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Clear and interesting names is extremely good customer experience. Most companies name their products straight from the ERP system, creating incomprehensible codes that sounds like they come from Star Trek.

Ikea has pioneered so much within service design (design beyond the actual product). The in-store journey, the self-assembly, the assembly instructions, clear naming, clear product display, in-store restaurant experience. The list goes on.

After Ingvar Kamprad retired, he continued travelling the world to do store inspections. Full-day walkthroughs that started in the morning at the loading bay and continued throughout the store. Everything was inspected and a list of follow-up actions was created for the store manager.



At the opposite end of the spectrum we have Sony Mobile, where product names are probably assigned by their worst enemy.

You can fully expect them to release a high end phone called

    Xperia one II 10
as successor to last year's

    Xperia one III
And also a low-end phone called

    Xperia II 10 Ultra 

Making it impossible for buyers to know which phone to buy this year.


Microsoft's school of naming versions, windows (95->98->xp->vista->seven->8...) and xbox (360, one, series x)


Don't worry, Microsoft has addressed their naming difficulties by determining that everything they ever make will now be called CoPilot.


They tried for a while to call everything .NET


> At the opposite end of the spectrum we have Sony Mobile, where product names are probably assigned by their worst enemy.

Or maybe the USB-IF


Reminded me of something not as bad as that, but: another Japanese company (Shimano) also has confusing (to my American brain) product progression.

Currently, their road groupsets rank like this (low to high):

  Claris (8-speed)
  Sora (9-speed)
  Tiagra (10-speed)
  105 (12-speed, available in both mechanical and electronic)
  Ultegra (12-speed, electronic)
  Dura-Ace (12-speed, electronic)
More niche, but Ltwoo (Chinese bicycle parts maker) uses "R9" for its 11-speed groupset offering and "RX" for its 12-speed.


Right, and if you want to buy a mechanical front derailleur for your road bike one of the most loved models for decades has been the Ultegra FD: https://fish.shimano.com/en-US/product/reels/spinning/frontd...

And here is Shimano Tiagra which costs much more: https://fish.shimano.com/en-US/product/reels/conventional/le...

They also have a line of bicycle components called Nexave for city riding. Here's one Shimano Nexave product: https://fish.shimano.com/en-US/product/reels/spinning/frontd...

Oh and here is Shimano Clarus: https://fish.shimano.com/en-US/product/rods/muti-species/cla...

Shimano also make mountain bike components. SLX are a nice midrange set, for example: https://fish.shimano.com/en-US/product/rods/bass/slx_casting...

They even sell cycling specific sunglasses called Technium: https://fish.shimano.com/en-US/product/rods/salmon_steelhead...


The wordless instructions are generally great, except in the occasional instance where there's a confusing panel or two.

Has anyone ever seen an academic analysis of the visual "language" used ? Or even any articles about it, serious or humorous ?


My guess is just that they are quite serious about user testing the manuals. 3-4 iterations and you're good to go. Many companies would never imagine that you could test manuals.


“Journey” is an interesting way to frame purposefully creating an incomprehensible maze to force end users to walk through the entire warehouse. One of the worse “clever” design philosophies I’ve seen, it’s actively user hostile


If everything considered 'user hostile' on this forum actually was, the world economy would look very different. People love going to IKEA.




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