Hi William,
I'm one of the Fedora UX designers and was pointed to this thread by charcol on
another list.
I would like to express enthusiastic support for having by default a display name field
and a legal name field. This is of particular benefit and interest to women as you clearly
recognize. My legal name is not what people know me by yet it's important for various
gov't docs that my legal name be used. In most contexts the name I go by is more
appropriate and recognizable for everyone. Red Hat allows me as an employee to choose a
displayname for my first name but not my last - my legal last name is not what I go by.
This has definitely caused me some serious real world challenges.
One question I have about having multiple names in one field, from a UX designer POV -
often when retrieving lists of names for display in interfaces, in a Western context they
are often listed lastname firstname in alphaorder. If the field is freeform and the person
inputs first middle last or even more names, how can the lastname be identified so that a
given user can be located in an alphabetically ordered list? This seems like a core front
end use case and I wonder if condensing down to one field is going to cause problems for
systems connecting to the directory. Another consideration - names may be listed in
different orders depending on locale. Eg typical Western format is given middle surname
but other locales (Japan comes to mind) is surname given. Can applications connecting to
the directory be able to display names appropriately for a given locale if there isnt a
way to parse them out correctly? This locale ordering isnt an issue for single names, but
3+ names make it I am
imagining nearly impossible to programmatically parse the user input in any reliably
correct way.
Hope this feedback is helpful.
Cheers,
~m