The Challenge
Define intuitive name for digital customer services.
Our understanding to language is shaped by our culture and life experiences, digital customer services like chatbot is not well known to most people yet, making an intuitive naming for those services a tough challenge.
The Outcome
A list of service name that validated by user test.
My Role
I designed and conducted the tests independently.
Project Background
This study start from a question from a director of customer service department: “what does Customer Service Messenger(客服即時通) means?” (it is a translation from chinese question, we actually use the “live chat” to indicate the service in English.)
When the product manager bring the question back to team, we all surprised about that. The “Messenger” means you can text customer service specialist question and get their feedback online. It should be very easy to understanding, isn’t it?
We soon realize the problem: the age. The age of all design team members are between 25–35. We all had been through the heyday of Yahoo Messenger, which is a messaging app were only popular in high school and college students between 2003 to 2010 in Taiwan. That means those people who under 20 and above 45 years old may not familiar with the name, and the director is about 55 years old.
The question revealed a blind spot to us: the design we thought intuitive maybe not really easy to understand. To resolve the problem, I conducted a study to optimize the naming of our digital services.
The Study
The study includes 2 phases, the first one is to define what is the “intuitive” name in user’s mind, in this phase, I collected keywords about how people indicated our digital services. The second phase is to test if user can associate the new name with the service correctly.
Collect Keywords →Revise name →Testing
Phase 1. Collect keywords: Imagine search keyword survey
The first question is: What is the “intuitive ” service name to user?
If we just ask user for that, they probably won’t able to answer it. I want to know how people indicate something they don’t familiar with, so I ask myself “what is the scenario that most close to inquiring something we don’t know its name?” The answer is SEARCH.
The search keywords usually represented the terms most related to the search target in user’s mind. Therefore, I designed a questionnaire with short description for each service and invited users to write down the imagine search keyword for them. This is a natural scenario so most people can easily answer the questions.
Phase 2. Revise and test: Name association test
The next step is to revised the service name according to the results in the search keyword survey. However, I don’t know if the revised name clear enough, therefore, I test 5 participants with the revised name.
The test is very simple. I showed the revised names to participants one by one and asked them to describe what kind of service they imagine about the name, if their answer meets the standard description, the new service name will be adopted, otherwise the name will be revised again.
The service name tha validated by user test got some positive feedbacks from customer service department. Although we only test chinese service name in this study, I believed that we can duplicate the test in any other language.
