A short post for a busy week.
I just downloaded the Spore Creature Creator, and this file showed up on my desktop: 792248d6ad421d577132c2b648bbed45_scc_trial_na.exe.
Why not “Spore Creature Creator Trial Install.exe”, or, if spaces aren’t your thing, “SporeCreatureCreatorTrialInstall.exe”? Either would be infinitely more meaningful than an MD5 hash followed by an acronym and a region code.
While the developers may have had a reason (though I can’t imagine it’s a good enough reason) to use this file name, the web team has no excuse.
There’s a lesson here: be nice to users. Whether it’s just a file name or helpful error messages or designing a user interface/experience, don’t treat your users like machines that parse your (bizarre) internal formats.
And Will Wright, if you’re listening, ask someone to rename that file.
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