Not everybody’s name confirms to the first name, last name structure – and getting this wrong can exclude people from services.
I recently watched a recording of Anh Duong’s presentation called ‘How to consider non-native English speakers in UX’ (YouTube). It’s a great talk and I really recommend it.
Anh Duong is a UX Designer and Accessibility Specialist. She was born and raised in Vietnam.
Anh shares her knowledge and personal experience on the difficulties users have completing forms that exclude the variety of naming conventions that exist. She did this at the 2024 Inclusive Design event.
She also provides examples of design choices that are unhelpful for those who do not have English as their first language. And tips to make your designs more inclusive for this user group.
My own experience with naming conventions
Her presentation reminds me of a government project I worked on years ago, where I first became aware of these cultural differences.
We were developing a service that allowed users to apply for benefits digitally. At the time, the GOV.UK Design System (GDS) required new services to have a Research Accessibility Design (RAD) review done before completing a service assessment.
A RAD review is basically a practice-run of a service assessment, so you can make updates based on recommendations beforehand.
The output of our service stitched the first and last name fields together into one line. The content designer conducting the RAD review flagged this as an issue. I remember they said, ‘You cannot assume the order of someone’s name. Different cultures have different naming conventions.’
Curious, I began researching this.
How naming conventions differ across cultures
Turns out, there’s a lot of variation in naming structures across the world.
In Vietnam, the family name comes first, followed by the given name(s). Vietnamese people usually have 3 or 4 names. This is the same in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan.
It’s uncommon to have a middle name in Japan, so mandating a ‘Middle name’ field is not an inclusive thing to do.
(Lots of British people don’t have middle names either, so if your service is for UK-based users only, it’s still not inclusive. Think about the variety of cultures and ethnicities you’re designing for.)
In Portugal and Brazil, people usually have 3 parts to their name: first name(s), mother’s family name and father’s family name.
For Spain and Columbia, the order is first name(s), father’s family name and mother’s family name.
Some Native American people have numbers in their names.
Some people only have one character in their first name.
Some first names have two words instead of one.
These are just some examples of cultural differences. They show how mindful we need to be when designing something as seemingly simple as collecting a user’s name.
So, how should we capture a user’s name?
How to make name fields inclusive
The most inclusive way to collect a user’s name is to use a single name field.
But sometimes this is just not possible. For example, when the service you’re designing for connects with other, older services, you can be limited to whatever structure was originally used. Very commonly, this is first, middle and last name mandated as separate fields.
You must consider the users you’re designing for. Would ‘family name’ be a more suitable label than ‘last name’?
If you need to use multiple fields to collect the user’s name, there’s some steps you can take to make this as inclusive as possible.
You can make your name fields more inclusive by:
- not adding a minimum character count to name fields
- always making ‘Middle name’ an optional field
- allowing symbols, punctuation, special characters and spaces
- writing error messages that focus on the solution (don’t tell someone their name is invalid)
- telling the user if what they input needs to match a certain document, like their passport
- presenting their name back to them exactly as they entered it
- testing with participants who don’t have English as their home language, from various cultures, backgrounds and ethnicities
- presenting the input requirements if there are any, and explaining why they exist (for example why there is a maximum character count, and what to do if their name is longer than this)
- not validating names against incomplete, biased databases of ‘acceptable’ names
By incorporating some of these tips, you’ll drastically improve the user experience of your service and make it much more inclusive.
Learn more about inclusive design for names
This Medium article on best practices to design inclusive name input fields by Riri Nagao, is an excellent read. It’s where I pulled a lot of this information from.
How to ask for names on GOV.UK design system has great advice for labelling name fields.
And you can learn more about designing for service users from international or mixed language groups from my colleague Miriam Vaswani.
