TITLE: Work Language Analysis and the Naming Problem
AUTHORS: Katzenberg, B., and Piela, P.
PUBLICATION : Communications of the ACM. Vol. 36, No. 6, 86-92.
PUBLISHER: The Association for Computing Machinery
DATE: 1993
ABSTRACT: The naming problem for computer interfaces is one of choosing 
verbal labels to refer to meanings in a way that people recognize them. 
Naming in interfaces has been extensively studies by psychological and 
human factors researchers, however the studies have focused on the 
properties of names rather than examining how names are interpreted by 
people in different situations. We employ the pragmatic Principles of 
Contrast and Conventionality (Clark, 1987; 1990) as a framework for 
defining what it means for a name to be good, and propose a method for 
making naming decisions based on linguistic and ethnographic analysis. 
We present two case studies drawn from a project in which a collaborative 
group of users and developers have been developing a new technology for 
equational simulation.