What’s in a name?

Posted November 3rd, 2008 by David Hamill

I noticed an advert the other day for Channel 4 Watch online internet catch-up service. It reminded me of a common problem on the web – branding things with names that nobody understands. Channel 4 have done the right thing. Their offering is the Ronseal Quick Drying Wood Stain of the catch-up TV world. So what does that make iPlayer? How many products could you legitimately give the name iPlayer to. I can think of:

• A cheap rip-off from the iPod (sorry I couldn’t help myself)
• A gaming console
• A new Roy of the Rovers sketch about a football playing robot

I’m sure you can think of a few of your own. It will take Channel 4 a bit less effort to get people to understand their offering. Meanwhile if you speak to a few of your less tech-savvy (licence-paying) friends and family, you’ll find that some of them aren’t sure what iPlayer is. The BBC now has to spend a lot more of your money explaining the concept.

[A previous post that I wrote about images on catch up TV gets most of its referrals from the search term "Silent Witness Catch up". I've added a little comment on that post to help those people on their way.]

So what’s this got to do with your website?

A lot of people who haven’t used iPlayer yet will think it’s a great invention. They’ve seen the adverts, they just didn’t understand what it was. So to them, the concept is hidden behind the name.

Have a look around your own website for links and headings that don’t make instant sense to someone with little experience of them. Your users will not click all the links that don’t make sense to them just to find out what they are. Instead they will just ignore the links that don’t make sense. If they need to read a paragraph before the heading makes sense, then the heading is not doing its job.

Intranets are full of these bad links

Intranets are a haven for this type of mistake. In the corporate world, Item 1 on the agenda for the steering group of any new initiative is to think of a bizarre name to ‘brand’ the concept. This is the name that will make it totally unfindable on the intranet. So the employee looking for the company’s flexible working policy will miss the link to ‘Super-Flexo’ or whatever it ends up being called.

“But we’ve communicated it, so people will understand it” is the common response from the project team. Well BBC have ‘communicated’ the iPlayer and lots of people still don’t know what it is.

Describe first, name second

On your website / intranet you should use links and headings that are descriptive before introducing the name the organisation has decided to give it. In a perfect world the name would be descriptive in the first place. But getting your colleagues to think in this way is easier said than done. After all iPlayer is a cooler sounding name than Watch Online, even if it is unhelpful.

Use trigger words

The thing that makes Watch Online such a good name is that it is probably a trigger word. I’d love to hear that Channel 4 found these words in their search logs and decided to use it as the name for the service. However I think it’s probably more to do with them also making archive clips available. Something that Scottish Television did some time ago. They just didn’t choose such a good name.

Disclaimer: I don’t hate BBC iPlayer

I’m actually a very big fan of both the BBC and the iPlayer I just think it has a silly name. If we were comparing interfaces rather than names then iPlayer would win easily.

Tags: catch-up TV, iPlayer, navigation, trigger words