What: An interactive tool to help the user brainstorm a business name.
Why: People with business idea sometimes just need a kickstart, and data proves that they often have a hard time coming up with a business name.
Major learning point: Design and testing go hand-in-hand and are inseparable from each other.
Highlight: Currently in production.
Born in an intern hackathon, GoDaddy NameStormer is the brainchild of Team Baby Got Hack (comprised by GoDaddy summer interns Proshonjit Mitra, Claire Tang, Jenny Li, Maurizio Diaz and Paari Gopal). NameStormer was declared as the Best Hack in the Customer Experience category and was pushed by the company’s senior leadership team to be developed further.
It started off as a business name recommendation system and was nameless at the time, but we soon realized that it would be both very unoriginal and hard-to-achieve in the span of the 24-hour hackathon. After identifying the needs and problems of our target user, we soon realized we had to come up with an interactive method to solve this problem.
Fair warning: This project, due to its nature of being born in a hackathon, didn’t follow conventional stages of design and development and things happened like in a Christopher Nolan movie, i.e. in a non-linear fashion.
Ideation process (hackathon)
The inspiration behind the tool was what users did while trying to come up with a business name from a business idea. We tossed around a few things people in our team employed and found a common theme, brainstorming a name definitely involved spit balling various words from a starting idea. Words lead to other words and so on before finding the right words that would make the name. We came up with the idea to visualize this process and sketched a mock up for the same.
User Persona
Hackathon idea
User enters keywords in a search bar, each keyword spawns an individual bubble cloud of a unique color scheme, with the entered keyword being the central bubble, and the outer bubbles consisting of words that are the closest relatives to the word in the central bubble. The number of bubble clouds generated will hence be equal to the number of keywords entered. At any given time, the current selection would be determined by the contents of the central bubble. The current selection generates available domain names for the user to Add to Cart and thus get a lock on the business name.
The user can then play around with each bubble cloud, by clicking on the outer bubbles one at a time, to make that word the central bubble (thus generating a new set of related words each time) as well as make it part of the current selection. As the current selection updates with each click, so does the list of domains.
Post hackathon
Once the project was declared a winner, the senior leadership team approached us to develop this idea further and were introduced to the Domain Search team. The domains team saw the merits and flaws in the project and asked us to conduct Usability tests on this version. As the only UX Designer on the team, I took charge of the project and started designing the Usability tests for our target population. The idea was to redesign and perhaps even re-ideate the whole thing per actual user research.
Usability tests
I designed and conducted several usability tests with help from my colleagues and team members.
Target users:
Our target population was anyone who had a business idea but did not necessarily have a name for their business and was willing to start the business in the next 6 months.
Modes of testing:
Moderated tests – 4 users
Unmoderated tests (on UserTesting.com) – 6 users
Several minor A/B tests (on UsabilityHub) for 500 users at each time
I ran a qualitative analysis in the form of affinity maps to find the major problems from all the users we ran the tests with.
Key findings from the study were as follows:
Most participants thought of NameStormer as a novel idea and had never seen anything like it before.
People wanted to know if the name that they were trying to finalize was unique (in the form of copyrights and trademarks) and if they were Search-Engine friendly.
Most people thought that the relations in the bubble cloud representation was murky and went off-topic pretty fast.
Most people had different approaches to entering keywords and none of them could guess the right way of entering keywords.
Almost none of the participant could guess one of the features – the drag and reorder feature.
Some of them had confusion regarding the Spanish button.
Most of them found the layout to be intuitive.
Aha! moment of the research – despite of the visible flaws in the prototype, the users could relate to the fact that this was very different from the name generators out there and was catered specifically towards business ideas. As an idea and a tool, they thought it would be very useful for them.
Re-ideation and iteration:
The results of the study confirmed some existing doubts I had about the design, but also acted as an eye opener in other ways. Some things were so fundamentally wrong about the design, that I had to rethink the whole idea of the system again.
About the bubble cloud
Although people thought of the idea of a bubble cloud as “neat” and “novel”, there were usability problems with it. Sometimes words that were generated were unrelated. While other times, the interactions associated (such as selecting and deleting) were not very visible. Sometimes words ran outside the bubbles which was not ideal either.
Solution: My solution to all of these problems was three-fold-
Every time a user enters a key word, a topic detection algorithm can be run to understand the topic the user is topic about, and the bubble cloud that is generated will only show words restricted to the topic of the original keyword.
Animations could be introduced to make each interaction more visible.
Sizes of bubbles would be dynamic based on size of the word it houses. Thus changing the shape of the bubble cloud representation from that of a sunflower to that of a planetary system.
Top 3 things users wanted from a service like NameStormer:
Help generate multiple combinations of business names from keywords and display them in some order.
Give each name a score and back that score up with unique domain names, their SEO value, social availability, etc.
Have an option to come up with a smart name, rather than just appending keywords, because sometimes they might be in need of a creative nitroboost in their brainstorming process.
Based on these insights, I came up with a completely new prototype for GoDaddy NameStormer.
Some of the wireframes that I designed for the final prototype can be seen below.
Current Status
The project has been handed off to GoDaddy’s Search team and they have decided to take it to production and run it as an experiment on 1% of the users.
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