Most UX, IxD, and Product Designers find themselves occasionally designing a novel interaction. In most cases it’s relatively easy to find an analogous interaction in the real world, or try your bag of tricks for explaining it at a different level. But sometimes you get stumped. When that happens I believe it’s best to think of naming features more like hitting a golf ball than a cue ball.
Names are vehicles for meaning that depend on shared cultural references. Even the most basic of words can have shades of meaning that change depending on what subcultures you have been a part of.
On top of that, cognitive load needs to be taken into account, particularly with analogies and metaphors; that one small additional step can be enough to cause people to halt, or not make the connection at all.
When operating within those limitations, it’s better to use a name that gets 70% of the meaning across to 100% of users, than 100% of the meaning to 70% of users. Yes, those 70% of users that fully understand the meaning are more likely to enjoy your product, but the 30% that didn’t understand will lose flow, connection, or trust in your product.
For example, let’s take the Lasso tool in Photoshop. I assume most people reading this are familiar with it, but for those who aren’t it is a selection tool that uses freehand clicking to define the selection boundary. You draw around what you want to select, you lasso it. It’s catchy (;p), it conveys the meaning well with the metaphor, and if you’re making a mass market app it might be a bad idea.
Unknown tools become blind spots in a user’s vision, we tune out what we don’t understand. This is as true for inscrutable icons as it is for inscrutable feature names.
I believe it was a good move for Adobe. They had a very specific market and the digital vocabulary wasn’t as well defined. Today such a tool might have been called Poly Select, Freehand Select, Draw Select, or in a touch-centric world maybe just Select.
All of those names do a decent job getting the concept across, but they fully convey that this is some form of select tool. It might not get all of the meaning across to all users, but it gets enough across that the users can mentally categorize it and file it away in the “some kinda select” category, instead of the “no clue” bin.
Which brings me back to golf and pool. In golf, you generally want to shoot for incremental steps, “what’s the best I can do *in this situation*”. You won’t get a hole-in-one, but if you can get on the green well under par, you’re doing okay. With pool every shot needs to be a win, there is no second chance so there is no opportunity to set up a next shot.
Get the ball on the green for your users, if you can get them close enough to the meaning, they’ll come back to putt it in on their own.