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nomilk
thomasahle
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.
GuB-42
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.
atoav
The real solution is to clarify the position of the folder in the hierarchy. If the Pictures folder is in your user directory what else than your folder should it be?
Lets say your name is alex and you share the computer with tony. Both of you have folders called "My Pictures". That "My" is simply false if you look at the files in Tonys directory. The conceptually much better solution is to take the parent folder into account. In Linux that usually means /home/alex/pictures and /home/tony/pictures
Filepaths in my opinion are already a perfectly fine abstraction and everything that tries to teach people to not understand them is creating new problems and a new class of idiot that doesn't understand computers. The latter is of course a feature, not a bug from the standpoint of OS manufacturers thar want to smartphone-iphy their Desktop-OS.
mook
"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…
two_handfuls
The blooper is that apps take the initiative to put random files in there, thus it is no longer "mine".
quietbritishjim
Raymond Chen clears things up again:
> Some people suggest that one thing Microsoft Research could do with that time machine they’re working on is to go back in time and change the name of the Program Files directory to simply Programs. No, it really should be Program Files. Program Files are not the same as Programs. Programs are things like Calc, Notepad, Excel, Photoshop. They are things you run. Program Files are things like ACRORD32.DLL and TWCUTCHR.DLL. They are files that make programs run. If the directory were named Programs, then people who wanted to run a program would start digging into that directory and seeing a page full of weird DLL names and wonder “What the heck kind of programs are these?” And eventually they might figure out that if they want to run PowerPoint, they need to double-click on the icon named POWERPNT. “Computers are so hard to use.” WLCM2DOS
> If you want to find your programs, go to the Start menu. The Program Files directory is like the pantry of a restaurant. You aren’t expected to go in there and nibble on things that look interesting. You’re expected to order things from the menu.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20131119-00/?p=26...
See also:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...
braiamp
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.
dspillett
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).
gjm11
I too find the "My" stuff patronizing and annoying but I'm not convinced by your string of "my"s as showing that it's childlike. I mean, you could equally say: my files on my computer on my desk in my work-room next to my bedroom where I sleep with my wife. Or: my files on my computer in my house that my savings plus my mortgage with my bank paid for. There are as many distinctively-adult things you can put "my" in front of as distinctively-childish ones.
I do in fact talk about my computer[1] and my files on it. The problem isn't that I wouldn't call them "my". It's that (1) when the computer labels them that way it feels like it's putting words in my mouth and I don't like that even if I'd have chosen similar words, and (2) it's unnecessary because if something's already in my home directory then calling it "My Whatever" rather than just "Whatever" is unnecessary. Of course, Windows rather wants to cover up all the evidence that you have a home directory, which for me is also part of the problem.
[1] Well, I'd be more specific, because like many people on HN I have more than one computer. But that isn't really the point here.
jrs235
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...
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montagg
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.
ants_everywhere
The big omission here is the third person, which is why I always prompt my LLMs to talk in the third person.
sedatk
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.
psidium
> 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.
eru
> 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.
SoftTalker
> English/Language-majored people's time is cheaper than techies' time.
Which is odd, because it's harder to communicate unambiguously in English than it is in code.
agos
It would be nice if they employed some of those dedicated tech writers for external documentation (sorry for the snark, couldn’t help it)
robertlagrant
> they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation
The trick with tech writing is retention!
ivan_gammel
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.
Stratoscope
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.
Muromec
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
_9ptr
At the risk of driving you up the wall, but please explain
edgsousa
One simple example is slavic languages where you have different forms of plural depending on the number.
Illniyar
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)
Groxx
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.
eloisant
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.
smnrchrds
For example, in Arabic, nouns have three forms: singular, dual, and plural. Dual and plural are not interchangeable.
sznio
Polish has different plurals for [2:4],[5:21], then [2n+2 : 2n+4], [2n+5 : 2n+11], restarting at 2n = 100
1 osoba
2, 3, 4 osoby
5, 6, 15, 21 osób
22 osoby
25 osób
101, 112 osób
patates
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" :)
esafak
Do you think any i8n library (in any language) gets it right?
patates
https://projectfluent.org/ comes close. The syntax is hard to read though. I guess you can't have the cake and eat it too.
BrandoElFollito
Would you have an example for Slavic languages? (ideally non-Cyrillic ones)
patates
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.
Patryk27
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.
AdventureMouse
> 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?
agos
Not OP but I’ll suggest one that is very dear to me: make sure you use the same verbs for the same actions, the same nouns for the same things, the same proper nouns for the same important concepts. This alone removes a huge mental burden from users: it’s always “delete”, not sometimes “remove”, “cancel”, etc
sedatk
I'm actually compiling a list of UI text mishaps, and I plan to publish it as a blog post at one point. A simple one would be to avoid using "your" in a "user -> UI" context (command), and "my" in a "UI -> user" context (message). For example, "Delete My Files" is okay on a button, but, in a message it must be "Are you sure you want to delete your files?". But, the better is to avoid generous use of "your" and "my" unless necessary to disambiguate.
For example, don't have a button that reads "Go to your profile", that screws up translations in languages like Turkish.
disposablese
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.
dkersten
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.
javier_e06
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.
jerf
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.
TomaszZielinski
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 :).
sethammons
You're absolutely right.
shayway
For the sake of argument -- if you were talking about your real desk to someone, you would say "my desk", no? If you were talking about a document somewhere in your files, you would say "it's in my files". If you were forced to physically label a drawer of your personal documents either "my documents" or "your documents", I think it's safe to say "my" is the more intuitive choice there.
To me, "your" violates the human-machine boundary more than "my" in many circumstances because it implies the machine is its own autonomous being that has its own "my". No, the computer isn't giving me anything; I own the computer, and I own the files, there is no external exchange here.
(all that isn't to say there aren't plenty of cases where "your" makes more sense -- more than where "my" makes sense, by my reckoning, considering how often there is an external exchange of some sort going on. But "your" isn't a one-size-fits-all solution)
maplethorpe
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?
sublinear
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.
d1sxeyes
“Share profile photo” vs “Don’t share profile photo” is just as clear, even more concise, and no ambiguity.
positron26
> 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.
SoftTalker
In that example I'd prefer that the options are simply "Yes" or "No".
Why repeat the premise of the question in each answer?
Even simpler is a checkbox:
[ ] Share my profile photo.
godshatter
I'd go for "Share profile photo" for the checkbox. Why even get into ownership of the photo? Maybe it's not mine and was given to me by whoever took the photo? Just keep it simple and stop pretending that my OS is alive.
presto8
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!
ryandrake
The one I hate is the error message that simply says "Something went wrong." maybe with a frowning cat icon, but with no other diagnostic message that could be used to determined what exactly went wrong and what corrective action to take.
Thank you, computer, for being totally unhelpful.
encom
This annoys me so much, and it's another reason I hate phone apps, because they do this all the time. Usually ANY error resolves to "something went wrong". I'm not expecting a stack trace, but they're too scared to show the user ANY tech jargon at all, and it's another reason why young people are computer illiterate. At least I can access the developer console on modern webshit when using an actual computer.
I had to logcat an app recently which failed with no error at all incidentally, to find out it was overzealous DNS blocking that prevented it from talking to its api endpoint. I don't to Android development, but I'm guessing apps would be aware of name resolution failures, and should be able to tell the user about it, without using fucking logcat.
12_throw_away
> error message that simply says "Something went wrong."
Actually, are there HCI guidelines for communicating inexplicable internal errors to the user? I definitely write assertions that really should never ever fail - if they do, we are in a completely unanticipated state. Either there's been a truly massive logic bug, or maybe even a memory error flipped a bit, but in either case, I have no idea what state the program is in or what caused it to get there.
What would a good tech writer tell the user in this situation? I can't think of anything all that much more helpful than "something went wrong". Maybe "There is a serious bug in the program, totally our fault, please help us by reporting it"?
acheron
Oops, something went wrong, lol! emojis
bitwize
Steve Summit liked to tell the story of an early Mac application with a distinct UI flourish: for dialog messages indicating success, the label on the button to dismiss the dialog would be changed to "Yay!"; for error messages, it would be changed to "Damn!".
Just another item on the long list of Things Done in the 80s That We Couldn't Get Away With Today.
psnehanshu
Older Windows had "My Computer" icon on the desktop, now they have "This PC".
bitwize
Back when Microsoft released Windows 98, they completely revamped the Explorer UI (made it shittier imho), among other things making folders open with a single click instead of the previous double click. This, their marketing department said, was to make your local computer look and behave more like the Web, and thus be more familiar. The theme of Windows 98 was an OS built for the Web, with smooth integration between local and Web resources.
I was like NO!!! YOU DO NOT WANT THIS!!! The difference between your local computer and the Web is like the difference between your house and St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans during Carnival parade season. My wife may feel "at home" in both, but she stands a good chance of being pickpocketed in one environment; the other, much less so.
I'm with you. We should emphasize a bright-line distinction between interaction with machines and interaction with people. "My Computer" in Windows 9x is okay to me, especially in light of the above; you WANT people to recognize the difference between "my computer" and "someone else's computer". But messages like "Please wait while we set things up" in recent Windows piss me off. What is this "we" shit, kemosabe? Who are you and what are you doing messing around in my computer?
binaryturtle
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.
Stratoscope
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?
TheRoque
Anyways, this message is just feel-good bullshit UI/UX design. I prefer to have just "Loading: 90%" and that's it.
Stratoscope
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.
pelletier
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%.
PaulKeeble
The amount of these bars that get to 99% and that in practice is the half way point is infuriating.
Surely at this point we understand the difference as programmers between the amount of bytes we need to change verses the number of files and the enormous performance difference of updating small files and why any measure needs to blend both to be at least a bit more accurate. Or if its more different types of work a much better split of the bar is necessary.
eloisant
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.
li2uR3ce
I'd be happier if they stopped using percentages. When percentage points don't consume close to an equal amount of time, don't use them. It's just complete nonsense at that point. It doesn't give the user any useful information just false hope that it might finish soon.
Of course if Windows update wasn't so horrible maybe it wouldn't matter as much.
impendia
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.
ninkendo
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.
MereInterest
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”.
Dylan16807
Phrasing things like a buddy is not an example of what you're describing. They're separate issues.
simonask
"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.
efdee
I can't think of any situation where "let's" does not mean "let us"?
danaris
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.
tommica
"Let's go!"
card_zero
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.
BrandoElFollito
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.
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Lammy
> 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
oneeyedpigeon
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.
eru
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).
OJFord
Ugh I hadn't heard about that. That seems especially silly given 'People's Party' is so well established as how you convey that.
oneeyedpigeon
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.
Lammy
This is extremely dangerous to Our Democracy.
kijin
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."
teiferer
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.
tdeck
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"
Waterluvian
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.
mattigames
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).
oneeyedpigeon
It's even more accurate to say "the my cases link/button".
Pinus
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...
lmm
> 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.
makeitdouble
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".
DonHopkins
When George Takei says "Oh My!" I agree by saying "Oh Your!"
nicbou
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.
yen223
Heh, Malaysia's two-letter country code is "MY". Guess what the national identity card is called?
codegladiator
Well myspace didn't have any issues, did it ?
sweetjuly
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.
makeitdouble
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.
RegW
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.
antonyh
My take on this: both 'your' and 'my' are weak.
Eliminate both or use 'the' if you must. Using 'the' is stronger for the singular, and unnecessary for the plural - The Account, The Profile Picture, Cases, Tasks, Items.
And in the case of personal computing: 'Documents' beats 'My' or 'Your'. It's an implied concept, doubly so as they are intangible abstracts rather then physical objects. It never sat comfortably with me in Windows XP, and messed with sort order too.
There's no reason to qualify it unless a system can have both 'my' and 'your' at the same time.
PaulKeeble
My Documents irritates me immensely not just because the My is useless but there is nothing mine about the contents of the folder, applications automatically dump stuff in it. I use my own Documents folder under Nextcloud and leave all the automated apps to spew their files into a folder that is meant to be mine, its actually owned and run by the system and applications they are its users not me, its a system folder better named "System Documents".
antonyh
Same here, although arguably even 'documents' is redundant when I can shove anything in there. The fact that I'm forced to have it at all when I want to have 'personal files' and 'work files' instead is problematic.
lancefisher
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.
jbb67
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
redleader55
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.
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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