Product naming — the human-centred way
When designing new solutions, whether a service, product or process, the Innovation Hub strives to be human-centred in its approach.
Human-centred design is a creative approach to problem-solving. It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor-made to suit their needs. It begins with building a deep understanding of your users and this continues at every stage of the design process as you gather feedback from them.
Last year, the British Red Cross first aid education team developed a fantastic new product — a set of online tools and resources to help teachers teach first aid. Struggling to pick a product name, one that would appeal to both school teachers and pupils they approached the Innovation Hub for support.
The Innovation Hub jumped at the challenge; we knew our human-centred approach could help. And who better to name a product for teachers and children than teachers and children themselves?
I designed and facilitated a ½ day workshop to develop a shortlist of product names designed and validated by target users. During the workshop, a team of teachers and children from across the country took part in a range of fun and engaging activities to create a long list of nearly 400 ideas. These ideas were then narrowed down and improved on to create a final shortlist.
Post-workshop we used a free online user research platform to test the ideas further and in just 48 hours surveyed 100 teachers and children to confirm the favourites.
At the end of the process, the team had 5 names to choose from, all tested to make sure they would meet the needs of their target audience.
Read on for workshop highlights but do get in touch if you’d like a detailed copy of the workshop agenda.
How we did it:
Naming 101: For inspiration, the Innovation Hub gave a masterclass on how some of our favourite brands were named. The teachers and children were fascinated to learn that Instagram is a combination of ‘instant camera’ and ‘telegram’ and Pandora comes from ‘all gifted’ in Greek.
Name association game: We played a selection of warm-up games to get the creative sparks flying, build confidence and level the playing field between the teachers and children. A favourite was the name association game where participants stood in a circle and in turn had to come up with a word to describe an aspect of the product. Once a player could not think of a unique word to add to the list, they were out and had to sit down with the last person standing the winner. Who’d have thought there would be 77 ways to say ‘young people’ and 55 phrases for ‘saving lives’? Lists of the words generated were added to our inspiration wall.
Territories: We used many ideation techniques to develop a long list of ideas but found this to be the most successful. We placed 7 large pieces of paper around the room, each with a name generating instruction (i.e. ‘Name that includes a ‘doing word’, ‘Name that describes the product in two words’). Participants were given post-it notes and a couple of minutes to add names to each of the themes. We used a dot voting technique to surface the best ideas. Participants then developed the ideas with the most votes using randomly given activities (i.e. ‘misspell the name’, ‘merge parts of two names to create a new one’, ‘swap parts of the name around‘ ‘make the name rhyme’.)
Final Idea Presentation: After many rounds of ideation, voting and iteration we had developed a strong shortlist of ideas. In pairs, the participants had 10 minutes to improve on one of these ideas to create a final name, associated logo and storyboard for a TV advert. These were then presented to the First Aid Education Team.
Check out the product and it’s the final name here.
But what was my favourite from the day? — It has to be ‘Firstaidy McFirst Aid Face’ developed by a creative 14-year-old from Surrey — unfortunately, that name didn’t make the shortlist …
