Talking the language of users

Designing a good user interface is as much about language as layout. The better you can name and describe the elements of your software product, the more intuitive it will be to use.

This is the challenge that I’m wrestling with early on a Sunday morning.

These are the core elements that matter to users in CANDDi today:

Trackers: What is a tracker? Really it’s the piece of code you apply to a site or campaign in order to track things. Of course users don’t care about creating a piece of code, they just want to track something. Rather than asking people to ‘Create a new Tracker’ as we do currently, we might be better off asking people to ‘Track a new location’, for websites or ‘Track a new campaign’ for emails. The question is, where do social media presences sit between those two. Are they locations or campaigns?

Goals: If you’re going to monitor a user’s progress through your website, then you need to define the stages that you want to monitor. These we call ‘Goals’. This is fairly industry (Google) standard terminology, but can we improve on it? The problem is one of context: if you’re just tracking websites, the perhaps ‘Pages’ is a better term, since that is exactly what you are tracking. But what about in email or social media tracking? ‘Pages’ becomes an irrelevant term. Perhaps the answer is a slightly more involved wizard, that allows the user to define different types of goal that are clearly naed?

Contacts: CANDDi’s raison d’etre - the ability to understand and manage online interactions at the level of the real individual rather than the anonymous number - means that we are very interested in what we call ‘Contacts’. These can be individuals the system has detected and started to track interactions with, or information uploaded by the user. But for either, is ‘Contacts’ the right word? I can’t make an empirical argument for this - it’s just feeling - but is ‘Community’ a better term? After all, is the value of CANDDi not the ability to build and interact with a community of customers and prospects more effectively? Or is that marketing bs overtaking my rational brain?

Answers on a postcard (or ideally in the comments box below) because as ever, we would appreciate your input.