User Experience of Nomenclature

work-in-progress

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

That quote is the clichéd but a true one from Steve Jobs in his closing Q&A in the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997.

This applies even to the Nomenclatures1 that we use in email subjects, meeting titles, and even files & folder names.

I’ve seen so many meeting invites titled, “discussion”, “meeting”, “decision-making for tech stack”, etc. Of course, the most common offenders are emails that have subjects sent by people without imagination, “Pick your brain”, “Is Friday OK”, “Beta Test”, etc.

A descriptive email subject is a good indicator of what the content should be, “CompanyName › Beta Invitation”, “Introduction: PersonOne ‹› PersonTwo”, etc. are fantastic examples of good ones.

Meeting invites titled, “Intro: Brajeshwar ‹› PersonBeingIntroduced” is way easier to parse fast and still get the gist of the details. Even if I’m the one inviting the PersonBeingIntroduced because when they sees the subject/title in their calendar, they know who they are meeting without reading the full content of the meeting invite. Similarly, something in the lines of, “CompanyName › Project Kickstart” would be enough to tell me everything about that meeting.

I’m going to tell you a story from the early days of my career. A back-end developer and I used to build many software, and websites for clinics, and physicians. This was the time when websites were built on TABLES2. Assets in them were separate .gif, .png, or .jpg files.

For instance, to name all types of arrows, I’d used a reverse but logical naming convention, such as, arrow-left, arrow-right, arrow-up, arrow-down instead of the way we say, left-arrow or right-arrow. This was the early 2000s. After over a decade, I met the team maintaining the website later in the 2010s, and the first thing the team leader reminded me was the standard of names, files, and folder organization in the project. It made it easy for the team to navigate, know where things are likely to be, and they are sort-able easily into the right categories, groups, etc. Personally, it was a very proud moment.

We all have gone through the final_final filenames. That website_comp_v4.2_final_final_final_final_of_the_fina.psd was never the final one.

While dealing with files, if you’d rather not deal with categories/tags for folders, use international standard dates to start the name your files and folders, YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD. Something like;

Of course, if the file or folder are of a specific item/object but time if the variant, then it is better to have;

Now, naming roads such as Hollywood Boulevard, MG Road makes sense as they are descriptive and tells you where they are. Unfortunately, this is not so for files, folders, groups, categories on your devices. Don’t name your files like invoice-file.pdf, or Discussion Folder, or named your team/group as design-team or AI-group.

Be descriptive, not verbose.

Try to be descriptive, be helpful, and be consistent.

  1. Nomenclature is a system of names or terms, along with the rules for forming those terms within a particular field of art or science. Its principles range from the loose conventions of everyday speech to internationally agreed rules governing specialist terminology in scientific and other disciplines. Where onomastics studies names themselves, nomenclature is concerned more with the conventions by which names get made. ↩

  2. The HTML <table> element marks up genuinely tabular data, nesting rows in <tr>, data cells in <td>, and header cells in <th>, optionally grouped into <thead>, <tbody>, and <tfoot>. A <caption> describes what the table holds, while scope=”col” or scope=”row” on header cells tells assistive technology which cells each header governs. ↩