Naming a new feature

Company: Intuit | Role: Senior Content Designer

 

Challenge

Figure out the right name for a new accounting feature.

Executives want to see financial performance across the whole business. The problem is, an enterprise business usually consists of multiple companies, each with their own accounting books and ways of organizing data. This creates headaches for accountants, who have to put together a single, consolidated report.

To help accountants with this, Intuit’s new product lets them create high-level categories (“Flour”) that bring together similar data from multiple companies (“Regular Flour,” “Premium Flour,” “Almond Flour,” and so on).

So, what’s the best name for this concept? Is it “high-level category”? “Parent account”? Something else?

 

Solution

Use a systematic approach to come up with a user-friendly name.

Competitive analysis: I did a content audit of other products to find out what terms were being used across the industry. I discovered there was no standard term—each competitor had their own words for this concept.

 

Customer research: I “listened” to customers and studied how they talk about this concept by…

  • Reading community forum posts and support center content

  • Reviewing customer interview transcripts

  • Analyzing keyword searches in our help center


Stakeholder consultation: I gathered input from internal partners on customer needs and business requirements.

 

Best practices and principles: I developed and applied a set of criteria to evaluate potential names.

Ultimately, the team and I concluded that “rollup” or "account rollup" would work best:

  • It was commonly used by our customers when they talked about this concept

  • It was precise, distinct, concise, and memorable

  • It worked well when we tried it out in various contexts, including the mobile app experience

 

Validation: I incorporated terminology questions into subsequent user testing sessions to verify understanding and acceptance.

 

Outcome

A quiet success.

The new “rollup” feature was included in the alpha launch of Intuit’s new enterprise accounting product. We tracked customer feedback, and it revealed no issues with the terminology, confirming the effectiveness of our naming decision.

While a successful naming process might seem like a "non-event," in this case no news is good news — users intuitively understood the feature without terminology becoming a barrier.