International Registration Form

Question

When designing an internation registration form how should I be asking for a user's information. Should name be [First, Last] or [Common, Surname] or simply [Name]. Does first and last name make sense for all names?

When asking for state and zipcode what would alternative terminology be, should I even be collecting this information for some countries?

We're recently getting into international users and methods and I'm hoping someone with experience can weigh in on the proper fields and labels that would be present in a solid international registration form.

Answer 1

I would suggest just the name, so that user could enter whatever seems right.

As for State, I quite don't understand what you need this information for. But I am not U.S. citizen, so... Two address lines (without implied format), zip code (terminology is OK, but do not try to validate) and country name should be sufficient. The problem with "States" is, some countries do not use such concepts (either at all, or use different regional split concepts, i.e. in Poland it is voivodship, in England it would be county, etc.). Again, I wouldn't use such details.

Answer 2

I would reccomend just a single input for name, not all names are logically separated into just two parts, some people have just one name (such as Teller, and if used for addresses, the name may be a company name). Labeling is complicated since first and last name is not the same as given and family name, if names in your language is normally in which field should the first/family name go and the last/given name go?

For an address input you need:

Name/Company: <text box; no validation or munging>
Address: <Multiline textbox; no validation or munging>
Country: <text box or select-box if you're paranoid>

Making it more detailed and you're creating problems for foreigners.

The only thing your local post service need for a foreign address is the name of the country. The rest is country specific and may include several fields or in some cases something like "behind the church in the woods" etc.

Do not include zip code or anything country specific like that unless the user has chosen a country you have extensive knowledge about. People tend to know how to type their address in a free form text area, but they may actually mess it up if they have to force their address into foreign fields.

The worst you can do is silently discarding invalid fields. That happened to me when registering my address (in Norway) for a magazine subscription from USA. The norwegian addres format is:

<Name or company>
<Street name> <house number>
<post code> <city or suburb>
NORWAY

But when trying to force these fields into the closest equivalent in a very US-centric form they ended up mailing it to:

<my name> Oslo/OSLO//<And a lot of garbage letters and symbols>
/NORWAY

It eventually arrived, but it was a month delayed. It probably helped that I have a unique name, and that we're only about 5 million people in Norway. I doubt it would have arrived if I my name was "John Smith" and lived in New York and some web form had munged it to John Smith NY/New York;/ USA///

Sorry for the long rant ;)

Answer 3

How you accept the user data is based on what you want to do with it. Having said that

Name: This is also country specific but based on the suggestions I've got "family name" and "given name" are generic/common across any country. Some names have multiple "family name"'s.

Address: Different countries have different address formats. You can get different format information here

Answer 4

As a non-US resident, who has a very non-standard address (live on a boat, which requires additional address information, and very often does not have a Royal Mail standarised address) I do find that US-centric registration forms are very irritating. As far as name goes, I have found first and last name appropriate. For addresses I would consider either leaving labels off for most lines or labelling them innocuously as "address line 1", etc. In addition make sure that there are a number of such lines; the dialog box is long enough to accept multiple fields; and the dialogs will accept address delimiters such as comma. The only ones I would leave as they often displayed are Town/City and Country. Zipcodes should not be referred to as such - the minimum courtesy I would expect from a registration form is a request for Zip/Post code.

Though not directly related to registration forms, I have previously provided a (very long) answer to a question on validation/normalisation of international data. It is not a simple topic.