“Sorry, But Your Name Has Invalid Characters.” Things to keep in mind to prevent poor error messages, lock-outs and dead ends — due to false assumptions about names.
✅ People often have multiple full names.
✅ People’s names do change over time.
✅ People don’t always have 1 full name which they go by.
✅ Systems often use different names for the same person.
✅ There are dozens of various naming schemes worldwide.
🚫 Names aren’t always written in a single character set.
🚫 Don’t impose space or character limitations.
🚫 Not everyone has a last name, family name or middle name.
🚫 First names and last names aren’t always different.
✅ Always allow people to type their name as they prefer.
✅ Use “Full name” instead of “First”, “Middle”, “Last” names.
✅ Names may include numbers and punctuation.
✅ Names also include prefixes, suffixes, everything-in-between.
✅ If you must, ask additionally how a user prefers to be addressed.
We shouldn’t make any assumptions about people’s names. There are literally dozens of different naming schemes around the world, and validating any names is usually a dangerous path to take.
Usually it’s done due to security, to prevent SQL injections or similar attacks by submitting malicious data. Yet very often validation rules are overly restrictive, blocking any special characters, including apostrophes and diacritics. And unfortunately, those rules are often wrong, breaking UX for many people.
Review the rules with your engineers. There is no such thing as invalid characters in a person’s name. People whose names break validation aren’t outliers. They are real people with real names that don’t match our validation restrictions.
The way out is easy: accept any name that a user provides, whatever characters they include, and whatever way they choose to type it.
Useful articles:
40 False Assumptions About Names In Interfaces, by Patrick McKenzie
https://lnkd.in/esFQZBch
How To Ask Users For Names, Gov.uk
https://lnkd.in/eYTQutVh
Designing Forms for Gender Diversity and Inclusion, by Sabrina Fonseca
https://lnkd.in/e2UGu9N2
Vitaly Friedman on LinkedIn
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