Plea to App Store developers for meaningful app names

[Charles Belov]

Developers:

As you may have noticed, the App Store doesn't show customers a description of your app until the customer clicks on the icon and is taken to your app page. This means if I want to see descriptions of 100 apps I have to click 100 times.

I'm not going to do that. I might click 5 or at most 10.

I've already commented to Apple about wanting a list where I can see a brief description of all apps so I can find the ones I'm interested in. This may or may not happen, but in the meantime, give your app as meaningful a title and icon as possible; usability expert Jakob Neilsen calls this "information scent."

Good app names actually found on the App Store:

Speak my iTunes
QR Encoder Pro
The Unarchiver

I'm not going to click on a vague or cute name just to find out what it does. Apps I'm probably not going to click on:

Touchgrind
Hexapper
Antimatter

These might be perfectly good apps, but there's no information scent for me to know whether they might be for me. And I really don't want to waste a click to find out.

Please do yourself and me a favor and use clear names and icons so that I can find your needle in the App Store haystack.

 

[Mal]

I have mixed feelings on this. Certainly having some good idea what an app is is important, but so is having a unique and memorable name. TouchGrind, for instance, while it may not catch your attention, would be quickly noticeable by most who rise skateboards, and thus gets the attention of it's intended audience. I have no idea what the other two bad examples you posted are, so of course I wouldn't be clicking on them unless I searched for something to do what they do (remember that the search function does search descriptions, so even if the name doesn't match, you can assume that it has something to do with what you searched for).

Bottom line: there's a lot of thought that goes into picking a good name. They're not always going to be hits with everyone, and some name choices are bad, but just going for a "meaningful" name isn't always going to be the right solution, or at least not the whole solution.

jW

 

[amarcus]

A developers perspective: A lot of names are taken already.