Fighting back against proper noun feature names

I posted on LinkedIn recently a year ago (this got lost in my drafts!) after some discussion in the Content + UX Slack group about naming product features. Here’s what I shared:

Every time you name a product feature that doesn’t require a name (e.g. “My Account” instead of just “account”) you’re adding cognitive load for users, increasing difficulty for your support staff and technical writers, and adding unnecessary weight to the product that makes it harder to be nimble in the future. 

Take it from a veteran of a 30+ year-old tech company that named EVERYTHING: It is a waking nightmare, and every seemingly-minor taxonomic question ends up being a puzzle, if not a full-blown battle. It’s awful. Don’t name things if you don’t have to. 

The post generated some useful discussion. One thing I learned quickly: feature naming is even harder in other languages. In German, for instance, every noun (insofar as I can tell from my DuoLingo lessons) gets Capital Letters. I clarified further:

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