Babynavnvelgeren – Fast exploration of Norwegian given names

My good friend Feda Curic recently came to me and wanted to make something together during his parental leave. At first we started out with something a bit too ambitious (for the time we had set aside), but then his wife came up with a great idea we could finish in our limited amount of time.

She wanted an app where you could quickly look up names for babies. Here in Norway Statistisk sentralbyrÄ (SSB) has statistics for all names used 4 or more times. The SSBs user interface leaves something to be desired though. It is either small lists containing some names, or a name search, where you input the exact name, and then get statistics about that specific name.

The SSB interface is not at all useful for exploratory search for names. In Babynavnvelgeren (the app we made) we have a lightning fast interactive search and filtering options. The data is available locally in the app, so it mostly works offline as well.

The very simple but effective UI of Babynavnvelgeren

Babynavnvelgeren makes searching for names easy and fun. My 8 year old daughter loves searching while sorting for the least popular names. She found some very interesting ones like:

  • Sau – Sheep in Norwegian.
  • Lillebil – I initially thought this was a bug for sure, but it is a name. My daughter finds it hilarious (“Lille” means small and “bil” is car in Norwegian).

More generally I think Interactivity and responsiveness is essential for exploration, and the process of exploration often leads to accidental discoveries and new hypothesis building. UIs which support this kind of interactivity are very useful in my experience, and I think more applications/data providers should have this in mind when presenting their data.

I also think there is a lot of low hanging fruit in this space, and small improvements in interactivity often cause massive increases in efficiency. For Norwegian names, Babynavnvelgeren has got you covered. Go get it!