HEY’s Fun Names

I use an email app called HEY. I like the workflow that it gives me, and a bunch of features add up to me enjoying email more because of the app. That’s beside the point.

One thing that I really like about HEY is that they come up with fun names for things.

A couple days ago, they released a “snooze” feature. If you don’t want to deal with an email now, but you want it to come back at some point, you can snooze it for some period of time.

But instead of calling it “snooze,” the standard name for this feature among email clients, they called it “Bubble Up.” It’s a metaphor of emails that bubble up to the top, and then stay there until you pop the bubble (seriously — you click a button called “Pop” to remove it from the top of your inbox).

There’s something charming about having the thought to name something differently than everybody else has. It’s a tradeoff, of course — people generally know what snoozing an email is, but they don’t know what bubbling up an email is.

But still, there’s something special that gets injected when you name something in a way that’s unexpected. It feels a bit more fun than it would have otherwise, and I love it.