The Hidden Power of Naming Things

It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

— The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

All comers in the world of startups — lurkers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, all of us — have a story embedded inside us from which we draw energy. The energy to wake up every morning to make one more incremental tweak to our app, to send out one more cold email, or to log into google analytics to see if that last SEO change has moved the needle in our favor.

My energy comes from a different quote from the same book.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

— The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

I discovered today that my passion has a name. I discovered that what I do best is called UX Writing.

Let me back up a little.

Your story, the one embedded deep inside you, has been there for months, maybe years waiting to be told. So, when you decide to take the entrepreneurial plunge, you are already months aheads ahead of your average user.

You know your vision. You know the value you can bring to the table. To you, your product practically sells itself. And very often, your website copy reflects this sense of knowing more than your reader.

Here is a fantastic example of what I mean. Take a look at this BEFORE version of the Hosted Metrics landing page.

The Hosted Metrics team was very confident that their product could support all manner of “Metrics and Monitoring Software”. Their target user base? Not so much. They had NO idea which monitoring softwares they could actually outsource to Hosted Metrics. This disconnect was likely costing them conversions.

When they approached me for help, my response was simple,“Name things.”

Here is what I advised —

… list out the top 3–4 monitoring and metrics products…

when you put the product names up for people to see, you show that you know exactly what your sweet spot is. People trust transparency. Don’t make them hunt for names of products below the fold.

(Full Disclosure — Actually, their new version is even better than what I had proposed in my response. Kudos to the team on that.)

This is the value a UX Writer brings to the table.

Their biggest advantage is that while they understand your value, they actually work for your user. They listen to your story while giving you a means to talk to the people with credit cards who can pay for your hard work.

If your website is suffering from low conversions or unclear messaging, you are probably missing quality UX Writing of the sort that we at Second Look provide. UX Writing may the unnamed x-factor which helps your lurkers convert!

• At Second Look, we offer personalized, honest feedback and suggestions for your website.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 339,876+ people.

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