* If you have a requirement for a legal name, ask for the legal name as one field. Don't artificially split it into two fields. Make it long enough that you won

* If you have a requirement for a legal name, ask for the legal name as one field. Don't artificially split it into two fields. Make it long enough that you won't truncate. * If you have restrictions on what you can store, show the user what you will be storing their entered name as and make sure they're okay with that. * If you must have multiple fields for a user's name (given, familial), allow one of them to be optional. * If you want to use a familiar name as a nice touch, ask the user what they want to be known as (e.g., a "nickname", but I wouldn't call it that). * If you have to interface with other systems that do have artificial restrictions, explain this to the user and give them an opportunity to override the name used for those systems if it's important. Obviously, you don't want to ask too much up front (to fight what I'm coining as "form-fatigue"; you know, where there's so many questions on the form that you just give up signing up), so you may need some decent heuristics to give you reasonable default values for these things that the user can override if they want.