We have an issue in our company right now where gay people are complaining that our forms are not "gay friendly" we have a wedding registry page where it says groom and bride but they want a different way of presenting it so that it would be acceptable by that demographic. Any good suggestions on how we handle this? (Hope no one gets offended, Its a legitimate question and were actually dealing with this right now)
Here is a screenshot of the form
There's no real standard or perfect way of doing it. Some options:
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Assuming that you can get consultation from the same people who are complaining, I think you'd be better off polling them for comment.
If I was going to make an arbitrary choice on how to do this, I suppose I'd add a same-sex checkbox which changd those labels to text boxes, and allow the applicants to decide their own labels. (instead of making any sort of "one size fits all" decision and filling in something 'alternative')
Have Bride/Groom in a drop down in front of the 2 input fields for first & last name. Have the form default to the hetero configuration (i.e. one line has bride preselected and one line has groom preselected) so the majority of users (no slight on homosexual couples, it's just statistics) don't have to change the form
EDIT: Similiar to @Narveson's answer, but with bride/groom drop downs in front of the name inputs instead of "name of spouse"
EDIT EDIT: I guess its not even relevant whether a person is a bride or a groom for the purpose of the form, I don't imagine you do anything meaningful with the gender information?
Put the first and last name boxes on the same line. I would tell you to do this even if you were keeping the bride and groom terminology.
Name of spouse: (first) [ ] (last) [ ]
Name of other spouse: (first) [ ] (last) [ ]
Even better, just use a single text box for each party's name. Who says everybody has a first name and a last name anyway? Adam and Eve didn't.