What's in a NAME

Name fields are often considered the most obvious and simple fields in a form. After all you have a first name a second name and you may have a middle name. So what can be so complicating about that? Consider designing a form which will be used by people across countries and cultures and complexity of names becomes evident.

I was recently designing a form which was to work well across all South-East Asian countries and cultures. As the information collected would be used for financial purpose, little (unintentional) discrepancy would mean problem for the bank in validating the user's identity. It could also mean bad user experience, if the bank had to ask user for verification of identity after user had filled in the form honestly. In Personal Names Around the World Richard Ishida lists down how the basic structure of a name changes across different cultures.

The Name Riddle defines the problem and suggest a two solutions.

The first solution proposes one single field for the entire name, followed by a field asking for user for the name to be used to address him/ her. I however strongly feel that second field label which reads 'Address', can be very misleading. I would prefer to go with 'short name' for the label and add instruction explaining what it means purpose of the short name. There is also the question of if both the fields should be made mandatory? Making the short name mandatory will mean users with single name will have to enter the same name twice. However if it is not mandatory, most people are likely to skip this field leaving the system with only the long name to address the user. My recommendation is to make the field mandatory only a shorter name is needed to address the user.

The second solution is more in line with the widely prevalent web forms, having two fields, for 'Given Names(s)' and 'Family Name'. This gives user the option to enter more than one name as 'Given Name'.

One field for the full name, as proposed in the first solution appeared a good solution. This however is a deviation from the predominant convention practised in web. The second solution is best suited for cultures and countries where English is the dominant language, but I am certain that this will not work very well in non-English cultures.