Courtesy Titles and website design guidelines

Do you need a courtesy title? Do you want one? If so, do you get the title you want, such as "Dr" or "Reverend"? Do you think they should be confined to the dustbin of history? Did you know that laws in both the UK and the US on gender discrimination and data protection may require you to make courtesy titles optional on your website?

Banned by the law

Hardly surprising from an American company though, the US Constitution (Article I, Section 9) expressly forbids the granting of titles. The Federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act states that you cannot by law require someone to give a title as doing so could form the basis of sex discrimination. Titles of nobility are also banned in Canada and many other republics and their use there can cause major diplomatic rows involving heads of state. Also, credit card Order forms almost universally allow the title to be dropped from how your name appears on the card, in response to public demand. The routine use of the title Mr for every male browsing a UK site also causes legal problems when viewed in The Netherlands. In the Netherlands the title "Mr." denotes someone (male or female) with a law degree. It would be improper - in certain circumstances perhaps even illegal - for someone without a law degree to use that title.

Misuse of titles

Esquire. How laughably datable that is now, yet only 30 years ago it was routinely added to every UK male's surname without thinking. What most people didn't realise though is that if you don't care about courtesy titles then you probably don't want a redundant suffix on your name and if you do care about titles and nomenclature then you probably already know that only a tiny proportion of men were actually properly entitled to use it. Fortunately Esq. has rapidly disappeared from common usage, thanks perhaps to computers which require names to be in a standard form.

Defacto naming standards emerge

Suffixes rarely make an appearance on any web form now, perhaps to the annoyance of Bill Gates III. Nonetheless, the same standardisation which has seen suffixes dropped and "Christian" names renamed as First or Given names (thankfully), has also caused the title or name prefix to become mandatory for those constrained by old ways of thinking. Rather than being an optional courtesy title, you probably won't find an online insurance form which can be filled out without specifying that you are Mr, Miss, Mrs or Ms. At least women have something of a choice and are asked what title they want. Men just get one regardless. It seems the customer is always right except when it comes to using their name as it appears on their birth or marriage certificate. Website designers don't have the right to dictate to people how they should use their names and many users resent having their name altered because of a webform. Furthermore we live in an increasingly diverse society where people with different cultural backgrounds or names from different languages all living together don't necessarily all conform to the same styles of address.

The good and the bad

Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk have been held up as the models for good e-commerce sites since they began. Yet, more than 7 years later, few sites have learned from their example in flexibility and offering what customers want rather than what companies think customers must have. Neither site requires a courtesy title when registering on the site, placing an order or making an enquiry. Why then is it such a problem for everyone else? Other user friendly sites include VisitScotland, John Lewis and Swinton Insurance. Sites requiring a title whether you want one or not include Scottish Power, John Lewis(!) - no firstnames allowed here either, Argos, Homebase, Tesco, BT and Britannia Building Society. The order of merit award for total absurtity must though go to British Airways - check out the title list on the British Airways website!. Maybe it would be easier to just allow people to type the title in? Perhaps BA will be introducing drop lists for Given names and Surnames next, they seem to like them so much? This is really all rather bizarre really since over 1/3 of people in the UK do not use a title when it is made optional on a webform. You probably don't know that if they are mandatory on your site.

The web is an international medium. If your site caters for people from more than one country, particularly non English speaking countries, it is clearly reasonable to assume they might have a different naming style or terms. It is completely inappropriate to force the entire planet to conform to dated UK English language specific forms of address. A German would probably rather be "Herr" than "Mr". A Spaniard "Senor". A Frenchman "Monsieur". I won't go into Japanese and the seven levels of Keigo here, reader-san. You only have to look at none other than the BBC to see that foreign languages titles still apply when speaking in English, there's plenty Herrs and Monseiurs on France. This means that non English speakers browsing your site should keep their native language titles rather than assuming an English form of address.

It isn't all formality, Americans tend not to bother at all with titles and this is enshrined in style guides - the widely used Associated Press Stylebook, 1980 standard stated that a title should only be used if there is no first name. However, this was recently changed so that titles will not be used at all by the Associated Press. This quote regarding the change is a lesson for all those who force titles to be mandatory:

"The change, which will be reflected in the forthcoming edition of The Associated Press Stylebook, reflects the preference of the vast majority of the news cooperative's newspaper members. Courtesy titles were eliminated several years ago in AP sports reports and in AP services for radio and television stations."

Excuses, excuses

So why is it that all men are "Mr" when it comes to most UK websites? I can suggest three reasons:

1. Using a title you can attempt to deduce someone's sex.
2. You can use a title to construct a salutation when writing to them (the two are NOT the same - many men have the salutation "Dear Sir" even though they do not have the actual title of Sir).
3. You do not cause offence by being unduly informal

Some reasons why the above are bogus.

Using a title you can attempt to deduce someone's sex.
Many people have the title "Dr" or "Professor" which does not reveal sex. If you need to know someone's sex (e.g. for a car insurance quote) then why not ask it? If you do not specifically require to know the person's gender then you are likely breaking the law by forcing them to reveal it through the mandatory use of a courtesy title. Here is the third principle of the Data Protection Act:

"Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which they are processed". The wide definition of processing should be borne in mind when considering the Third Principle. In complying with this Principle, data controllers should seek to identify the minimum amount of information that is required in order properly to fulfil their purpose and this will be a question of fact in each case. If it is necessary to hold additional information about certain individuals, such information should only be collected and recorded in those cases."

Storing my title means storing my gender. Storing my gender is excessive in relation to processing an order or credit card booking since both my credit card and the post office can operate without using titles. Clearly this is in excess of the "minimum required" and many companies have stated to me that they use courtesy titles to work out how many men and women use their site. I'm sure this statistical gathering is also incompatible with the above principle.

Flexibility and customer satisfaction

It isn't about being informal, it's about having the flexibility to meet customer needs. Some cultures, notably Japan and Germany tend to prefer more formality. However, other cultures, such as the US, Canada and Australia do not. It's not about forcing everyone to be informal, it's about trying to persuade webdesigners that there's a world out there with varying needs and by having a flexible webform you can cater for these needs much more effectively rather than assuming the world all has one naming convention. This means the title field should be optional and free text. So if your title is "Brigadeer" ,"Prof." "HRH", "President", "Lord" or "Inspector", you can type it in a box if you want to. If you don't, then no-one is forcing you. Furthermore, if you have a preference for a salutation such as "Dear Mr Smith", "Dear Craig", "Hi Sir Richard", "Bonjour Maurice", "Hola Manuel" or "Hey Dude" then you type that into a box too. Having one field is also very important if you do not want to offend over one fifth of the world's population who write their surname first (including China and Japan). What would writing Smith John rather than John Smith do for your customer care? Having two fields does not allow you to concatenate them in the correct order, whereas asking someone to enter their full name uses their preferences rather than your assumptions. With one field you can easily accommodate all nationalities, naming preferences, name orders, suffixes, and titles.