Does your app save content offline? Humanize your filenames.
- 27 Aug, 2017
I am on a quest to help UX designers think about humanizing their products. In this post I’d like to talk about humanizing filenames when your application saves an invoice. Any application that bills it’s customers should have a human readable file name. Your customers need those invoices when they submit expense reports. It’s frustrating to have a folder full of poorly named files when you are trying to find a specific invoice. I’d like to use Buffer to demonstrate my point. Buffer is an awesome app that has a great user interface. It’s the contrast between a normally great UI and it’s in-human invoice file names that illustrates the problem.
Download an Invoice
The download UI is below. When you click on either Download Invoice as PDF or Download Receipt as PDF a file is dropped into your download folder. 
Anyone see a problem here?
The receipt filenames are woefully unhelpful. It’s very obvious what is going on here. The developer who wrote this code probably had the requirement that each receipt filename should be unique. Come tax time I’m going to have a folder full of these poorly named files. I will either need to rename them all or manually check each file to see if it includes the correct months. It’s not such a big deal with Buffer since my invoices are all the same amount. I would rip my hair out in frustration if I had to manually match different invoice amounts with the appropriate file. This is an easy problem to solve by adopting the following naming convention.
Do this instead
application - receipt - YEAR-MO - unique ID.pdf
So, in the example above Buffer should name the files
buffer - receipt - 2017-01 - BHz7Z.pdf
buffer - receipt - 2017-02 - AMz7Z.pdf
buffer - receipt - 2017-03 - aLz7Z.pdf
buffer - receipt - 2017-04 - Ajz7Z.pdf
Humanizing information removes cognitive friction in your application. If you allow users to save files offline, make sure that the filenames are as useful to them as the rest of your product.
Stay Ahead in Product Management!
Ready to elevate your product management game? Join our community of passionate professionals and be the first to receive exclusive insights, tips, and strategies directly in your inbox. Subscribe now to our newsletter and ensure you're always in the loop with the latest product management trends and wisdom bombs!