Name games
I have a friend who was telling me about someone he knew who’d changed his name to a single letter.
Like, not his first name to a single letter, his entire name was a single letter. Something tells me the IRS doesn’t like that guy.
But Blogamundo will love him!
Does it really make sense to use First Name and Last Name fields on a website anymore?
I humbly suggest that it doesn’t. Or rather, that those fields are mostly artifacts of the English speaking world.
Er, no, that’s not right either. The point is that the names of the fields don’t work. In other words, trying to translate “First Name” and “Last Name” is a can of worms, because those terms are somewhat contextual.
Take Japanese, for instance. The famous writer’s name is 村上 春樹, romanized as Murakami Haruki. In English speaking contexts he uses Haruki Murakami.
Now, which of those is “first” and which is “last”?
Multiply that particular example by all the naming conventions for Akan and Arabic and Chinese and Fijian and French and Philippine and German and Hawaiian and Hebrew and Hungarian and Icelandic and Indian and Japanese and Korean and Polish and Vietnamese and Russian and thereabouts and Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan and…
And you get the idea.
So, we’re going to give people a great big “Name” box and be done with it.
2 comments.
Technorati tags: Language and the Web
It’s an interesting challenge. I think the main reason why you still see a lot of usage of two fields for names is searching & sorting.
For example, with one field name how do I find all users with the last name of “Hall”? I think at the end of the day it’s entirely context sensitive. MS Outlook has the interesting solution of allowing you to enter a name in a single field and then select from a drop-down how you’d like it to display (First Last, Last First, Mr. First Last, etc.)
Perhaps a solution is to have two fields, “Given Name:” & “Family Name:” with only one being required (to handle issues like Mr. “X” above. You could then offer them the option of which way the names were displayed via drop-down.
Without knowing the exact context of this Name field I’d pose a second question - for users who’s primary language/char-set is something like Mandarin, Japanese or Arabic how do you handle displaying their name to users who can’t read that language?
i.e should Haruki Murakami use the romanized version or his native language or do you need to provide them with fields to enter name variations based on the viewers language selections?
Hi Ryan!
I agree that searching and sorting are the main reasons for the persistence of those fields.
But it seems to me that searching is far more important, nowadays. Even with something as simple as names like Macdonald vs McDonald there are no set conventions. In that case, then, what you really need is to be able to search substrings of names, not match directly against a whole field.
Actually I don’t plan to use personal names as unique ids at all — in fact, personal names will be optional. Users will have to have a username, however, and that will be plain ASCII (since that’s really the only set of characters that we can be sure that everybody can see reliably).
So Haruki Muramaki would use
harukiorhardboiledor whatever.Since the site will be fully multilingual I don’t think that we can realistically expect to totally avoid things like users seeing ?????? instead of the Japanese words “村上春樹”.
Hypothetically, asking Mr. Murakami to specify how he wants his name to appear to users without Japanese language support as well as those who do have it (and perhaps those with only Simplified Chinese support?) seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
We’ll have to see what people say… still thinking about this.