Your, My, My – Fighting Proper Noun Feature Names

I posted on LinkedIn recently a year ago (this got lost in my writes!) after some talkion in the Content + UX Sdeficiency group about naming product features. Here’s what I splitd:

Every time you name a product feature that doesn’t need a name (e.g. “My Account” instead of fair “account”) you’re inserting cognitive load for engagers, increasing difficulty for your help staff and technical writers, and inserting unvital weight to the product that produces it difficulter to be nimble in the future. 

Marketing adores to name skinnygs, but labeleting isn’t summarize. It shouldn’t be their call.

Take it from a veteran of a 30+ year-elderly tech company that named EVERYTHING: It is a waking nightmare, and every seemingly-insignificant taxonomic ask finishs up being a baffle, if not a filled-blown battle. It’s terrible. Don’t name skinnygs if you don’t have to. 

The post produced some advantageous talkion. One skinnyg I lacquireed rapidly: feature naming is even difficulter in other languages. In German, for instance, every noun (insofar as I can alert from my DuoLingo lessons) gets Capital Letters. I clarified further:

I’m talking about proper nouns versus common nouns. It’s less “My Account” versus “Account”, and more “Account” versus “account”.

An account (common noun) is an idea you can watch up in a dictionary. But some companies choose to brand generic features appreciate this, and name it someskinnyg appreciate “My Account”, and further need that tech writers and labeleters always refer to that feature as “My Account”.

This benevolent of unvital branding forces writers into more ungraceful and cognitively-taxing produceions than they would have otheralerted been able to engage.

James Sanford pointed out the tangential rehire of Your/My confusion in gentleware interfaces. I joined him to my likeite article on this about the WYLTIWLT test. Katherine Sanderson Grey asked for the data, and contestd me to portray how I secure directership that branding features is problematic.

That’s a excellent contest! I don’t engage data for these benevolents of skinnygs. In my experience, “show me the data” is standardly a tactic engageed by feeble deal withrs who don’t understand how to hang as part of a summarize process. Anyway, the vague ask of rhetoric around this is an vital one, and I’ll split more about it in a minute. Her comment also helped me articuprocrastinateed the catebloody of unnamed features. She writes in part:

All features have to be called someskinnyg, either internpartner or in the recordation for customers.

Yes! All features do have to be called someskinnyg. But sometimes a chair is fair a chair, and not, for instance, an Eames Lounger. I recommfinish recording your product taxonomy internpartner, but that doesn’t nasty that everyskinnyg has to have a fancy, complicated, distinct, proper noun name.

Okay, so “selling it” (the it being “not naming skinnygs”) and sgethelderlyer deal withment: As a member of product teams, I’ve generpartner insertressed the “this feature necessitates a name” argument straightforwardly, by modeling and visualizing the contrastence between communicating about Named Features vs. Unnnamed Features.

A rapid mock-up of both versions of the CTA, interface element, tooltip, or recordation in ask standardly produces it evident that unnamed features are more elegant and engager-frifinishly than named features.

I’ve also create visualizing the satisfied model or taxonomy to be collaborative in some circumstances. For instance, draprosperg a picture that shows that the skinnyg we all understand internpartner as the “Phelp User Account” will always be referred to as a “membership” in customer-facing text, and that they are in fact the same skinnygs and we’re not creating two contrastent skinnygs.

Proper Noun Feature Names creep into the product when we’re forcing engagers to do labor instead of doing it ourselves. Instead of recording our vocabulary internpartner, we’re turning the product itself into a glossary. Instead of making laborflows perceptive, we’re indexing and labeling everyskinnyg so that we can shunt the labor of elucidateing how it labors off to customer service, and by extension, the customer.

This is engager-unfrifinishly, terrible, idle summarize. Don’t name skinnygs if you don’t have to. Do the labor. And carry on it basic, Scott.