14 ms·

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: Sathia

• eloisant 3y 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 3y ago
  Would it be better to have "full legal name" and "preferred name"? To clarify the purpose of the two
• fy20 3y 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?
  • newaccount74 3y 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?
    • kwhitefoot 3y ago
      That's an internal matter. The supplier needs to include the customer's order number anyway or no one in the company will know how to deal with the invoice. That number will be linked to the person who raised the order.
      • newaccount74 3y ago
        What if you mistype the order number, or forget to provide it? Or when an employee makes a small order that they can just pay immediately with a corporate credit card without first getting approval? Or when a customer pays for something with their personal card and gets reimbursed later by the company? It just makes life a lot easier for everyone involved when the name of the person who made the order is printed on the invoice. And if people really don't want the supplier to know their name, they just type "IT Procurement" into the name field.
  • msh 3y 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.
    • r_hoods_ghost 3y ago
      Do you not use POs? Much easier, allows you to approve spend if necessary and means the person paying I voices doesn't need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of your employees and keep up to date with which ones have ledt
      • qwerty456127 3y ago
        POs seem to be very rare in Europe, people who even know what's a PO are rare.
        • dalke 3y ago
          That's far from my experience. Where in Europe and for what kind of payments? I only use POs with my customers. I'm based in Sweden, doing work mostly in Germany, Switzerland, and England, as software sales and contract work. No one has even blinked. In Swedish it's called a inköpsorder, but often abbreviated PO. As an example, https://www.betydelse-definition.com/ink%C3%B6psorder https://www.betydelse-definition.com/ink%C3%B6psorder has "Inköpsordern (ofta säker man PO som är kort för Purchase Order) är det viktigaste dokumentet i en inköpsverksamhet och är ett avtal mellan två parter. POn definierar vad som köps in och under vilka villkor och förutsättningar." In English: "The purchase order (often said PO, which is short for Purchase Order) is the most important document in a purchasing operation and is an agreement between two parties. The PO defines what is bought in and under what conditions and requirements." Looking around, here's a description of purchase order use in the UK: https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/guide-to-purchase-orders/ https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/guide-to-purchase-orders... > Purchase orders are a helpful part of the procurement process, allowing business owners to keep track of incoming orders and to monitor stock levels. It’s a way to see exactly what money is being spent where and at what moment. In some cases, purchase orders are a basic requirement for doing business. Many government agencies and authorities insist upon PO forms being issued before they’ll agree to settle an invoice. It wasn't hard to find similar examples for other European countries.
  • numpad0 3y 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.
  • muzani 3y 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.
• nicbou 3y 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.
  • kwhitefoot 3y 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.
  • pmontra 3y 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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• yreg 3y 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`.
  • efitz 3y 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 3y ago
    You can do `Hello @TheirSlackHandle`.
    • leokennis 3y ago
      This is what I do too. Basically, we are deflecting the awkwardness and/or blame to the software.
      • deathanatos 3y ago
        Assuming the other end has filled in what Slack calls Display Name (which I interpret as "preferred name", is heavily implied by Slack's UI, and I think most people will too) … then you've addressed them as they prefer. (And if not, they can change it, and it instantly updates!) I mean otherwise it's like literally any other communication medium, and you'll have to either take a culturally-appropriate respectful best effort guess at a preferred address, or just ask.
      • KptMarchewa 3y ago
        Or just "Hello, $reason_for_this_message"
        • yreg 3y ago
• lemper 3y ago
  this. and if they don't use latin alphabet,"local name" addition would really be nice. that's what my paycheck giver does.
• worrycue 3y 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?
  • dkdbejwi383 3y 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.
    • worrycue 3y ago
      What does “Hated the name Harry and got it removed” meant then? Sounds like the poster got the name removed. Also it was his grandfather that gave him the name “Harry”, not his parents.
      • Macha 3y ago
        There's no pronoun for that sentence, so it's left undefined who it's talking about. It doesn't mean the poster. It also doesn't really matter, if one former Singaporean politician dropped their "first name" then it's being used as an example that others may too.
      • dkdbejwi383 3y ago
        It means that LKY himself stopped using the name Harry, for whatever reason. His (LKY) Wikipedia article states when, but not why - it cites his autobiography so that may be a useful source if you are interested to learn more.
  • ghusbands 3y 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.
• leokennis 3y 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
  • muzani 3y 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.
• weinzierl 3y 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 3y 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.
    • pomstazlesa 3y ago
      Same thing in Hungary.
    • danmaz74 3y ago
      Roman naming conventions were very different from current Italian ones, and Caesar's full name was Gaius Julius Caesar, where Gaius is the closest thing to what we would call a first name. If he had some brothers, they would all have been "Julius Caesar", and only the praenomen would have distinguished them. For example, Julius Caesar's father was also named Gaius Julius Caesar, and had (most likely) a brother whose name was Sextus Julius Caesar.
    • 3y ago
• bryanrasmussen 3y 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.
• GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  There's w3c guideline for this https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
  • austinjp 3y 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."
  • zarzavat 3y 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.
    • physicsguy 3y ago
      I have a friend who just married a Burmese girl of Indian origin and she just had a single name 'Jennifer'
    • marcus_holmes 3y ago
      The point is that First Name and Last Name do not correspond to Family Name and Given Name, which is actually what is desired (you can start an email to me as "Hello <Given Name>", and be reasonably sure of avoiding insult. You can't do that with "Hello <First Name>", you will definitely insult some people). However, I don't do this. If I want someone's name so I can talk to them, I just ask them "what do you want us to call you?" with a single field (and if they enter "Captain HugePenis" then I cheerfully start the email "Hello Captain HugePenis,"). I only use Given/Family if I need their official name for bureaucracy reasons, and then it's very much "what's your name as it is written in your passport/id?", and I don't use it to address them, because it's very easy to get wrong.
• delta_p_delta_x 3y 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.
  • muzani 3y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. Not that familar with Indian names, and interesting to know it's as complicated as others.
  • jzb 3y 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.
• throwaway2037 3y 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 3y 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.
    • gniv 3y ago
• lawgimenez 3y 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 3y 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/ https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/names/
  • dgb23 3y ago
    This has to be one of the best design systems I ever looked at...
    • RadiozRadioz 3y ago
      As a UK citizen, I am routinely impressed by our government website. It is one of the few things this country does right, in my opinion. I know some people who work on the UI, and they put painstaking attention into every tiny detail to make things as accessible as possible. The goal is that it should be universally navigable by anyone, regardless of technical competence, disability or background.
      • dgb23 3y ago
        As a web developer I’m impressed by the consistency, practical beauty and the respect of users. We as technical nerds often forget how people actually interact with technology and assume way too much attention, familiarity and ability to understand UI patterns. We often think of accessibility in terms of screen readers, but that’s just a fraction of the story… Add varied devices, slow connections, very bad performance etc. I’m craving for things like simplicity, performance, robustness and accessibility. This looks like a holistic, carefully crafted design system. I’m looking forward to study it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y 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_adler 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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)
• generic92034 3y ago
  Oh, and make sure you can handle long names. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Blaine_Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff_Sr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Blaine_Wolfeschlegelste....
  • qingcharles 3y ago
    Don't forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden#Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden#Brfxxccxx...
• david-gpu 3y 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.
  • lelanthran 3y 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?
    • david-gpu 3y ago
      > You presumably have a formal name: A B C D, with A and B being your two given names, C and D being your two surnames. Yes, that's right. That is my full legal name. > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? Same as my full legal name: A B C D. > Does your countries revenue service address you as "Dear A B", "Mr C D", "Dear A", "Mr D" or something else altogether? Well, there is no such thing as "my country" because I'm a dual citizen. Born in Spain, currently living in Canada as a naturalized citizen. That is where the troubles begin, because while in Spain IT systems typically assume people have two surnames, in North America they often assume a single surname. So far it has not a problem when dealing with the various levels of the Canadian government, but for example my bank addresses me as A B C-D due to limitations in their IT infrastructure. Incidentally, in Spain we are typically addressed as A C or Mr. C for brevity, while A B C D would be reserved for formal communications. I hope this answers your questions.
      • lelanthran 3y ago
        > > So what does it say on your ID? Your birth certificate if you have no ID? > Same as my full legal name: A B C D. Right, so your Firstname is A and your Lastname is D. There's no ambiguity there. You're sorted for those forms that ask for firstname/lastname, not for those forms that ask for given/family name.
• YesJustWolf 3y 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.
  • qingcharles 3y 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?
  • registeredcorn 3y 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.