> MS Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines suggests the following:
> Use the second person (you, your) to tell users what to do. So use second person for error messages, help, window or page labels, on-page documentation, and other places where the app is telling the user about the user’s content.
> Use the first person (I, me, my) to let users tell the program what to do. So use first person for buttons, menu items, and other controls where the user commands the app.
> Don't use My or Your. In most cases it's obvious whose they are.
> The only case you might want to do it is to differentiate e.g. between the user's documents and everyone's documents. In that case I would follow the Microsoft guidelines cited by Michael and use "Your Documents" and "All Documents".
> One of the worst UI bloopers in Windows XP is the use of the prefix "My". It's ridiculous: want to see your photos? Look under "M" for "My Photos". Received files? Look under "M" for "My Received Files". It's like the old joke about the secretary who files everything under "T" for "The Payroll", "The Rent", etc.
I don't consider "My..." in Windows XP to be a blooper. In folders, it meant these are personal folders, as opposed to system folders, shared data, etc...
You have to put it into context, it was the fist multi-user system for most people. Before that, they considered the whole filesystem to be theirs, no pesky permissions or anything like that. So "My" is a good indication for where to put their stuff (instead of, say, C:\).
I think it makes more sense than "Your" as "Your" is more like "stuff the computer gives you / read only" rather than "stuff you give the computer / editable" and a folder like "My Photos" is more of the latter. Matching the idea of the article where "your" is the question, a question is not something you change, and "my" is the answer, which is the thing you act on.
And by the way, the more I look at it, the more I respect the UI designers at pre-Windows 8 Microsoft. So many stupid things that turned out not to be stupid at all. It doesn't mean perfect, but when we see the mess that we have now, it pretty much was by comparison.
Another one is why have folders with spaces in them: "Program Files", "My Documents", etc... The rumor is that it was to force programmers to take handle spaces in filenames properly, because if they don't, it won't work at all. And seeing how terrible the situation is with Unix shells, if true, it is definitely justified. Most of the shell scripts (and not just shell scripts) I see outside of popular public projects fail to handle spaces properly, sometimes catastrophically.
Every platform and application seems to do things differently. On Linux, I end up with a mix of dotfiles in my home directory, some apps putting things under ~/.local/..., and then tools like Miniconda insisting on a top-level folder. It feels inconsistent and messy. Windows isn’t much better—despite having an AppData folder, some programs still scatter their files in random places. \s I guess we'll just need to create a brand new standard, that will make things better. \s
Everything under %USERPROFILE% is user data, so having "My" for directories living under it makes zero sense. XDG user dirs is good enough to tell you where you put stuff and for programs to find them.
I usually go with neither. I always found "my" to be a bit patronising and childlike (my files in my computer on my desk next to my apple that my mum told me to take in for my teacher) and usually find "your" to be superfluous.
I have sometimes used "your" to differentiate between things like private, shared, and global, resources. More often than not this is not needed as there is a better word to use (local, private, shared, …) but sometimes the extra “your” or “by you” does help (for differentiating objects shared by others and those shared by you it can be more concise and clear than listing the name of who shared/owns the resource, for example).
It might be a bit lengthy and a UI challenge on smaller screens/interfaces but I hate pronouns and unnecessary thinking, I'd prefer Current User Documents (or Current User's Documents) and All Documents. Sometimes I might be logged in as my personal user, sometimes as Admin, sometimes as one of my children. "Your Documents" or "My Documents" makes me hit the brakes in whatever I was trying to do/look for to figure out "who am I" [logged in as].
Edit: Actually it should be "[Username]'s Documents" not "Current User's Documents" otherwise I have to stop to remember who I'm logged in as...
Another razor I’ve used is whether the user has chosen the content or what will appear, when it comes to naming navigational elements. Strawman* example: “My Favorites” when you populated the list vs “Your Favorites.”
*Strawman example because this one could easily just be “Favorites,” which imo is the preferred way: avoid ownership pronouns unless it actually makes sense to use them.
I do not like the word “my” anywhere in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Putting on my autistic , very factual, and methodologically empathetic hat on, I prefer a clear line of separation—machines should act as machines, not as personalized companions. I prefer “your” everywhere.
I wanted to do research in HCI a while back, but funding in this area is limited. To me, HCI research felt overly focused on making computer interaction more personable by adding layers of so-called "personalization." Let interaction with machines remain objective, straightforward, and friendly—especially for older people.
This is similar to why I prefer LLM's to behave less human-like and more robotic and machine-like, because they're not humans or human-like, they are robotic and machine-like. The chatbot is not my friend and it can't be my friend, so it shouldn't behave like its trying to be my friend. It should answer my queries and requests with machine-like no-nonsense precision and accuracy, not try to make an emotional connection. Its a tool, not a person.
With some effort, you can train yourself to respond to "You are absolutely right" with being offended at the attempt to manipulate.
It's good training and has been since long before the AIs came along. For instance, the correct emotional response to a highly attractive man/woman on a billboard pitching some product, regardless of your opinions on the various complicated issues that may arise in such a situation, is to be offended that someone is trying to manipulate you through your basic human impulses. The end goal here isn't even the offendedness itself, but to block out as much as is possible the effects of the manipulation. It may not be completely possible, but then, it doesn't need to be, and I'm not averse to a bit of overcompensation here anyhow.
Whether LLMs actually took this up a notch I'd have to think about, but they certainly blindsided a lot of people who had not yet developed defenses against a highly conversational, highly personalized boot licking. Up to this point, the mass media blasted out all sorts of boot licking and chain-yanking and instinct manipulation of every kind they could think of, but the personalization was mostly limited to maybe printing your name on the flyer in your mailbox, and our brains could tell it wasn't actually a conversation we were in. LLMs can tell you exactly how wonderful you personally are.
Best get these defenses in place now. We're single-digit years at best away from LLMs personalizing all kinds of ads to this degree.
My favorite reply is something like: „You’re The Real GOAT!!! And now let’s just quickly clarify some minor points”, followed by a complete destruction of my arguments :).
Overly-anthropomorphised dialog boxes (such as pop-up offers on web sites, not so much on operating system controls) bug me in the same way. Instead of "Yes, please" and "No, thank you" buttons, I would prefer simply "Yes" and "No". I'm giving orders to a machine not talking to a person!
The example is bloated UI to begin with. It should just be a checkbox with the label: "Share your profile photo".
This is going on a tangent now, but making things more clear and concise allows more options to fit on one screen which also reduces the need for endless submenus. This is a better experience because the user doesn't have to remember where the option is if they're all on one screen anyway, yet still broken up under subheadings.
Edit: As I stand massively downvoted at this point in time despite my comment being entirely factually correct, I invite any potential downvoter to consider the sentence “Give me apple” before reaching for the button.
Sadly that is factually correct and none of the links in your reply actually supports your point.
The rule about the zero article doesn't list the case of a noun after an imperative.
The first link is about the subject, not the object and the third is about negative imperative. Why are you posting links about completely unrelated things?
Once again, using a noun without an article this way is gramaticaly incorrect.
"Share profile photo" would be grammatically incorrect as a complete sentence.
But it's perfectly grammatically correct as a command label.
English has different grammar rules in different contexts. For example, newspaper headlines omit articles all the time. That doesn't make the NYT grammatically incorrect on every page, though. Because they're using correct headline grammar, which is different from sentence grammar.
> But it's perfectly grammatically correct as a command label.
Agree to disagree. The reason it sounds robotic is because it's grammaticaly incorrect. The article is not optional before the object in this sentence.
The 2nd and 3rd examples are plural. You don't need an article for plural nouns. "Fix bayonets." and "Fix the bayonet." are standard grammar. "Fix bayonet." isn't.
Well, hands up is lacking a verb, and fix bayonets is in a funny passive tense - or something - because it seems to say "generally go around looking for bayonets to fix", but means specifically "fix your bayonets". In fact hands up is like that too, the intent is "put your hands up", not just "put hands up" in the abstract.
Then there's informational signs, too. Wet floor is not an instruction. Labels generally aren't sentences.
Or instructions on signs: ring bell for assistance, return tray to counter, close gate after use.
> Or instructions on signs: ring bell for assistance, return tray to counter, close gate after use.
I have never seen this.
I have seen plenty of "Please close the gate" or "Keep the gate closed". Sometimes, the article is eluded when the noun is subject "Gate must be kept closed" but imperative + noun without an article on a sign seem highly unusual to me. It feels weird so I would definitely notice.
I have seen "ring bell for assistance" however. It's jarring everytime. I must be the strange one.
I would claim "Your" doesn't belong either. :) UI should be entirely passively describing things to the user only. Same for technical documentation. E.g. just describe what an option does, don't tell the user what they can or not can do.
That’s also important with localization. In Turkish, the UI -> user formality is different than user -> UI formality. When the app speaks to the user, the language is formal, but when the user commands the app (through a button for example), it’s informal.
So, if you use a caption like “Delete Your Files” on a button, it would mean the files of the app, not the files of the user. Or, if you have a dialog titled “Delete My Files”, that would imply an app is asking the user to delete the app’s files due to the differences in the formality.
That’s a problem I’ve been encountering while translating Bluesky. If devs follow certain simple rules while writing UI text, it would make a tremendous difference for translation quality.
> If devs follow certain simple rules while writing UI text, it would make a tremendous difference for translation quality
As a UI Developer that has accidentally focused my whole career in building (complex) forms, I can tell you there is a night and day difference from when I worked alongside User Assistance professionals vs when UX designers had to come up with the texts. These “User Assistance professionals” were usually English/Language-majored that would exclusively take care of how to properly write the texts on the screen for the users. From help texts to button labels, to release notes and RCA, and especially taking care of how to write texts in English so the app would be easily translatable, they would own all. The apps that had that sort of handholding with the devs were extremely easier to use and input data to, even when the UX itself was subpar.
I used to think it was standard to have English-focused professionals helping UI teams to deliver easy to understand products, only to find out that that company was kinda odd in that regard, and having UX or even product people coming up with labels is quite common. I do miss being able to fire an email when I need a quick text reviewed to be sure that a button is well labeled for the user and translation.
> I used to think it was standard to have English-focused professionals helping UI teams to deliver easy to understand products, only to find out that that company was kinda odd in that regard, [...]
Which is a bit of a shame, because English/Language-majored people's time is cheaper than techies' time.
Google is another outlier in a related way: they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation.
The role you are describing is UX copywriting. In companies working on international markets it’s common to have it assigned to a dedicated team responsible for localization, but it’s also perfectly normal and common for UX designers to do it - it’s part of their job. Product managers can do it too, but ideally shouldn’t.
Edit: Also have to note that education in language or literature doesn’t make person a good UX copywriter automatically. It’s a cross-domain job with multiple career paths towards it. You were lucky to work with someone who really excelled in it.
I am a mere programmer, not any kind of UX writer.
A company I worked for some 20 years ago had writers who mostly thought about the "happy path". When things went wrong, the error messages were left up to the programmers.
I discovered this when I tried to install our product on an old Mac and got this message:
Your hard disk is too small
Wait? My what is too small?
Later, on Windows, I got this popup:
You are not here
WTF?
I searched for this message and found it came from a function called CantHappen(), which was kind of like an assert(false). Something you throw into a code path just to note a place that you really know the code can never reach. Until it inevitably does.
I went on a rampage through our code, finding all these crazy messages and updating them - and when possible, fixing the code so the error messages wouldn't be needed.
My manager and his manager, to their credit, knew how bad our messages were, and they helped me pull together a little team with a writer and translators to fix these up. And we did. Our messages got a lot better, easier to understand and more helpful.
All because our Mac installer told me my hard disk was too small.
Great story and exemplar attitude from you and your manager! Too often such issues are eternally deprioritized, but you have got it into the pipeline and the team committed resources for fix. Ideally this should not happen, but that would require end-to-end collaboration of the entire team where UX people are involved on later stages of development process, adapting design and copy based on feedback from engineers. Many modern product designers just work based on „shoot and forget“ principle.
Translation is always a pain in the ass if developers are monolingual in English.
On every project I ever worked on somebody had thingCount == 1 ? 'thing' : 'things' somewhere and it drives me up the wall having to explain that and pgettext thingy
Making it plural doesn't always mean "replace one word by another".
The right thing to do it:
add_one = "Add one thing"
add_multiple = "Add {n} things"
Then you'll provide the full sentence for each language. Of course some languages will need more cases, like slavic language where it's 1, 2-4, 5+, so depending on the languages you need to support you need to put more than 2 strings.
it can largely be turned into six categories of behavior, with tons of languages choosing different boundaries for those categories. ios/osx and android have tools for this, and probably others (I'm just personally familiar with these).
and even English isn't even that simple in the way many treat it - you don't pluralize sentences, parts of sentences change in contrast to each other (a car drives vs cars drive). so e.g. widely used APIs like https://apidock.com/rails/v7.1.3.4/String/pluralize are blatantly misleading merely by existing, and it leads to mistakes in many (most?) languages, and also English, even though the authors of the API speak English.
It's impossible to provide enough context for translation strings. You need links to mockups, designs, or any other visual aid so that translators don't make huge mistakes. Even then, they'll eventually find that the programmatic parameters are insufficient for returning the correct translation, and they'll have to duplicate strings because the same sentence has different translations in different contexts. It's a never-ending job.
Turkish is especially funny here, but not even close to how creative you might need to get for some other Asian as well as Slavic languages.
Lucky that you never had to translate Ekşi Sözlük, how do you even translate "şükela" :)
Russian having singular, few (2-4), and plural (5+) forms is one from the top of my head. I can't remember any specific examples from non-cryllic ones but remember we having to duplicate a lot of translation keys to make them more context specific.
Not the parent commenter, but -- days of week in Polish are a nice example, IMO.
`Środa` means `Wednesday`, but depending on the grammatical case it's going to be translated either to `środa` or `środę` (or five more, but somewhat less likely to appear in UI [1]).
- Next <Wednesday> is 2018-01-03. = Najbliższa <środa> przypada na 2018-01-03.
- This event happens on <Wednesday>. = To zdarzenie ma miejsce w <środę>.
If you mix the variants, it's going to sound very off (but it will be understandable, so there's that).
What's more, days of week have different genders, which affects qualifiers:
- <this> Wednesday = <ta> środa (Wednesday is a "she")
- <this> Monday = <ten> poniedziałek (Monday is a "he")
... together with the grammatical cases affecting the qualifiers:
- <This> Wednesday is crazy. = <Ta> środa jest szalona.
- <This> Thursday is crazy. = <Ten> czwartek jest szalony.
Another pet peeve is when a "percent done" message like this rounds to the nearest percent. So once it is more than 99.5% done, it says "100% done". But obviously it's not 100% done, it's still sitting there waiting to finish!
Folks, if you are ever tasked with coding an "nn% done" message, please floor the percentage instead of rounding it.
Agree. Though at some point I also added a round up when percentage was strictly between 0% and 1%. In my case it seemed like users believed more easily that the program was “broken” if it took a while at 0% rather than 1%.
One of my favorite Knuth videos was him reviewing some students' code in a lecture. I /think/ this was for the Stanford GraphBase code that he was getting students to write, but can't fully remember. What I do remember is how he liked the distinction a student did at the start of a code to define what different voices would be used in the code.
I will try to find the quote later, my first minute looking failed. But it basically highlighted how the narrative was able to pull out different perspectives on the same code. From the intent of the author, the actions of the computer, and where the author thought the reader would be best focusing attention.
To that end, I think the idea in this article is to acknowledge the perspectives. And, sure, sometimes there are multiple entities that could be referenced in an interaction. Try to be consistent with whose voice a label is communicating with.
I was thinking about this exact kind of issue yesterday, while watching an interview with Jeremy Corbyn, a British politician who has formed a new party that is, provisionally, called "Your Party". The back-and-forth with the interviewer just highlighted how bad an idea this is, with one of them referring to "your party" and the other one also referring to "your party". In some contexts, it's absolutely fine. In others, it's a complete mockery.
I am inclined to agree, however often any publicity is good publicity, and stumbling over the name a bit makes it perhaps more memorable (and takes time away discussing any of the real issues, which might actually have something for people to disagree with).
In fairness, it's supposed to be a placeholder, but a) it's been in place for ages, with interviews taking place in the meantime, and b) placeholders can take root if you're not careful.
The Simpsons always has at least one reference suitable to be shoehorned into a topic. But that one is pretty much a perfect bullseye.
I’ve had this problem at times and it feels like one of those cases where a designer responsible for consistency is helpful. I end up oscillating between first and second person.
I don't see what would be so awkward about saying "Go to My Cases" even if it was spoken over the phone. The user is already looking at a screen that contains a menu that says "My Cases". You are reading out the name of that menu. That's enough context for most people IRL.
If you are genuinely worried that the user might try to look up your cases instead of their own, you can just add a few words to clarify: "Click the menu that says My Cases."
And you my friend are demonstrating why this keeps being used. It's so common that now generations of devs and designers are so used to it that they don't see anything wrong. And if on the phone with grandma, instructing her to go to "my files" and her asking where to find my files (instead of hers), that's shrugged off as stupid user rather than an UX fail.
If you're talking to someone who is mostly computer illiterate, you'd say something like "do you see a folder icon on the screen that says My Cases? Double click on that." and not "go to My Cases"
Yeah, if somebody is really that computer-illiterate, you'll also need to tell them where on the screen to look since they're likely overwhelmed by all the other things. These tend to be the same people who, unfortunately, haven't installed ad blockers, and are constantly tempted to click on an ad, thinking it's the "right" place to click.
When spoken it helps to tell the user "my cases" in a monotonic voice (and/or slightly lower tone), which hints that is just a verbatim label (the reason this works is because it mimics how a lot of people sound when reading aloud).
What really bugs me is use of the first person plural, which Microsoft (among others) seems to be doing a lot recently. I feel like I'm being talked down to.
"Let's add your Microsoft account." No, let's not.
I literally returned a game from steam because it not only required a Microsoft login but the login dialog said “let’s get you signed in.”
I maintain that if it didn’t use such infantilizing wording I may have given it a chance (I had a Microsoft account, after all.)
There’s a certain… dissonance that happens when I’m reading a dialog that pretends me and an app are good buddies, old pals, when in reality I fucking hate the company involved. It can make me feel physically angry, like enough to want to throw my computer. I’m fully aware that this is a flaw in my personality, but I just hate it so, so, so much.
Ditto “Got it!” (With the cutesy fucking exclamation point) and other similar informal language in the buttons.
It’s NewSpeak. The concept is often misapplied to refer to the use of new words for new/nuanced concepts, but that isn’t accurate to how it is described in 1984. Instead, NewSpeak is a stripping away of words and phrases, such that only the acceptable responses can even be expressed.
Every time a dialogue box has “Sure”/“Ask me later”, they are preventing you from expressing “No”.
You and simonask are speaking at different levels of literality.
Yes, literally, "let's" expands to "let us". But idiomatically, "let's/let us <do this thing>" does not mean "allow us to <do this thing>"; it means "I am requesting that we now <do this thing> together".
Now, I'm not entirely sure why simonask felt this level of literality was a useful one to bring up here, but it is true.
Let literally means "allow." In many cases where this is said, the person saying it isn't blocking/preventing/gatewaying anyone from going. So the literal meaning of "allow" is not intended.
I dislike the dishonesty. Compare to this line from Office Space: "I'm gonna need you to go ahead and work Saturday". Here go ahead implies that you're being given permission to joyfully do some work you were eager to do. In the Microsoft example, let's implies that this is a bright idea for something fun for you to do with Microsoft, your friend with your best interests at heart.
As a non-English speaker, my understanding of no ahead did not have any joyful connotation. It was rather to express that someone will need to do something that has an initial friction, so not enjoyable.
Your understanding does not match the broadly accepted idiomatic meaning of the expression. The humour comes from the implied inversion of sacrifice, a kind of irony.
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"?
French web sites seem to have lost the plot completely. Buttons are sometimes imperative, sometimes infinitive, sometimes first-person present ("J’en profite!"), and probably others...
> This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"?
Japanese use of "my" as a loanword creates a lot of these. Please park your my car in our my car parking lot.
One would think those uses of "my" are limited to small stuff people don't pay attention to. But no, the gov pushed a "My Number" card initiative that acts as an official ID and is pretty critical to many procedures, including health insurance.
So you're at the counter with the clerk going "Please show me your My Number card".
We have the same thing in Quebec. It pairs with the use of "on" to imply that you and everybody else is doing the thing: "ce vendredi, on vote bleu". It's a sort of mild suggestion.
Using pronouns is most of the time the sign of an immature team/director/PO or building a service that is of extremely limited target.
Trying to be overly friendly and human to the user is cute but doesn't translate well internationally. Very fast one bumps into the sometimes tricky social norms associated with pronouns, and significant time is then spent dealing with the subtilities while the clueless person at the top is bitter about the fuss made about things they still think are trivial.
IMHO being clear beats being natural.
Even Amazon has this issue where "Your" is very brief in English so they stuck it on "Your Payments" "Your account" etc., and it makes for a weird mess in other languages where it needs to be dropped in some places but not others.
I was once contracting at an ISP/telco in the naughties. While working on a UI to obtain PAC codes and transfer phone numbers, I was coding a modal confirmation dialog, when I almost unconsciously translated the specified "You sure" into "Are you sure?".
The QA guy kicked it back. So I took it a manager to get the spec corrected. The manager said to just follow the spec as written. No, I couldn't add a question mark. Apparently the company used language like this to appear "down with the kids".
I hadn't realised I had got so out-of-touch. So I went away and did as I was told. Oh well - I'm still here, but the telco isn't.
The article makes some excellent points. I think this part isn't a great example, though:
> Saying something like “Go to my cases” is awkward and unnatural – if I told you to go to my cases, you’d think I was telling you to go to my cases, not yours.
A help article should use proper capitalization. a couple extra words can add clarity too. For example, "Go to the 'My Cases' page."
Many people don't know how to write good help articles, though, so it's probably still best to avoid "my"/"your" in UIs.
We’ve been talking about this for a while, but it’s always fun to revisit in the context of the latest advancements and trends. I always liked the conclusion that Dustin Curtis came to which is: if you can use “your” in the UX it acts like a conversation with the user. This is even more appropriate as UX is becoming literally conversational.
And it makes sense in context of the article because on Windows you will be told a lot what and how to do.
With macOS, you understand what to do and may have questions how to do new things.
The conclusion I got from the article sounds like "talk to the user like normal human beings talk to one another". This seems like a very obvious and non-controversial idea, in hindsight. I wonder if that says more about how weird we - the people working as software engineers - are, than anything else.
Agreed; if I’m writing help text or instructions, regardless of the use of “my” or “your”, I put pages or features in quotes or bold or italics or whatever format helps it stand out.
‘Click on your “My Cases” tab’
‘Click on “Account”’
etc
Reducing my/your in features is a good start (My Pictures → Pictures, as mentioned in this thread), but always treat specific concepts as proper nouns.
"My" is used to make it clear that it contains the user's pictures, not pictures from other people, Apple, the Internet, etc. Just "Pictures" would make it more ambiguous. (Not saying it's the right thing to do, just pointing out why they do it.)
I'm so glad I dont work with UI/UX. All of these type thought experiments seem so banal and futile to me, that said I'm glad there are some other people taking care with it all.
90% of all important work is banal. That's kind of the thing.
I'm sure a lot of engineering hours were spent on getting the door handle on your car to the exact safety/cost/functionality requirements, and at the end of the day, it's a door handle. Replace "door handle" with 99% of hardware and software that you ever see, and the same thing still applies. And yet, imagine using a car without a door handle.
Most important work isn't sexy, it's banal stuff that's boring until you remove it and realize how important it is.
Fairly sure we only use "My" at all due to iMacs being misinterpreted by computer illiterate people assuming the I as a possessive term, meaning "I Mac" and not the correct truncation of "Internet Machine."
This blew up as an assumption at the time - the kids want identity! Customization! - and soon we got "My" tagged to everything, the most famous being myspace.com
So now we're stuck with these dumb assumptions of possession when we could just have "My Account" be "Account" and be done with it.
Thanks to the author for this, I definitely find those observations interesting.
In defense to the UK gov services website used as examples here. I think it is one of the most efficient website I’ve ever used. Absolutely superb on mobile/desktop, navigation and UX is clear and to the point. Accessibility is also top notch and I often refer to that website as the perfect example for clean product outcomes during product brainstorms.
Generally I'm against both "Your" and "My". A computer system is a tool, a storage, a servant or aide. When I use it, it is all by my command in some sense. So I consider this possessiveness in the interface unnecessary. I wonder if this is partly a personality-type thing? Maybe it's me :-)
I thought from the title this would be about who the UI. Take, for instance, Emacs. User owns the UI, can completely configure and script it, in fact, they're encouraged to. On the other side of the spectrum is something like a website, which has a generic UI for everyone.
As someone who's a support engineer (in enterprise software) this part was interesting to me because it was obviously not written by someone who has spent a long time in a support or documentation environment.
> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.
The way that I would word it and would mentor people to say is "go to 'my cases' at the top"
Thats a thoughtful way of communicating.
However I am not sure if the issue is that big. If someone tells me "I like your car", I also have to do the transfer that they are talking about "my" car.
However I am not working in the support field, and communicating in a way that works around these pitfalls is probably the safer way.
Doesn't the select example invalidate the first point of not using a prefix? By the select examples logic, it should be fine to have UI element stating "my cases" and email stating "your cases".
But for UI elements? Should I name say a tab “My Pictures” and not “Your Pictures” because clicking on said tab I’m communicating to the system I want to see my pictures?
No, you should name it "Your Pictures" because the app is communicating to the user that in this tab there are "your pictures". The article gives an example for the case:
> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.
Replace "cases" with "pictures" :)
If, however, there's a button which lets you upload pictures, it should be "Upload my picture", because the user is the one who's communicating to the app about their intent.
Hmm, I guess this then makes sense if we regard the app as a latent space projecting user's data, so its views are awaiting to be activated.
Seen this way, the app is basically communicating to the user: Hey I have "Your Pictures", "Your Cases", etc. Click to find out.
But to me the "My ..." variation also makes sense. e.g. In Photos app on macOS you will see "My Albums", "My Projects", and although they can be renamed, I don't think I created them.
First person pronoun overuse is the most immediate symptom of low social intelligence. This becomes clear in a way you could never otherwise imagine once raising children with certain forms of autism.
For some reason, I really hate when websites use "my" or "I" instead of "your" and "you"; it feels patronizing, like they're trying to help us understand what's happening.
Also the example given at the end of the article has a simple solution:
> Do you want to share your profile photo?
=> YES / NO
Why would we need to repeat the question in that case? This is not ambiguous.
Ambiguities sometimes exist, though; my favorite is this one (not related to what's discussed here):
I hate that one with all my soul. There are several variations where the answers are completely ambiguous. This is frustrating when you need to, say, print something, but gets dangerous when this is a destructive action ("Do you want to delete this? This action is IRREVERSIBLE"")
> Do you want to delete this? This action is IRREVERSIBLE
Every so often, I’ll check this github issue[0] from 2017, which requests that the various prune commands for docker (e.g. “docker image prune”) have a dry-run flag to display what will actually be deleted. These commands have a warning that data may be deleted, which requires user confirmation to continue, but don’t actually tell you what actions will be performed based on that confirmation until after the deletion has been performed.
They mention not using either, which solves the problem too.
Personally, I detest the Microsoft way of naming directories. "My Documents" is just files. If you're going to name it "My Documents" it damn well better only contain documents, no config files, no videos or images.
In other news, whilst I have my ranting hat on, WTAF is going on with Microsoft Explorer's search? Now sure, getting on the way and preventing you doing stuff is MS's cute thing -- but why does it suck so, so badly. It's as useful as a dingleberry.
Windows has been calling it Documents (and has had separate Pictures and Videos top-level folders) since Windows Vista, in 2007. So you're almost 20 years late with your complaint. And the "My Documents" name was introduced in Windows 95 SP2 (according to Wikipedia, at least), so by now Windows has had separate Documents, Pictures, and Videos folders for the majority of its lifetime.
Ugh. It's almost as bad as verbose documentation by people who can't grok concision, but it's worse because it's inflicted on many more people more times.
Furthermore, it's helpful to have other skeuomorphic, iconic, color, and/or other affordances that don't detract that do not require language to aid not-native speakers and those with disabilities.
The overuse of first person on French official websites also feels weirdly infantilizing.
Clicking a button that says "I register" or "I want to pay for a parking ticket", feels so bizarre to me. It's like the website telling you what to click. Like it's holding your hand.
I don't usually get mad at petty stuff like this, but this one just pisses me off somehow.
For electronic communications with the Czech government, there's mojedatovaschranka.cz - "my data box". The first time I saw the url, I had to triple check it's not some kind of scam. It still weirds me out every time.
I see many English (UK) websites following your second example but none for the first. They need to account for low reading and comprehension skills among users which might explain this style, or it might even be to match search terms.
This reminds me a Russian localization of the "Search" bar on some version of Windows 10, which reads something like "Type the prompt to perform search". Also weirdly infantilizing, overly verbose and just plain weird. Had a couple overseas friends ask me a few times why the text on the search bar is so long haha
I think it's just some kind of design trend or something. But I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little bit put off by it from a user perspective.
French has the added difficulty of requiring to choose between "tu" and "vous" if you want to use the "your..." style. So you can instantly see if the website is trying to fake being your friend.
I think Flemish websites just use "jouw whatever" but it's much less direct and jarring than being called "tu" in French by a corporate entity (not a native Dutch speaker though, but I've been living in Flanders for quite a while now).
Software in Dutch has a bit of a tension between je/jouw and u/uw too. Je/jouw sometimes seems to familiar, u/uw too formal. And I feel the balance between the two is different in Flanders vs the Netherlands.
For something like Facebook, it's OK to use je/jouw. But for something like a government website, or perhaps things like banks or insurance companies, je/jouw is not appropriate and u/uw should be used.
I just checked some samples: Facebook uses je/jouw, LinkedIn uses u/uw, government website MyMinfin uses u/uw. That all seems appropriate, so the choice is perhaps not as delicate as I first thought.
Even their product names follow this pattern, leading to long and childish app names: "Mon espace santé" (My health space), "Mon espace France Travail"
This kind of soft infantilization, especially coming from the government, has always been rubbing me the wrong way.
Nowadays, using "Your" and "My" runs the risk of infuriating alt-right MAGA cultural warrior Groypers who reflexively hate pronouns, without actually understanding grammar.
Which pronoun to use is very much a problem introduced by the last couple of generations. How someone or something identifies is irrelevant to almost everything. The antecedent can almost always be identified by context without resorting to irrelevant information like if it's "mine" or "yours", let alone having to choose the proper grammatical gender depending on animate status ("its" vs. "their").
I move we strike pronouns entirely from the English language. It turns out they're just too much trouble (although that sentence might be a little awkward). Bring back declensions.
From UX stack exchange [0]:
> MS Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines suggests the following:
> Use the second person (you, your) to tell users what to do. So use second person for error messages, help, window or page labels, on-page documentation, and other places where the app is telling the user about the user’s content.
> Use the first person (I, me, my) to let users tell the program what to do. So use first person for buttons, menu items, and other controls where the user commands the app.
[0] https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/4350/128359
Second answer is better imo:
> Don't use My or Your. In most cases it's obvious whose they are.
> The only case you might want to do it is to differentiate e.g. between the user's documents and everyone's documents. In that case I would follow the Microsoft guidelines cited by Michael and use "Your Documents" and "All Documents".
> One of the worst UI bloopers in Windows XP is the use of the prefix "My". It's ridiculous: want to see your photos? Look under "M" for "My Photos". Received files? Look under "M" for "My Received Files". It's like the old joke about the secretary who files everything under "T" for "The Payroll", "The Rent", etc.
I don't consider "My..." in Windows XP to be a blooper. In folders, it meant these are personal folders, as opposed to system folders, shared data, etc...
You have to put it into context, it was the fist multi-user system for most people. Before that, they considered the whole filesystem to be theirs, no pesky permissions or anything like that. So "My" is a good indication for where to put their stuff (instead of, say, C:\).
I think it makes more sense than "Your" as "Your" is more like "stuff the computer gives you / read only" rather than "stuff you give the computer / editable" and a folder like "My Photos" is more of the latter. Matching the idea of the article where "your" is the question, a question is not something you change, and "my" is the answer, which is the thing you act on.
And by the way, the more I look at it, the more I respect the UI designers at pre-Windows 8 Microsoft. So many stupid things that turned out not to be stupid at all. It doesn't mean perfect, but when we see the mess that we have now, it pretty much was by comparison.
Another one is why have folders with spaces in them: "Program Files", "My Documents", etc... The rumor is that it was to force programmers to take handle spaces in filenames properly, because if they don't, it won't work at all. And seeing how terrible the situation is with Unix shells, if true, it is definitely justified. Most of the shell scripts (and not just shell scripts) I see outside of popular public projects fail to handle spaces properly, sometimes catastrophically.
"My Computer" and "My Documents" first showed up in Windows 95, though. In that context, it's not really a multi-user system.
But yes, I do quote all my paths excessively in shell scripts because of Program Files…
The blooper is that apps take the initiative to put random files in there, thus it is no longer "mine".
Every platform and application seems to do things differently. On Linux, I end up with a mix of dotfiles in my home directory, some apps putting things under ~/.local/..., and then tools like Miniconda insisting on a top-level folder. It feels inconsistent and messy. Windows isn’t much better—despite having an AppData folder, some programs still scatter their files in random places. \s I guess we'll just need to create a brand new standard, that will make things better. \s
Everything under %USERPROFILE% is user data, so having "My" for directories living under it makes zero sense. XDG user dirs is good enough to tell you where you put stuff and for programs to find them.
I usually go with neither. I always found "my" to be a bit patronising and childlike (my files in my computer on my desk next to my apple that my mum told me to take in for my teacher) and usually find "your" to be superfluous.
I have sometimes used "your" to differentiate between things like private, shared, and global, resources. More often than not this is not needed as there is a better word to use (local, private, shared, …) but sometimes the extra “your” or “by you” does help (for differentiating objects shared by others and those shared by you it can be more concise and clear than listing the name of who shared/owns the resource, for example).
It might be a bit lengthy and a UI challenge on smaller screens/interfaces but I hate pronouns and unnecessary thinking, I'd prefer Current User Documents (or Current User's Documents) and All Documents. Sometimes I might be logged in as my personal user, sometimes as Admin, sometimes as one of my children. "Your Documents" or "My Documents" makes me hit the brakes in whatever I was trying to do/look for to figure out "who am I" [logged in as].
Edit: Actually it should be "[Username]'s Documents" not "Current User's Documents" otherwise I have to stop to remember who I'm logged in as...
Another razor I’ve used is whether the user has chosen the content or what will appear, when it comes to naming navigational elements. Strawman* example: “My Favorites” when you populated the list vs “Your Favorites.”
*Strawman example because this one could easily just be “Favorites,” which imo is the preferred way: avoid ownership pronouns unless it actually makes sense to use them.
The big omission here is the third person, which is why I always prompt my LLMs to talk in the third person.
I do not like the word “my” anywhere in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Putting on my autistic , very factual, and methodologically empathetic hat on, I prefer a clear line of separation—machines should act as machines, not as personalized companions. I prefer “your” everywhere.
I wanted to do research in HCI a while back, but funding in this area is limited. To me, HCI research felt overly focused on making computer interaction more personable by adding layers of so-called "personalization." Let interaction with machines remain objective, straightforward, and friendly—especially for older people.
This is similar to why I prefer LLM's to behave less human-like and more robotic and machine-like, because they're not humans or human-like, they are robotic and machine-like. The chatbot is not my friend and it can't be my friend, so it shouldn't behave like its trying to be my friend. It should answer my queries and requests with machine-like no-nonsense precision and accuracy, not try to make an emotional connection. Its a tool, not a person.
You're absolutely right.
I hear you ( I am not an LLM ). I can't deny that the "You are absolutely right" gives me a shot of confidence and entices me to continue the dialog.
I am being manipulated.
I prefer the machine to reply:
Affirmative.
Unfortunately this billion dollar LLM enterprises are competing for eyeballs and clicks.
With some effort, you can train yourself to respond to "You are absolutely right" with being offended at the attempt to manipulate.
It's good training and has been since long before the AIs came along. For instance, the correct emotional response to a highly attractive man/woman on a billboard pitching some product, regardless of your opinions on the various complicated issues that may arise in such a situation, is to be offended that someone is trying to manipulate you through your basic human impulses. The end goal here isn't even the offendedness itself, but to block out as much as is possible the effects of the manipulation. It may not be completely possible, but then, it doesn't need to be, and I'm not averse to a bit of overcompensation here anyhow.
Whether LLMs actually took this up a notch I'd have to think about, but they certainly blindsided a lot of people who had not yet developed defenses against a highly conversational, highly personalized boot licking. Up to this point, the mass media blasted out all sorts of boot licking and chain-yanking and instinct manipulation of every kind they could think of, but the personalization was mostly limited to maybe printing your name on the flyer in your mailbox, and our brains could tell it wasn't actually a conversation we were in. LLMs can tell you exactly how wonderful you personally are.
Best get these defenses in place now. We're single-digit years at best away from LLMs personalizing all kinds of ads to this degree.
My favorite reply is something like: „You’re The Real GOAT!!! And now let’s just quickly clarify some minor points”, followed by a complete destruction of my arguments :).
Overly-anthropomorphised dialog boxes (such as pop-up offers on web sites, not so much on operating system controls) bug me in the same way. Instead of "Yes, please" and "No, thank you" buttons, I would prefer simply "Yes" and "No". I'm giving orders to a machine not talking to a person!
So for the example in the article:
> Would you like to share your profile photo?
> Yes, share my profile photo
> No, do not share my profile photo
You'd prefer it says "your" profile photo, instead? Wouldn't that make it sound like I'm sharing someone else's photo?
The example is bloated UI to begin with. It should just be a checkbox with the label: "Share your profile photo".
This is going on a tangent now, but making things more clear and concise allows more options to fit on one screen which also reduces the need for endless submenus. This is a better experience because the user doesn't have to remember where the option is if they're all on one screen anyway, yet still broken up under subheadings.
“Share profile photo” vs “Don’t share profile photo” is just as clear, even more concise, and no ambiguity.
It’s also grammatically incorrect.
Edit: As I stand massively downvoted at this point in time despite my comment being entirely factually correct, I invite any potential downvoter to consider the sentence “Give me apple” before reaching for the button.
Those are not analogous. You have added a direct object without preposition, which is not standard usage in such contexts.
The closest analogous sentence would be "Give apple", which works perfectly well as a choice to select in a textual medium.
This form of imperative clause does have clear and consistent rules, whether you like them or not.
And just stating that your opinion is factually correct, when it is plainly not, reeeeeally doesn't help your cause.
That's factually incorrect, which is worse.
Imperative mood: subject you is implied, so no need to write it.
https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/imperative_mood.htm
Zero article/bare noun phrase: allows omission of your, the, etc. in fixed instructions.
https://www.thoughtco.com/zero-article-grammar-1692619
Standard negation: "don’t" is the grammatical way to negate an imperative.
https://www.scribbr.com/verbs/imperative-mood
Sadly that is factually correct and none of the links in your reply actually supports your point.
The rule about the zero article doesn't list the case of a noun after an imperative.
The first link is about the subject, not the object and the third is about negative imperative. Why are you posting links about completely unrelated things?
Once again, using a noun without an article this way is gramaticaly incorrect.
"Share profile photo" would be grammatically incorrect as a complete sentence.
But it's perfectly grammatically correct as a command label.
English has different grammar rules in different contexts. For example, newspaper headlines omit articles all the time. That doesn't make the NYT grammatically incorrect on every page, though. Because they're using correct headline grammar, which is different from sentence grammar.
Heres a secret: Grammer rules are just whats colloquially acceptable speech 50 years ago
> But it's perfectly grammatically correct as a command label.
Agree to disagree. The reason it sounds robotic is because it's grammaticaly incorrect. The article is not optional before the object in this sentence.
How about these commands:
Raise anchor, fix bayonets, hands up
I think I'm with crazygringo on this one, there's special command grammar.
The 2nd and 3rd examples are plural. You don't need an article for plural nouns. "Fix bayonets." and "Fix the bayonet." are standard grammar. "Fix bayonet." isn't.
Well, hands up is lacking a verb, and fix bayonets is in a funny passive tense - or something - because it seems to say "generally go around looking for bayonets to fix", but means specifically "fix your bayonets". In fact hands up is like that too, the intent is "put your hands up", not just "put hands up" in the abstract.
Then there's informational signs, too. Wet floor is not an instruction. Labels generally aren't sentences.
Or instructions on signs: ring bell for assistance, return tray to counter, close gate after use.
> Or instructions on signs: ring bell for assistance, return tray to counter, close gate after use.
I have never seen this.
I have seen plenty of "Please close the gate" or "Keep the gate closed". Sometimes, the article is eluded when the noun is subject "Gate must be kept closed" but imperative + noun without an article on a sign seem highly unusual to me. It feels weird so I would definitely notice.
I have seen "ring bell for assistance" however. It's jarring everytime. I must be the strange one.
> Wouldn't that make it sound like I'm sharing someone else's photo?
Since the second party is not present, that interpretation makes no sense and users wouldn't interpret it that way in native English.
I would claim "Your" doesn't belong either. :) UI should be entirely passively describing things to the user only. Same for technical documentation. E.g. just describe what an option does, don't tell the user what they can or not can do.
That’s also important with localization. In Turkish, the UI -> user formality is different than user -> UI formality. When the app speaks to the user, the language is formal, but when the user commands the app (through a button for example), it’s informal.
So, if you use a caption like “Delete Your Files” on a button, it would mean the files of the app, not the files of the user. Or, if you have a dialog titled “Delete My Files”, that would imply an app is asking the user to delete the app’s files due to the differences in the formality.
That’s a problem I’ve been encountering while translating Bluesky. If devs follow certain simple rules while writing UI text, it would make a tremendous difference for translation quality.
> If devs follow certain simple rules while writing UI text, it would make a tremendous difference for translation quality
As a UI Developer that has accidentally focused my whole career in building (complex) forms, I can tell you there is a night and day difference from when I worked alongside User Assistance professionals vs when UX designers had to come up with the texts. These “User Assistance professionals” were usually English/Language-majored that would exclusively take care of how to properly write the texts on the screen for the users. From help texts to button labels, to release notes and RCA, and especially taking care of how to write texts in English so the app would be easily translatable, they would own all. The apps that had that sort of handholding with the devs were extremely easier to use and input data to, even when the UX itself was subpar.
I used to think it was standard to have English-focused professionals helping UI teams to deliver easy to understand products, only to find out that that company was kinda odd in that regard, and having UX or even product people coming up with labels is quite common. I do miss being able to fire an email when I need a quick text reviewed to be sure that a button is well labeled for the user and translation.
> I used to think it was standard to have English-focused professionals helping UI teams to deliver easy to understand products, only to find out that that company was kinda odd in that regard, [...]
Which is a bit of a shame, because English/Language-majored people's time is cheaper than techies' time.
Google is another outlier in a related way: they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation.
> they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation
The trick with tech writing is retention!
The role you are describing is UX copywriting. In companies working on international markets it’s common to have it assigned to a dedicated team responsible for localization, but it’s also perfectly normal and common for UX designers to do it - it’s part of their job. Product managers can do it too, but ideally shouldn’t.
Edit: Also have to note that education in language or literature doesn’t make person a good UX copywriter automatically. It’s a cross-domain job with multiple career paths towards it. You were lucky to work with someone who really excelled in it.
I am a mere programmer, not any kind of UX writer.
A company I worked for some 20 years ago had writers who mostly thought about the "happy path". When things went wrong, the error messages were left up to the programmers.
I discovered this when I tried to install our product on an old Mac and got this message:
Your hard disk is too small
Wait? My what is too small?
Later, on Windows, I got this popup:
You are not here
WTF?
I searched for this message and found it came from a function called CantHappen(), which was kind of like an assert(false). Something you throw into a code path just to note a place that you really know the code can never reach. Until it inevitably does.
I went on a rampage through our code, finding all these crazy messages and updating them - and when possible, fixing the code so the error messages wouldn't be needed.
My manager and his manager, to their credit, knew how bad our messages were, and they helped me pull together a little team with a writer and translators to fix these up. And we did. Our messages got a lot better, easier to understand and more helpful.
All because our Mac installer told me my hard disk was too small.
Great story and exemplar attitude from you and your manager! Too often such issues are eternally deprioritized, but you have got it into the pipeline and the team committed resources for fix. Ideally this should not happen, but that would require end-to-end collaboration of the entire team where UX people are involved on later stages of development process, adapting design and copy based on feedback from engineers. Many modern product designers just work based on „shoot and forget“ principle.
Translation is always a pain in the ass if developers are monolingual in English.
On every project I ever worked on somebody had thingCount == 1 ? 'thing' : 'things' somewhere and it drives me up the wall having to explain that and pgettext thingy
At the risk of driving you up the wall, but please explain
Not the parent, but you use a translation format like `translations("INVITE_USER", {gender_of_host, num_guests})`
Then you will have an algorithm that knows to translate based on some rules - like the ICU messages format - https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/mes...
In the link there's an example of how such rules look like (they'll be different for each language)
One simple example is slavic languages where you have different forms of plural depending on the number.
For example, in Arabic, nouns have three forms: singular, dual, and plural. Dual and plural are not interchangeable.
Making it plural doesn't always mean "replace one word by another".
The right thing to do it:
add_one = "Add one thing" add_multiple = "Add {n} things"
Then you'll provide the full sentence for each language. Of course some languages will need more cases, like slavic language where it's 1, 2-4, 5+, so depending on the languages you need to support you need to put more than 2 strings.
pluralization is much MUCH more complex in many languages than in English: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/47/supplemental/language...
it can largely be turned into six categories of behavior, with tons of languages choosing different boundaries for those categories. ios/osx and android have tools for this, and probably others (I'm just personally familiar with these).
and even English isn't even that simple in the way many treat it - you don't pluralize sentences, parts of sentences change in contrast to each other (a car drives vs cars drive). so e.g. widely used APIs like https://apidock.com/rails/v7.1.3.4/String/pluralize are blatantly misleading merely by existing, and it leads to mistakes in many (most?) languages, and also English, even though the authors of the API speak English.
That has to be one of the most cursed functions that I've heard of in my life. Anything less than a call to ChatGPT is doomed to fail.
It's impossible to provide enough context for translation strings. You need links to mockups, designs, or any other visual aid so that translators don't make huge mistakes. Even then, they'll eventually find that the programmatic parameters are insufficient for returning the correct translation, and they'll have to duplicate strings because the same sentence has different translations in different contexts. It's a never-ending job.
Turkish is especially funny here, but not even close to how creative you might need to get for some other Asian as well as Slavic languages.
Lucky that you never had to translate Ekşi Sözlük, how do you even translate "şükela" :)
Do you think any i8n library (in any language) gets it right?
Would you have an example for Slavic languages? (ideally non-Cyrillic ones)
Russian having singular, few (2-4), and plural (5+) forms is one from the top of my head. I can't remember any specific examples from non-cryllic ones but remember we having to duplicate a lot of translation keys to make them more context specific.
Also things like:
—-which look correct until you want to translate them into a language with a different order of words in a sentence.Not the parent commenter, but -- days of week in Polish are a nice example, IMO.
`Środa` means `Wednesday`, but depending on the grammatical case it's going to be translated either to `środa` or `środę` (or five more, but somewhat less likely to appear in UI [1]).
- Next <Wednesday> is 2018-01-03. = Najbliższa <środa> przypada na 2018-01-03.
- This event happens on <Wednesday>. = To zdarzenie ma miejsce w <środę>.
If you mix the variants, it's going to sound very off (but it will be understandable, so there's that).
What's more, days of week have different genders, which affects qualifiers:
- <this> Wednesday = <ta> środa (Wednesday is a "she")
- <this> Monday = <ten> poniedziałek (Monday is a "he")
... together with the grammatical cases affecting the qualifiers:
- <This> Wednesday is crazy. = <Ta> środa jest szalona.
- <This> Thursday is crazy. = <Ten> czwartek jest szalony.
- I'm busy <this> Wednesday. = Jestem zajęty w <tę> środę.
- I'm busy <this> Thursday. = Jestem zajęty w <ten> czwartek.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C5%9Broda
> If devs follow certain simple rules while writing UI text, it would make a tremendous difference for translation quality.
As a dev that often writes UI text, which simple rules do you recommend that I should follow?
The case that annoys me to no end is when Windows is installing an update that requires a reboot, and it puts up a message like this:
You're 90% there
NO, you blithering idiot, I am not 90% there, you are 90% there. All I am doing is waiting for you.
You could have said:
We're 90% there
And then we would both be happy.
I even took the time to submit feedback to Microsoft on this (and much more politely than I stated it here).
Who wants to guess if my feedback was ever acted on?
Anyways, this message is just feel-good bullshit UI/UX design. I prefer to have just "Loading: 90%" and that's it.
To be honest there was a short period where it felt fresh and cool when UI started to talk casually instead of the cold factual language.
Now the novelty has wore off and we should go back to those boring computer messages.
I agree completely.
Another pet peeve is when a "percent done" message like this rounds to the nearest percent. So once it is more than 99.5% done, it says "100% done". But obviously it's not 100% done, it's still sitting there waiting to finish!
Folks, if you are ever tasked with coding an "nn% done" message, please floor the percentage instead of rounding it.
Agree. Though at some point I also added a round up when percentage was strictly between 0% and 1%. In my case it seemed like users believed more easily that the program was “broken” if it took a while at 0% rather than 1%.
One of my favorite Knuth videos was him reviewing some students' code in a lecture. I /think/ this was for the Stanford GraphBase code that he was getting students to write, but can't fully remember. What I do remember is how he liked the distinction a student did at the start of a code to define what different voices would be used in the code.
I will try to find the quote later, my first minute looking failed. But it basically highlighted how the narrative was able to pull out different perspectives on the same code. From the intent of the author, the actions of the computer, and where the author thought the reader would be best focusing attention.
To that end, I think the idea in this article is to acknowledge the perspectives. And, sure, sometimes there are multiple entities that could be referenced in an interaction. Try to be consistent with whose voice a label is communicating with.
> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.
Simpsons did it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vihwYGENbFg
I was thinking about this exact kind of issue yesterday, while watching an interview with Jeremy Corbyn, a British politician who has formed a new party that is, provisionally, called "Your Party". The back-and-forth with the interviewer just highlighted how bad an idea this is, with one of them referring to "your party" and the other one also referring to "your party". In some contexts, it's absolutely fine. In others, it's a complete mockery.
I am inclined to agree, however often any publicity is good publicity, and stumbling over the name a bit makes it perhaps more memorable (and takes time away discussing any of the real issues, which might actually have something for people to disagree with).
Ugh I hadn't heard about that. That seems especially silly given 'People's Party' is so well established as how you convey that.
In fairness, it's supposed to be a placeholder, but a) it's been in place for ages, with interviews taking place in the meantime, and b) placeholders can take root if you're not careful.
It's just a prototype!
Wait but is that your prototype, or my prototype?
The Simpsons always has at least one reference suitable to be shoehorned into a topic. But that one is pretty much a perfect bullseye.
I’ve had this problem at times and it feels like one of those cases where a designer responsible for consistency is helpful. I end up oscillating between first and second person.
I don't see what would be so awkward about saying "Go to My Cases" even if it was spoken over the phone. The user is already looking at a screen that contains a menu that says "My Cases". You are reading out the name of that menu. That's enough context for most people IRL.
If you are genuinely worried that the user might try to look up your cases instead of their own, you can just add a few words to clarify: "Click the menu that says My Cases."
And you my friend are demonstrating why this keeps being used. It's so common that now generations of devs and designers are so used to it that they don't see anything wrong. And if on the phone with grandma, instructing her to go to "my files" and her asking where to find my files (instead of hers), that's shrugged off as stupid user rather than an UX fail.
If you're talking to someone who is mostly computer illiterate, you'd say something like "do you see a folder icon on the screen that says My Cases? Double click on that." and not "go to My Cases"
Yeah, if somebody is really that computer-illiterate, you'll also need to tell them where on the screen to look since they're likely overwhelmed by all the other things. These tend to be the same people who, unfortunately, haven't installed ad blockers, and are constantly tempted to click on an ad, thinking it's the "right" place to click.
When spoken it helps to tell the user "my cases" in a monotonic voice (and/or slightly lower tone), which hints that is just a verbatim label (the reason this works is because it mimics how a lot of people sound when reading aloud).
It's even more accurate to say "the my cases link/button".
What really bugs me is use of the first person plural, which Microsoft (among others) seems to be doing a lot recently. I feel like I'm being talked down to.
"Let's add your Microsoft account." No, let's not.
I literally returned a game from steam because it not only required a Microsoft login but the login dialog said “let’s get you signed in.”
I maintain that if it didn’t use such infantilizing wording I may have given it a chance (I had a Microsoft account, after all.)
There’s a certain… dissonance that happens when I’m reading a dialog that pretends me and an app are good buddies, old pals, when in reality I fucking hate the company involved. It can make me feel physically angry, like enough to want to throw my computer. I’m fully aware that this is a flaw in my personality, but I just hate it so, so, so much.
Ditto “Got it!” (With the cutesy fucking exclamation point) and other similar informal language in the buttons.
It’s NewSpeak. The concept is often misapplied to refer to the use of new words for new/nuanced concepts, but that isn’t accurate to how it is described in 1984. Instead, NewSpeak is a stripping away of words and phrases, such that only the acceptable responses can even be expressed.
Every time a dialogue box has “Sure”/“Ask me later”, they are preventing you from expressing “No”.
"Let's" in English does not mean "let us".
I mean, it literally does, but language is not literal.
For the record, I also dislike the familiarity.
I can't think of any situation where "let's" does not mean "let us"?
You and simonask are speaking at different levels of literality.
Yes, literally, "let's" expands to "let us". But idiomatically, "let's/let us <do this thing>" does not mean "allow us to <do this thing>"; it means "I am requesting that we now <do this thing> together".
Now, I'm not entirely sure why simonask felt this level of literality was a useful one to bring up here, but it is true.
"Let's go!"
Literally "let us go", there's no way around the literal meaning
Let literally means "allow." In many cases where this is said, the person saying it isn't blocking/preventing/gatewaying anyone from going. So the literal meaning of "allow" is not intended.
[delayed]
"Let's go" never means "let us go". Just try to articulate it as such! I can't.
Shall we go?
Let us go / Let's go / Let's
If you don't want to use the full form, it shan't stop me.
I dislike the dishonesty. Compare to this line from Office Space: "I'm gonna need you to go ahead and work Saturday". Here go ahead implies that you're being given permission to joyfully do some work you were eager to do. In the Microsoft example, let's implies that this is a bright idea for something fun for you to do with Microsoft, your friend with your best interests at heart.
As a non-English speaker, my understanding of no ahead did not have any joyful connotation. It was rather to express that someone will need to do something that has an initial friction, so not enjoyable.
Your understanding does not match the broadly accepted idiomatic meaning of the expression. The humour comes from the implied inversion of sacrifice, a kind of irony.
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"?
French web sites seem to have lost the plot completely. Buttons are sometimes imperative, sometimes infinitive, sometimes first-person present ("J’en profite!"), and probably others...
> This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"?
Japanese use of "my" as a loanword creates a lot of these. Please park your my car in our my car parking lot.
One would think those uses of "my" are limited to small stuff people don't pay attention to. But no, the gov pushed a "My Number" card initiative that acts as an official ID and is pretty critical to many procedures, including health insurance.
So you're at the counter with the clerk going "Please show me your My Number card".
When George Takei says "Oh My!" I agree by saying "Oh Your!"
Heh, Malaysia's two-letter country code is "MY". Guess what the national identity card is called?
We have the same thing in Quebec. It pairs with the use of "on" to imply that you and everybody else is doing the thing: "ce vendredi, on vote bleu". It's a sort of mild suggestion.
It's a problem in Spanish too. You'll sometimes see buttons with the infinitive and others with the 2nd person command form.
I recently saw a major company's app using both in the same dialog. It's madness.
Well myspace didn't have any issues, did it ?
Using pronouns is most of the time the sign of an immature team/director/PO or building a service that is of extremely limited target.
Trying to be overly friendly and human to the user is cute but doesn't translate well internationally. Very fast one bumps into the sometimes tricky social norms associated with pronouns, and significant time is then spent dealing with the subtilities while the clueless person at the top is bitter about the fuss made about things they still think are trivial.
IMHO being clear beats being natural.
Even Amazon has this issue where "Your" is very brief in English so they stuck it on "Your Payments" "Your account" etc., and it makes for a weird mess in other languages where it needs to be dropped in some places but not others.
I was once contracting at an ISP/telco in the naughties. While working on a UI to obtain PAC codes and transfer phone numbers, I was coding a modal confirmation dialog, when I almost unconsciously translated the specified "You sure" into "Are you sure?".
The QA guy kicked it back. So I took it a manager to get the spec corrected. The manager said to just follow the spec as written. No, I couldn't add a question mark. Apparently the company used language like this to appear "down with the kids".
I hadn't realised I had got so out-of-touch. So I went away and did as I was told. Oh well - I'm still here, but the telco isn't.
The article makes some excellent points. I think this part isn't a great example, though:
> Saying something like “Go to my cases” is awkward and unnatural – if I told you to go to my cases, you’d think I was telling you to go to my cases, not yours.
A help article should use proper capitalization. a couple extra words can add clarity too. For example, "Go to the 'My Cases' page."
Many people don't know how to write good help articles, though, so it's probably still best to avoid "my"/"your" in UIs.
We’ve been talking about this for a while, but it’s always fun to revisit in the context of the latest advancements and trends. I always liked the conclusion that Dustin Curtis came to which is: if you can use “your” in the UX it acts like a conversation with the user. This is even more appropriate as UX is becoming literally conversational.
https://dcurt.is/yours-vs-mine
Sometimes it's just wrong. An old one :-
"It is now safe to turn off your computer"
Awesome I'll go turn it off then, it's just across the room from this one that isn't mine that I'm currently shutting down
Windows: your, macOS: my.
And it makes sense in context of the article because on Windows you will be told a lot what and how to do. With macOS, you understand what to do and may have questions how to do new things.
The conclusion I got from the article sounds like "talk to the user like normal human beings talk to one another". This seems like a very obvious and non-controversial idea, in hindsight. I wonder if that says more about how weird we - the people working as software engineers - are, than anything else.
Interesting, but bikeshedding. Just use capitals and/or quotes. Nobody is getting confused by something like:
Would you like to share the 'My Pictures' folder?
Agreed; if I’m writing help text or instructions, regardless of the use of “my” or “your”, I put pages or features in quotes or bold or italics or whatever format helps it stand out.
‘Click on your “My Cases” tab’
‘Click on “Account”’
etc
Reducing my/your in features is a good start (My Pictures → Pictures, as mentioned in this thread), but always treat specific concepts as proper nouns.
But what's wrong with calling that folder "Pictures" (or, even better, "pictures")? macOS calls it "Pictures".
"My" is used to make it clear that it contains the user's pictures, not pictures from other people, Apple, the Internet, etc. Just "Pictures" would make it more ambiguous. (Not saying it's the right thing to do, just pointing out why they do it.)
If that's the case then there should be another folder to put pictures that aren't mine.
I'm so glad I dont work with UI/UX. All of these type thought experiments seem so banal and futile to me, that said I'm glad there are some other people taking care with it all.
90% of all important work is banal. That's kind of the thing.
I'm sure a lot of engineering hours were spent on getting the door handle on your car to the exact safety/cost/functionality requirements, and at the end of the day, it's a door handle. Replace "door handle" with 99% of hardware and software that you ever see, and the same thing still applies. And yet, imagine using a car without a door handle.
Most important work isn't sexy, it's banal stuff that's boring until you remove it and realize how important it is.
Fairly sure we only use "My" at all due to iMacs being misinterpreted by computer illiterate people assuming the I as a possessive term, meaning "I Mac" and not the correct truncation of "Internet Machine."
This blew up as an assumption at the time - the kids want identity! Customization! - and soon we got "My" tagged to everything, the most famous being myspace.com
So now we're stuck with these dumb assumptions of possession when we could just have "My Account" be "Account" and be done with it.
/rant
I seem to remember Windows 95 had "My Computer" and the iMac came out in 1998, so the "My" labeling was already underway.
Technically yes, but no one thought that was necessarily cool. iMacs were huge in the adoption of computers by families and kids though
The first time I remember seeing "My" was "My Computer" on Windows 95.
I hated then, still hate it now.
Thanks to the author for this, I definitely find those observations interesting.
In defense to the UK gov services website used as examples here. I think it is one of the most efficient website I’ve ever used. Absolutely superb on mobile/desktop, navigation and UX is clear and to the point. Accessibility is also top notch and I often refer to that website as the perfect example for clean product outcomes during product brainstorms.
> Saying something like “Go to my cases” is awkward and unnatural
Then say the natural "go to the tab called "My cases" "Your" doesn't eliminate ambiguity either because it could be "Cases" like in the Amazon example
The "share your photo"example is just needlessly verbose, the repetition in each answer carries no useful info, just "requires" extra reading
Generally I'm against both "Your" and "My". A computer system is a tool, a storage, a servant or aide. When I use it, it is all by my command in some sense. So I consider this possessiveness in the interface unnecessary. I wonder if this is partly a personality-type thing? Maybe it's me :-)
That's covered at the top of the article. The author agrees with you.
The article is about when you should use my or your in form controls like upload dialogs.
Or be a proper comrade and only use our :p
In addition to `Your` and `My`, I can sometimes see `This`. For example, Microsoft change Windows `My Computer` to `This PC`.
It's not really your computer anymore...
I thought from the title this would be about who the UI. Take, for instance, Emacs. User owns the UI, can completely configure and script it, in fact, they're encouraged to. On the other side of the spectrum is something like a website, which has a generic UI for everyone.
As someone who's a support engineer (in enterprise software) this part was interesting to me because it was obviously not written by someone who has spent a long time in a support or documentation environment.
> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.
The way that I would word it and would mentor people to say is "go to 'my cases' at the top"
Thats a thoughtful way of communicating. However I am not sure if the issue is that big. If someone tells me "I like your car", I also have to do the transfer that they are talking about "my" car. However I am not working in the support field, and communicating in a way that works around these pitfalls is probably the safer way.
Doesn't the select example invalidate the first point of not using a prefix? By the select examples logic, it should be fine to have UI element stating "my cases" and email stating "your cases".
From the article:
> In summary:
> Use “your” when communicating to the user
> Use “my” when the user is communicating to us
I could see how this makes sense with dialogs.
But for UI elements? Should I name say a tab “My Pictures” and not “Your Pictures” because clicking on said tab I’m communicating to the system I want to see my pictures?
No, you should name it "Your Pictures" because the app is communicating to the user that in this tab there are "your pictures". The article gives an example for the case:
> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.
Replace "cases" with "pictures" :)
If, however, there's a button which lets you upload pictures, it should be "Upload my picture", because the user is the one who's communicating to the app about their intent.
Hmm, I guess this then makes sense if we regard the app as a latent space projecting user's data, so its views are awaiting to be activated.
Seen this way, the app is basically communicating to the user: Hey I have "Your Pictures", "Your Cases", etc. Click to find out.
But to me the "My ..." variation also makes sense. e.g. In Photos app on macOS you will see "My Albums", "My Projects", and although they can be renamed, I don't think I created them.
For what it’s worth capitalization fixes a lot of this. “Go to my account” vs “Go to My Account”. Pretty clear to me.
First person pronoun overuse is the most immediate symptom of low social intelligence. This becomes clear in a way you could never otherwise imagine once raising children with certain forms of autism.
Could you elaborate? I hadn't noticed such a correlation before. Especially in relation to children on the autism spectrum.
For some reason, I really hate when websites use "my" or "I" instead of "your" and "you"; it feels patronizing, like they're trying to help us understand what's happening.
Also the example given at the end of the article has a simple solution:
> Do you want to share your profile photo?
=> YES / NO
Why would we need to repeat the question in that case? This is not ambiguous.
Ambiguities sometimes exist, though; my favorite is this one (not related to what's discussed here):
Do you want to cancel?
=> Ok / Cancel
Reminds me of the old "Press Enter to exit" messages.
I hate that one with all my soul. There are several variations where the answers are completely ambiguous. This is frustrating when you need to, say, print something, but gets dangerous when this is a destructive action ("Do you want to delete this? This action is IRREVERSIBLE"")
> Do you want to delete this? This action is IRREVERSIBLE
Every so often, I’ll check this github issue[0] from 2017, which requests that the various prune commands for docker (e.g. “docker image prune”) have a dry-run flag to display what will actually be deleted. These commands have a warning that data may be deleted, which requires user confirmation to continue, but don’t actually tell you what actions will be performed based on that confirmation until after the deletion has been performed.
[0] https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/30623
https://youtu.be/wX1x7pfH8fw?si=aEGLYtBTSbCrbRBJ
> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.
Which is why everyone says...
> Go to "My cases"
...instead.
They mention not using either, which solves the problem too.
Personally, I detest the Microsoft way of naming directories. "My Documents" is just files. If you're going to name it "My Documents" it damn well better only contain documents, no config files, no videos or images.
In other news, whilst I have my ranting hat on, WTAF is going on with Microsoft Explorer's search? Now sure, getting on the way and preventing you doing stuff is MS's cute thing -- but why does it suck so, so badly. It's as useful as a dingleberry.
> WTAF is going on with Microsoft Explorer's search?
I stopped caring (and actually used to remove Windows Search from the "Turn Windows features on or off" menu) once I heard about Everything.
Windows has been calling it Documents (and has had separate Pictures and Videos top-level folders) since Windows Vista, in 2007. So you're almost 20 years late with your complaint. And the "My Documents" name was introduced in Windows 95 SP2 (according to Wikipedia, at least), so by now Windows has had separate Documents, Pictures, and Videos folders for the majority of its lifetime.
Ugh. It's almost as bad as verbose documentation by people who can't grok concision, but it's worse because it's inflicted on many more people more times.
Furthermore, it's helpful to have other skeuomorphic, iconic, color, and/or other affordances that don't detract that do not require language to aid not-native speakers and those with disabilities.
"No thanks, I love missing out on amazing deals"
> Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over webchat or a phone call. This is confusing if the UI says “My cases”.
No it isn't.
The overuse of first person on French official websites also feels weirdly infantilizing.
Clicking a button that says "I register" or "I want to pay for a parking ticket", feels so bizarre to me. It's like the website telling you what to click. Like it's holding your hand.
I don't usually get mad at petty stuff like this, but this one just pisses me off somehow.
For electronic communications with the Czech government, there's mojedatovaschranka.cz - "my data box". The first time I saw the url, I had to triple check it's not some kind of scam. It still weirds me out every time.
I see many English (UK) websites following your second example but none for the first. They need to account for low reading and comprehension skills among users which might explain this style, or it might even be to match search terms.
This reminds me a Russian localization of the "Search" bar on some version of Windows 10, which reads something like "Type the prompt to perform search". Also weirdly infantilizing, overly verbose and just plain weird. Had a couple overseas friends ask me a few times why the text on the search bar is so long haha
The old school of bureaucratic verbosity (big words cosplaying precision) dies ever so hard.
French fellow, 100%. It reads really unserious.
Oh, that's interesting! I always thought French-speaking people (I'm from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) actually expected this type of language.
I think it's just some kind of design trend or something. But I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little bit put off by it from a user perspective.
French has the added difficulty of requiring to choose between "tu" and "vous" if you want to use the "your..." style. So you can instantly see if the website is trying to fake being your friend.
I think Flemish websites just use "jouw whatever" but it's much less direct and jarring than being called "tu" in French by a corporate entity (not a native Dutch speaker though, but I've been living in Flanders for quite a while now).
Software in Dutch has a bit of a tension between je/jouw and u/uw too. Je/jouw sometimes seems to familiar, u/uw too formal. And I feel the balance between the two is different in Flanders vs the Netherlands.
For something like Facebook, it's OK to use je/jouw. But for something like a government website, or perhaps things like banks or insurance companies, je/jouw is not appropriate and u/uw should be used.
I just checked some samples: Facebook uses je/jouw, LinkedIn uses u/uw, government website MyMinfin uses u/uw. That all seems appropriate, so the choice is perhaps not as delicate as I first thought.
Yeah, it looks like the French websites are actually doing it less and less.
Even their product names follow this pattern, leading to long and childish app names: "Mon espace santé" (My health space), "Mon espace France Travail"
This kind of soft infantilization, especially coming from the government, has always been rubbing me the wrong way.
Remember "Ma French Bank"?
I really couldn't think of a more ridiculous name. It closed down this year anyway.
Nowadays, using "Your" and "My" runs the risk of infuriating alt-right MAGA cultural warrior Groypers who reflexively hate pronouns, without actually understanding grammar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groypers
I can't tell whether this is a joke or not.
Which pronoun to use is very much a problem introduced by the last couple of generations. How someone or something identifies is irrelevant to almost everything. The antecedent can almost always be identified by context without resorting to irrelevant information like if it's "mine" or "yours", let alone having to choose the proper grammatical gender depending on animate status ("its" vs. "their").
I move we strike pronouns entirely from the English language. It turns out they're just too much trouble (although that sentence might be a little awkward). Bring back declensions.