David Burrowes' Blog

I sometimes find myself wondering about the role of product and component names in overall user experience. Of course, these tend to be defined by marketing rather than "UI" people, and I think that's the right group to be giving those names.

At the same time, of course, they are part of the overall user experience. So, this is yet another one of those indications that everyone on a team needs to be on the same page when it comes to the user experience. It doesn't do much good for the interaction design to be delivering one flavor of experience, visual design to do another, the programmers a third, docs a fourth and marketing a fifth. (Unfortunately, I have yet to work on a project where this isn't happening to one degree or another).

I often find myself thinking of the names that Apple rolled out when OS X was introduced. Carbon, Cocoa, Aqua. Really, these are pretty meaningless names. Yet, they were catchy and once you were oriented about what they meant, they served as great handles. I also think of the wave of "Active Foobar" that came out of Microsoft for a while. I assume these were meaningful to folks tied into the Microsoft ecosystem (personally, I always found the "Active" prefix a bit distracting. and just as meaningless as, say "Sun Java" as a prefix).

No sizable company seems to keep its focus long enough to maintain a stable and predictable set of names over the long haul. I don't know if Apple is still producing things with elemental names, but I don't feel I've seen any. I'd expect the "Active" prefix has mostly been replaced by ".net" related things (yet, what is the naming family around that?)

Anyway, I think these names are actually reasonably important and probably shouldn't be changing based on executive-whim. It would be nice to see more well-thought-out names for products and subsystems that reflect the overall intended experience in some manner. I do feel like companies are beginning to get the sense that this is important (Sun, with its whole Share and Participation Age messaging does recognize that the company as a whole has to put some stakes in the ground to define what it is about).