[Fwd: Re: Gnome Icons, Gnome/KDE Menus need improvement]

[Chris Blizzard]

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 17:19:49 -0400, Seth Nickell <snickell at redhat.com> wrote:
> Yeah, I agree. In cases where heavy branding has already been done, it
> will be easiest for people to recognize the brand. E.g. if we're
> offering Coke in our menus (and our menus have plenty of, ahem "coke"),
> I'd call it Coke, not "Cola Beverage". Our goal should be to use the
> lowest noise / most identifiable name. The apache brand is strong enough
> in sysadmin circles that I would definitely label an apache menu item
> (if we were to have such a thing for some wacky reason *grin*) "Apache
> Web Server". I caution, however, that while the Firefox (or
> OpenOffice.org) brand could in theory be strong in 2 years, its
> basically non-existant in the general office worker population today.

Even so, is it in our best interest to promote the Firefox brand
because it promotes our goals, even outside of the distribution of our
operating system?  If people are exposed to it one place, they might
be willing to use it in other places as well (think home vs. office.) 
The more people using something other than IE, the better.  Promoting
the Firefox brand does this.

> >From a usability perspective:
> In cases where the brand does not already exist (the norm for
> practically all of our apps relative to, say, Abby), we should use
> generic names. Branding is usually a process of educating people about
> things they don't need to know, but we want them to know. It is not
> typically helpful from a usability perspective (there are cases where it
> is, but on the whole, not so much). We should not be reducing usability
> to help establish brands, though where a brand is established we can
> leverage it ).

There's also uneducating people as well.  That is, if someone has had
a bad experience in the past with brand Y and those problems have been
fixed, rebrand as brand Z and you have the chance to re-educate under
the new brand.  (Netscape 6 was terrible.  Firefox is, by comparison,
not.)

> 
> >From a branding perspective:
> Prolific brands lead to brand dillution and reduces the ability to have
> *any* distinct brands. In the marketplace you can't control this,
> because everyone will try to establish a brand. In this case we can. We
> can effect how many brands show up in the interface.

Yep.  You need to pick and choose.

--Chris