About Baby Brackets

The problem it solves

Almost everyone choosing a baby name ends up with the same artefact: a note on a phone with twenty names on it, added to over months, never pruned. The list keeps growing because adding a name is easy and removing one feels like a decision. Eventually there's a deadline, and the list is no closer to an answer than it was in the first trimester.

The reason lists don't resolve themselves is that ranking many things at once is genuinely hard. Comparing two things is easy — you know immediately which one you prefer. Baby Brackets is built entirely on that gap: it never asks you to rank a list, only ever to choose between two names, and it does the bookkeeping so the answers add up to an ordering.

How it works, briefly

You enter the names you're considering and play one of three games. A Tournament Bracket is a knockout that produces a single winner quickly. Rank Match compares every name against every other and produces a complete ranked list. Name Dating compares nothing — it deals your names one at a time and asks only whether you like each one, which is the fastest way to cut a long list down. There's a full comparison if you want to know which suits your list, and a walkthrough of the whole process.

What we think a naming tool should do

• Ask for nothing. No account, no email address, no sign-in wall between you and the thing you came to do. Your names are yours; the ones you enter on your own device never leave it.
• Be honest about the method. The bracket is properly seeded, byes go to top seeds, and we explain what each game can and can't tell you. A knockout does not produce a trustworthy runner-up, and we say so rather than presenting the full order as if it were meaningful.
• Not pretend to decide for you. The result is information. Often the most useful thing it produces is your own reaction to seeing a winner — relief or disappointment both tell you something the list never did.
• Work on a phone, at eleven at night. Which is when this decision actually gets made.

How it's paid for

Baby Brackets is free and supported by advertising on its written pages. There are deliberately no ads on the voting screens — interrupting a decision with an advert is both bad manners and bad design. We don't sell data, and we don't have accounts to attach data to.

What's next

The features we're working on are shared voting — so two people can vote on the same list and see where they agree and disagree, rather than playing separately and comparing — along with saving a game in progress and sharing a finished result as a link.