Recently, the UX writing team at Dashlane undertook a wide-ranging and important project: renaming certain key terms in our app and ensuring they are clear and consistent across all platforms. Chances are, you won’t notice a lot of these changes, at least not in a big way—but we hope the changes in our naming system help make your experience using Dashlane even simpler and more intuitive.
Keep reading to learn what we changed and how we arrived at those decisions.
What’s changing?
Here are the three main changes we’re making to our naming system.
Passwords/Accounts/Credentials —> Logins
- It’s true that we store and autofill your passwords—but we also store your usernames, associated emails, web addresses, and more. By using Login as the bucket for those additional details, we streamline the language in our product and more closely align with how people are already thinking about these concepts. Additionally, while the common industry term is “password manager,” we are helping you more broadly with access management. All this to say, Passwords didn’t cover all the necessary elements in the same way Logins does.
Login and Secondary Login —> Username and Alternate username
- Because we changed the overarching category from Password to Login, we needed to adjust the fields that gave you the option to include additional login details. During this project, we realized it was far more accurate to label these items as your Username and Alternate username, both of which live within an individual Login.
Name —> Item name
- Within an item’s details, there was a text field simply labeled Name, which we decided was not as clear as it needed to be. By changing this to Item name, it’s clearer that this field refers to the unique item as opposed to, say, your name.
Why the change?
Ultimately, the decision to start this project came down to two main goals: consistency and clarity. As you might imagine, Dashlane has seen its fair share of change in the 13 years we’ve been a company. From new products to new people to new platforms, there have been a lot of moving parts—occasionally leaving a gap wide enough for inconsistency to sneak in.
We recognize that it’s confusing for someone to encounter different terms for the same thing based on the platform or device they’re on. And we want Dashlane to be intuitive and easy to use no matter where you’re using the app. Additionally, when terms are unclear or not as specific as they could be, it means we have to use up more space within the product explaining what that term stands for, which can make for a clunkier user experience.
Now, it’s much easier for these important terms to stand on their own and they are used consistently across platforms—meaning your Dashlane experience should be clearer than ever. These changes are the first updates in an ongoing endeavor to make all the terminology in Dashlane as clear as possible so your experience is as smooth as possible.
We didn’t make any of these updates in a vacuum. An important part of this project was user research. By considering the viewpoints of current users and prospective users alike, we were able to better understand the “mental models” that already existed for people. For example, 80% of users thought Logins was the clearest, most understandable term.
We made some meaningful updates during this project, as well as codified an approach to our naming system that will help us keep product terms clear and understandable moving forward. After all, to make security simple, we need to make using Dashlane simple—down to each individual product term.
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