How much effort goes into a brand name? Sometimes millions of dollars and hours of user research and analysis. Sometimes it’s a random employee who comes up with the idea through a contest (think Accenture – accent on the future). We do a lot of naming for our clients whether it be for a new initiative, a new product, a renaming of a company, an internal program, and there really is no one way to go about it. From a brainstorm to all the legal intellectual property searches, I wonder how many hours really went into some of the most well known names out there?

Many people ask me where Sandstorm came from. I should come up with a highly conceptual meaning, but that’s not how it happened. Sandstorm was a nickname of mine from college so I went with it because it was fun yet strong, spontaneous and energetic. Plus my maiden name was very difficult to pronounce, spell and remember. When I started the company in 1998 I had no idea that someday I would have an incredible agency filled with Sandstormers. Still wows me today.

Part of our user-centered web design process includes the development of personas through research and analysis. Persona’s have a noticeable advantage over traditional demographics because we (you, me, clients, etc) can relate to a person far more naturally than a list of stats and demographics. It’s human nature to bucket information into a way that you can remember, that you can relate to, that you can engage with – and a persona literally puts a name with a face on a fictional character that we can all discuss and create an amazing experience around.

So my big question is how far to go with the persona? How much detail is necessary to tell the story and paint the picture?

I would like to personally offer a free user research opportunity here for web site hosting companies – for those web site hosting companies that question what their customers want, need and feel. For those web site hosting companies that are serious about growing their hosting businesses by listening to their customers.

At the end of the day, what we value most, is the most simple of requests – that you please please please keep our web sites up and running. What we fear the most, is that you are going to take our web sites down for any number of reasons (fixing a bug, fixing a hack, server down for no particular reason, cold fusion crash, windows crash) and not let us know, and not have an answer to when it will be fixed, and quite frankly, move on with your day as if this is and should be expected. Many web site hosting companies brag about their up time, but here’s the catch. It’s not the uptime of our web sites, it’s the uptime of your servers, which doesn’t protect our web sites enough. This makes us (your users) not trust your hosting company.

Think of a user experience team (like us at Sandstorm) as a group advocating for web site surfers… basically your web site users whoever they may be. It’s easy to get caught up in business requirements while trying to build a web site/ interactive application/ online experience, but the goal of user centered design is to actually have your users drive some of your requirements.

We’ve been in more meetings that we can count where we’ll spend an hour or two discussing what we “think” the user wants, what we “think” the user needs for education and content, what we “think” the user will do when we build our site – and we “think” how much easier it would be if we just picked up the phone and asked a few. So we do, and more often than ever before, user research is driving more and more of our web design decisions – ultimately enhancing a user’s experience.