We are developing a feed for our mobile application that consists of news and activity updates. Looking to use a creative name but not confuse the customer base as to it's purpose. Has anyone been successful with a different naming convention?


Why Apple is Apple?

Because it refers to the illumination, the eureka that happened to Isaac Newton (no matter how much truth there is in this story, it refers to something invaluable).


  1. Try to find the very unique value that the system gives to the Users. Something that would make them love it and would be the cornerstone of it at the same time, something that will not become diminished when you make the pivot. Something that will be a core part of your vision statement. Think big, but be careful of any overpromise you could give.

  2. Experiment with this, brainstorm ideas.

  3. Ask people (even via corridor testing) what they think about it.

  4. Perform a check if the name is not offending or triggering negative emotions in any of the target markets and if there are no "collisions" with other brands on the market.

  5. Select one.

  • Appreciate the recommendations Dominik! Very helpful. – Isabel Apr 5 '17 at 18:32
  • Alternative 3: Ask people what they think the name means. If it's not "news and activities" then scrap it. – Ken Mohnkern May 4 '17 at 21:11

If you are looking at possible label ideas, you can try creating some of your own and doing quick research with users to explore expectations around label language.

A decent starting point would be to look at your users' app and website activity habits to see what kinds of labels are use for this type of information. You can try and build off of the existing patterns in a way so that the effort in understanding what they are consuming is lower/lessened for your users (mixing language and similar visual patterns to educate).

  • Of course! Knowing what your users are already using will let you know what their expectations are most likely to be, so you can use them as a basis if you want to keep the learning curve low(er) or at least come up with a way to take existing knowledge and connect it to what you are trying to teach them – Bradly Zavakos Apr 5 '17 at 20:41

The following steps can help you finding a consistent & meaningful label name for your app:

  1. Organise a quick name brainstorming session with your team
  2. Check the current label language used in your app and try to keep the label language consistency
  3. Organise a quick voting session for the names that your team came up with
  4. Organise a user testing session with your users pool (if you have one) or recruit some users and test with them (although this is quite expensive process if you don't have budget for that). You can use usertesting.com or Treejack (both these tools help you recruit independent users based on your requirement) tool for that.
  5. Repeat the same steps until you get some solid feedback

In the real world testing with 15-20 independent users will do.

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