What’s in a name…?

Well Bill, quite a lot actually. Try to spell ‘Ayuda Heuristics’ down the phone on a poor connection. Try to say ‘Ayuda Heuristics’ to your mates in a noisy bar when you’re down a few pints and “Despacito” is playing in the background. There’s a Tinder date who’s convinced I work in Ayurvedic holistic medicine (we never went on a second date).

Our users

But more important than losing out on Tinder love is losing out on user love. Users are the lifeblood of any product company, and when you’re making an app like ours, love for our users runs high. So it genuinely hurts everytime we lose one. It means we’ve let someone down. It means we haven’t created enough value for them, or we haven’t effectively communicated the value we do provide.

Heur…what?

No one knows what ‘heuristics’ are. Do you? Unless you’re a data scientist or did maths at uni (or you work for Ayuda Heuristics…), probably not. Yes, it’s what we do as a company. Yes, it’s what our users have been doing their whole lives to manage their diabetes. But does that matter if they don’t know what it means?

I’m not even going to say what it means because you shouldn’t need to know – I should be able to convey an idea to you without resorting to jargon. Without you needing to refer to a Wikipedia page.

What we did

We only recently realised this. In the app, we changed the “Heuristics” tab to the “Decide” tab. Because that’s why our users go there, to make a decision about how much insulin to inject. Who cares that we use ‘heuristics’ to get there – if our users don’t, neither should we.