Terminology Standardization

Time for change

About 8 months into my time on the Physical Stores team, I was ready to propose some terminology changes.

Below is the email I sent to stakeholders, up to director level, and across multiple teams including Legal, PR, Marketing, and Product.

At the time, the UX team was about to embark on a website content refresh, which would extend to things like FAQ and help articles, and I wanted to get ahead of any competing terminology within the scope of that project.

I was not proposing new terminology

AO already contained instances of all the terms (sign up/enroll, AO ID/profile/account). But as the product and its accompanying materials grow, these inconsistencies would only become more apparent, so I was ultimately calling to specify and align on these competing terms going forward.

Sign up → Enroll

One of the reasons for proposing sign up become enroll was because Big Amazon (as it's known internally) uses sign up. In order to use Amazon One, the customer must already have a Big Amazon account, so for net-new customers we would have to tell them to, "Sign up for Amazon in order to sign up for Amazon One" and that's a confusing mouthful.

The main landing page, technically owned by Marketing

I was even willing to let marketing keep their exclamation point, in the name of compromise

There was significant confusion around what customers are signing up for – Amazon or Amazon One.

Changing AO to exclusively using “enroll” language helps mentally differentiate between the two products for the customer.

When Amazon One introduced online enrollment, it begat a need for the concept of being “pre-enrolled”. The Success screen, which customers see at the completion of online enrollment, doesn't mean they're fully enrolled – they still need to go to a device and add their palms.

"Pre-signed up" is a weird and unfamiliar term

"Pre-enrolled" is already a familiar concept

Passive voice :(

Active voice :)

Amazon One ID → Amazon One Profile

Why?

A the time, ID, account, and profile were all used interchangeably throughout the Amazon One experience. Choosing one word (Profile) would create consistency and structure within the user's mental model.

"Profile" is a much more familiar term within the account-creation mental model than "ID"

Users were invited to link other rewards memberships, such as Starbucks, to AO so they could pay with their palms.

Most other memberships also use the term "profile" rather than "ID"

Additionally, the team was on the verge of launching ID Verify.

ID Verify would allow users to scan their valid government-issued ID in order to use their palms to indicate age eligibility at participating locations. I was the UX writer for ID Verify, and foresaw that it would be accompanied by the introduction of many references to IDs, so I advised we get ahead of this duplicative terminology.

ID Verify launched after I left the team, but this screenshot from one.amazon.com demonstrates my point: "Link your ID"

So I sent out this email, got almost all the approvals needed and.......got laid off, along with 18,000 other Amazon employees.

However, we can still poke around the live website and see if I had any lasting impact.

Sign-up → enroll seems to have mixed adoption

Buttons: "Create a FREE profile; Sign up now!" & Instructions: "Pre-enroll online; Finish enrolling in person" That's a lot.

On the landing page, "Sign up" and "Enroll" are still side-by-side. Along with a new player: "Create a FREE profile" CTA...

Oh well.

As previously mentioned, this page is owned by Marketing.

The Help site (also owned by a separate team) is also still presenting mixed language.

However, it looks like the UX team did follow through with my proposal within the AO experience itself. Yay!

As for Amazon One ID → Profile,

I could only find one live use of "Amazon One ID" buried deep within a help article.

Other than that, every instance of Amazon One ID seems to have been updated to Amazon One Profile.

In addition to the launch of ID Verify, AO also partnered with AXS Mobile to allow users to use their palms as tickets. AXS also used "ID" so adopting "Amazon One Profile" was good future-proofing.

Linking an AXS Mobile ID to an Amazon One ID would be a potentially confusing flow.

All in all, even though my time on this team was cut short, I take pride in knowing I made a lasting impact in a few linguistic nuances that will hopefully make the user experience (and the world) a better place.