing with government applications four generations is required but sometimes tribe name is omitted where it can identify your religion, sect to prevent bias to you or against you. The son-of (Bin or Ibin) is mostly omitted except for cases where the first name is composite of two names, like “Mohammed Ali”, where both parts are valid names on their own.

jll29• 3 years ago

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 pattern list:

  Only, Only
  Only

Localization is tricky, not just for names, e.g. postcodes (GB) and zip codes (US) come after the city ("London SW4 0AF", "Beverly Hill, CA 90210"), in many other places before (e.g. FR, DE, e.g. "91054 Erlangen").

devoutsalsa2• 3 years ago

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.

searchableguy2• 3 years ago

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

gumballindie• 3 years ago

Common in europe as well. Just use a name input field and a display name or preferred name field.

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

Try logging into Facebook with different locale settings on your Facebook account. You can have several names depending on your language. That way they can handle name order but also show English speaking contacts a readable name, while say, Japanese friends gets to see the Japanese name.

buro9• 3 years ago

What do you need their name for?

Do you need their legal name? As in, actually legally need it?

Realise that you'll probably need several name fields in different places depending on what you're doing, i.e. an e-commerce app may have a name to address someone by, a name on a billing address, a name on a shipping address, a name on a payment method... all of which can vary for the same person.

If all you need is a way to address them, just a single name field.

tannhaeuser• 3 years ago

Representing names (and postal addressing via UPU S1) are one of the use cases where SGML/XML and other document techniques feels appropriate in internal business data representation, as opposed to storing details in 1NF (a la first/last name) in databases, especially when working with international customer data.

cybervegan• 3 years ago

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.

gvx• 3 years ago

Honestly, most apps don't need a full name. Just a preferred name is enough.

If you really need a full name, it'll be because you need it for a specific institution, like government or bank. In that case, you probably need the ability to provide a separate full name for each institution.

mariogintili• 3 years ago

I18n string interpolation

alickz• 3 years ago

if this is an iOS app use Apples PersonNameFormatter and let the user's device localisation decide

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/personn...

albert_e• 3 years ago

I come from a family that traditionally writes names as Familyname Givenname.

But even in our country Firstname Lastname is prevalent among many regions and central government.

I grew up in the 90s and simply resigned that I will always be Givenname Familyname in most systems and documents.

After school I never bothered writing / typing / filling my Familyname first anywhere.

By simply staying consistent with this (wrong) way, I ensured that all my documents perfectly agree with each other. That peace of mind and lack of hassle is worth any "sacrifice" for me. Others may place different value on keeping their conventional names and must also have real reasons to do so too. I was lucky maybe, not to have those hurdles.

ncoelhosantos• 3 years ago

There's an established pattern for this, which is to provide users with a choice of:

  Sort order:
    - By First Name
    - By Last Name

  Display order:
    - First, Last
    - Last, First

Obviously, users can input names in a multitude of ways. But the convention is to offer at least two distinct fields, "First name" and "Last name". The sort order determines if the items are ordered by first name or last name. And the display order determines if the full name for each item is displayed as First name and then or last name, or the other way around.

And finally, set a default based by the user's locale and region.

danmur• 3 years ago

I have nothing useful to add except that I know quite a few people who would be happy if they could have an apostrophe in their name without everything going to shit

yakubin• 3 years ago

Another edge case: aside from different orderings in different countries, in Spanish speaking countries people have 2 surnames.

ungerik• 3 years ago

var names []string

smcleod• 3 years ago

I always thought “First” and “Last” relate to the order of the names and was compatible with cultures that have self family, family self etc….?

juliantejera• 3 years ago

If you have an iOS app I suggest looking into https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/personn...

richie_adler4• 3 years ago

ObRef: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

paulmooreparks5• 3 years ago

Even in England, you would have to consider King Charles III's name. His given names are Charles Philip Arthur George. No family name. Of course, now his name is even a bit longer: "Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith". So, if you think he might sign up for your app, make sure your name field is long enough, and that the "Preferred Name" field can accommodate a space: "Charles III" or "Charles Rex"

tectec• 3 years ago

He's from the house of Windsor so wouldn't he use that as his last name where it's needed?

paulmooreparks5• 3 years ago

No. It's not his last name. It's not even in his name anywhere.

Edit: Technically, his family name is Mountbatten-Windsor. Still not a last name, though.

rsynnott5• 3 years ago

As others have said, there's a lot to be said for having a single name field and not trying to second-guess how people expect this to be presented. There's huge variation here, and some cultures don't even have a concept of a single last/family name.

dv_dt• 3 years ago

I would ask for a breakdown according cultural fields if there are interactions with external systems (e.g. payroll or banking, etc), but carry a single field preferred full name that is auto populated with a best guess suggestion.

adulion• 3 years ago

i work in ecommerce and we have a conditional for the order of the fields based on the delivery country the user checking out

robobro• 3 years ago

In Indonesia , we have name anarchy. Some people have a family name, some people have two given names, some people only have one name, some people have many names and none of them are family names...

How will your app handle people with a single name? My wife's mother splits her name in two based on syllables, but that's not exactly right.

I think two fields, one mandatory -- "name" -- and other optional -- "preferred name" -- is the way to go.

You should also consider how to handle people changing names, in the events of marriage, sex change, religious conversion, or what have you.

kroltan2• 3 years ago

Don't even need to go as far as Asia, even european-descended cultures have different naming conventions.

Here in Brazil, it is very common to have "compound names" which are just... two given names you have to use together, for example "Ana Maria", AND it is also common to have "middle names" which are neither family names, nor given. My name, for example, is Leonardo Giovanni Scur, but "Leonardo" is my given name that I respond and expect people to call me by, and "Scur" is the family name. "Giovanni" only exists in documents, basically.

So, the first question is, what are you using their names for? If you are a paid service that identifies users to other users by name, ask for a "billing name" for your legal/policy needs, and a "display name" for identification, don't attribute any structure to it. If you don't need a legally identifying name, just ask for the "display name", and let people name themselves "Sir Bearington of Nunya Biznis".

kroltan2• 3 years ago

Tangent:

A common reasoning for asking for a structured name is to build visually consistent interfaces, such as identifying everyone by their given name.

But that is disrespectful to people with "complicated" names, as well as social conventions. Some people would rather be called by their family name, others their given name, and I guarantee you none of them says "but think about the pretty, homogenous UI we will be leaving behind!".

For users, your brand aesthetics are at best very far down on their list of things to care about, even lower than thinking about what specific dish they will make for lunch in 3 weeks.

Hamuko3• 3 years ago

The name order isn't your only issue to worry about. A Japanese system might be expected to have two fields, one for the name as it's written and another for pronounciation. Just in case someone decides that 小鳥遊 as a name is pronounced as たかなし.

I remember Amazon.co.jp having two name fields when you registered a new user, and in English they were called "Your name" and "Your name again", because a name pronounciation field probably makes little sense as a concept to most non-Japanese speakers.

johnwalkr• 3 years ago

Well there are some kanji names that have multiple pronunciations (with only one being correct for an individual). And some Chinese people in Japan go by the Japanese pronunciation of their hanzi/kanji name.

They way these fields are done in Japan is often difficult if you have a non-Japanese name and give a lot of insight to this discussion. I've encountered many variations of these two sets of fields. Usually the name fields accept kanji, hiragana and katakana, sometimes accept roman letters, but sometimes if the site can be set to english, only then name fields may or must be entered in roman letters. Usually the pronunciation fields must be in katakana, but sometimes they must be hiragana and again sometimes if the site can be set to english, it may or must be entered in roman letters.

Sometimes, like for a credit card application, there is a third set of fields for romanization. And for names, romanization has standard rules but there are exceptions such as when your family has been using a previous romanization so you shouldn't automate it, especially if an exact match to a passport or credit card name is required. Many other languages have different romanization possibilities for names too. There are even cases where bank insists on one romanization and the passport office insists on another leading to airplane tickets issued with the wrong one!

Some (mostly old) systems require so-called full-width roman characters (same width as a Japanese character and monospace) and some systems require so-called half-width katakana. The latter usually doesn't accept small katakana or diacritical marks, making it difficult to read and write non-Japanese names (or company names for that matter). Back in the day to transfer money at a bank you had to successfully write the recipient's name this way but these days all banks can automatically grab the katakana name and you just have to check it (but it's still in hard to read half-width katakana).

A common annoyance is when everything must be in full-width characters except phone number which must not be.

Finally, there is one type of field that really can trip you up: the address field. It usually must be in full-width characters which is fine in principle, but building names are often (officially, on the record) in English. The windows Japanese IME will happily default to "normal" and not full-width characters. This is easy to spot for a building name and figure out your mistake. But if you live on the third floor (denoted by adding "－３Ｆ") it's hard to spot an accidental "-3F", "－3Ｆ", "－３F" or especially "-３Ｆ" (the dash is wrong).

SeanLuke• 3 years ago

Wait until you see Icelandic names where there is no last name at all. Björk's "last name" is Guðmundsdóttir, because she is the daughter of Guðmundur, whose "last name" is Gunnarsson, because he is the son of...

The Indian name situation, going by initials instead, is particularly interesting. There is a famous professor I know who goes by initials because his second name is forty letters long.

registeredcorn2• 3 years ago

There's an excellent GitHub repo that lists a lot of common falsehoods regarding names. I'm not sure how useful it'll be to OP, but the repo in general should probably have way more attention than it already does.

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#human-identit...

IlliOnato2• 3 years ago

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 :-)

mrcgnc• 3 years ago

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.

Larrikin• 3 years ago

In the Android apps I've worked on, family name and given name are saved separately in the database and then in our string file we have a separately defined string "full name format" that just takes in two strings. Depending on the localization string file, the two strings can be reversed. Haven't had to do major internationalization efforts in many apps I've worked on but this has been perfectly fine for times we needed to have multiple formats.

Just considering other countries and languages (and not doing obviously American/English only) has made the effort considerably easier, even when other countries aren't in the radar at the time

wirthjason• 3 years ago

On the flip side, I wish rat Japanese design allowed for middle names. It annoys me that my marriage certificate has my first and middle name concatenated together simply because my legal name on my passport has a first, middle, and last name.

alentred2• 3 years ago

Not suggesting it for the UX, more of a curiosity: in France, a somewhat common convention is to put the family name in uppercase. This is well known by everyone, but not everyone does that. Sometimes you would receive an email from "Robert Martin" and stop for a second to figure it out.

foxyv• 3 years ago

In my opinion, name should always be a two field setup. One would be the full name for legal documentation. This can be tokenized for searching databases. The other would be the preferred name of address "You may call me Jim" which shows up on "Welcome Jim!" messages. Trying to parse out names is almost pointless. There are so many different name standards it's bonkers. If you want you could even include a phonetic section for pronunciation.

If you need to split first, middle and last name for US government form entry you can just ask for those when you need them individually.

thrwyexecbrain• 3 years ago

In Calibre (the ebook management software) there are two fields: "author name" and "author sort name", both free-form text. The latter serves as the sort key when the books are ordered by author. I have found this solution both elegant and practical.

pphysch• 3 years ago

Store "names" as a JSON document per person, and provide different view functions that construct a "full name" string based on that data and localized standards/conventions. You have infinite flexibility with nominal (heh) overhead.

lowbloodsugar• 3 years ago

Do other countries have a concept of a “legal” name? Like someone said their names are a set that can be in any order or just pick one: does the government insist on a single specific order for interacting with them and with, eg banks?

contingencies• 3 years ago

20+ years in Asia here. Have run many sites/apps and filled in many forms. Here is what you do:

Full name field. (Optional) Title field. (Optional) Display name preference. (Super optional) Allow the user to duplicate ALL of these fields for EACH IANA/ISO language, eg. many people may have a Chinese or Thai name and also a separate English name with zero relation.

Read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... and note there is an unwritten set of similar fallacies regarding signatures, plus an addresses version at https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

ecesena2• 3 years ago

I would call it “first” and “last” and, therefore, put “first” first.

(I’m very serious, I thought a lot about this because as a non-native speaker I often get confused with expressions like “given”, “surname”, etc. don’t make me think please)

ecesena2• 3 years ago

And if -by chance- you have the power of change immigration forms, I will forever be grateful.

wageslave99• 3 years ago

Could you put the surname with uppercase letters? That's a convention used in France that I think we should all use.

In Spain, where we have two surnames (first one from father and first one from mother in either order), that would make easier for foreigners to understand that our surname is not the last word. e.g. José Luis GARCÍA LÓPEZ means García López is his surname, while José Luis is a composed name (like JFK where John Fitzgerald were his two names).

imrehg• 3 years ago

You say Asian, but same order in Hungary too.

Funny part, now living in Taiwan, when the forms ask me for my "English Name", I never know it means "First Last" (which would be the opposite order for me of the original form), or merely "Name in Latin characters".

Names are hard.

akasakahakada• 3 years ago

Meanwhile Japanese company assuming everyone on this planet must have Kanji name with Katakana spelling, don't be mad at them when you can't fit your alphabet name into their scheme haha.

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

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