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…