If you’ve got a list of baby names you’re currently considering, this is the post for you! Whether you’re just trying to figure out your own personal opinion or you’re opening the conversation up to multiple people’s input, the technique described here will work perfectly for you.

Why ranking baby names is so difficult

Picking a name for your baby is a subjective choice — there’s no objective data to tell you whether Noah or Jack is a better name! However, people often try to treat this decision as if it’s some sort of rational choice by using things like drag-and-drop ranking surveys or long voting polls to help them decide which name to pick from a list of options.

When it comes to ranking, humans are much better at making a simple “A vs. B” decision than they are at comparing and ranking a large set of options. Studies have shown this to be true even for factual options, like ranking a list of US States by population, never mind subjective and opinion-based ranking which is even harder.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just take each name and compare it against just one other option at a time? Then we could see which name won the highest number of pairs at the end! This is actually a very popular research approach called Pairwise Ranking. Pairwise ranking breaks a list of options down into a series of head-to-head pair votes (like “Do you prefer Name A or Name B”) and then calculates which options win the highest percentage of these pairs.

While this sounds good in theory, it turns into a LOT of spreadsheet calculation work. A list of just 20 names would create 190 possible pair combinations (n(n-1)/2, where “n” is the number of ranking options). If you’re thinking about asking your partner to vote too or some friends/family to share their thoughts too, this can quickly turn into 1,000+ data points to analyze.

This was the exact situation I ended up in just a few years ago. I was building a startup and was trying to figure out which problem was the highest priority to solve according to my target customer. I had 45 problem statements to rank, so a drag-and-drop ranking list was out of the question. We ended up building a ranking tool just for this purpose and we collected 3,000+ votes to help us craft the perfect startup pitch (more on that story here). Now we give that tool away for free so that others can benefit from it too!

Setting up a Pairwise Ranking survey for baby names

The tool we made ended up becoming pretty popular — it’s now used by thousands of companies, including teams at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify, and more. It’s free, easy to use, and allows as many questions or ranking options as you need. Here’s a quick example of a survey I created to vote on baby names:

In the example above, the Score is just the percentage of pairs each option “won”. As you can see from the “Setup” screenshot, you can also change the survey to show a random sample of pairs rather than all possible pairs, which works great if you’re asking a bunch of people to vote or have a much longer list of name ideas.

Setting your pairwise ranking survey up only takes 1 minute. Just create a free survey, choose “Pair Rank”, copy/paste your list of names in, and then start voting!

The free version of OpinionX doesn’t have any time limit or require you to add your credit card — it’s just fully free. Our premium tiers are built for research teams that require extra customization or analysis features like segmentation filtering. So give it a try and create a free baby name survey in minutes with a free OpinionX account.