"your" Vs. "my" in User Interfaces
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The article discusses the use of 'your' vs 'my' in user interfaces, sparking a debate among commenters about the best approach to UI labeling and the implications of different pronoun choices.
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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.
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...
Japanese use of "my" as a loanword creates a lot of these. Please park your my car in our my car parking lot.
So you're at the counter with the clerk going "Please show me your My Number card".
I recently saw a major company's app using both in the same dialog. It's madness.
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.
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).
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.
This kind of soft infantilization, especially coming from the government, has always been rubbing me the wrong way.
I really couldn't think of a more ridiculous name. It closed down this year anyway.
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.
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.
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.
Which is odd, because it's harder to communicate unambiguously in English than it is in code.
Playing an instrument is harder than being a code monkey. On the one hand, you can make good money being a top tier musician, there's almost no money in being a mediocre musician (or even an above average one). On the other hand, it's fairly easy to get by as a mediocre code monkey.
Even as a somewhat subpar software engineer, you can make enough money that you don't have to be waiting tables as your day job.
(Waiting tables itself is a good example at least to contrast with acting or making music or writing novels. None of these aspiring artists and poets is necessarily any good at waiting tables, but it still pays the bills compared to even pretty good acting skills.)
The trick with tech writing is retention!
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.
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.
To understand the problem, consider two things.
First, imagine another word that rhymes with "disk". I will just call it "di*k" here.
Second, the problem wasn't that my hard di*k was too small. I could have the biggest hard di*k in the world, but if it didn't have enough free space, there wouldn't be room to install Acrobat.
So the message had an admittedly slim chance of being misconstrued, but more importantly it was just plain incorrect.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/ibm-announce...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...
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
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.
1 osoba
2, 3, 4 osoby
5, 6, 15, 21 osób
22 osoby
25 osób
101, 112 osób
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)
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.
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" :)
`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
Which is a simple example why you need context.
All UI frameworks should have a "translate" mode, where all labels and static text can be right-clicked and modified...
59 == nioghalvtredssindstyve
59 == 9 [ni] + [og] ((3 [treds] - 0,5 [halv]) * [sinds] 20 [tyve])
So 9+2,5*20 == 59
Halvtreds means half third, or halfway to three. There's also halvfjerds and halvfems for 3,5 and 4,5. Exercise: spell out 79.
As a dev that often writes UI text, which simple rules do you recommend that I should follow?
For example, don't have a button that reads "Go to your profile", that screws up translations in languages like Turkish.
> 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
> 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 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).
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.
While I often use “my” like that (“has anyone seen where I put my phone?” etc), the thing with Windows95 was that it was applied to everything and coupled with the crayola-like UI friendlyfication. On its own, or used less judiciously, it might have not felt a bit infantilising like it did.
Also, there are a few things in your list that I would use more passive language for. I always referred to the mortgage on my flat as “the mortgage” unless in a situation where that might be ambiguous, and the bank is definitely the bank not my bank. The distinction generally falls along personal/other lines: within my flat (which I sometimes call the flat) I have my bedroom but also the bathroom, the spare room (or guest room, lodger's room, craft room, junk room, workout room - it has had many names over the years all usually prefaced with “the” rather than “my”), the kitchen, and the living room. For work, when I'm not working from home, I go to the office. If your every day use of the language doesn't have this distinction (this could easily be a regional or generational variation, most others around me follow a pattern similar to mine, for reference I'm a late-40s anal-retentive from northern England) then the Win95 UI's use of that language wouldn't give you the same feeling.
> because like many people on HN I have more than one computer
This may be a time based difference too. Around the time of Win95's first arrival I did have a computer of my own, and it wasn't the only one in the house, though this was unusual: many people did not have a computer at home at all (even if counting game systems or general purpose micros like a C64 that they used exclusively for playing games) and the only computers that they used were at school, at work, or in the library, so were not there's except when they were using them, and I probably spent at least as much time on computers that I didn't consider to be mine than I did on the one that was.
Interesting. I would sometimes say "the mortgage", "the bank", "the car", etc., but I don't think "my" is wrong for any of those except in so far as the thing in question isn't just mine (e.g., it's my wife's -- excuse me, the wife's -- car as well as mine).
Thinking about this some more, I think the pattern is as follows. I would say "my" to refer to something that (1) is specifically mine rather than anyone else's and (2) might be thought to be someone else's, or otherwise be ambiguous, if I didn't say "my". For something that's in some sense mine but for which #1 and #2 don't both hold, I would more often say "the".
So, e.g., "the mortgage" or "my mortgage"? If I'm living on my own, "the" because there's no one else. If I'm living with a partner, "the" because it's joint with them, or because we both know that they don't have one. If I'm living with a minor child, "the" because they can't have one. But if I'm talking to another adult, typically "my" or "our" for disambiguation.
"The office" or "my office"? "The" if it's the office I go to with all my colleagues. "The" if it's a room in my house and it's the only such room. "My" if two of us living in the same house have rooms they use in the same way.
(In my actual house there's a room that we originally called "the study" which we envisaged being used by whoever needed it, but in practice it's basically always me. My wife calls it "your study". I feel kinda bad about having usurped it -- there's another room my wife uses for similar purposes but it's substantially smaller and I've clearly got the better end of this deal -- and I often call it "the study" but when I do I know I'm being a bit dishonest.)
If you're a child then probably there are lots of things that are specifically yours. You might refer to "the teddy bear" because there's no one else it's likely to belong to, but your parents won't because it's not (in the relevant sense) theirs so "the" isn't appropriate for them. And if you're a child and you regard something as yours, you're probably painfully aware that (1) any siblings might try to lay claim to it and (2) in some sense your parents could lay claim to it, so you're going to use "my" whenever you can.
So I think I agree that "my" is proportionally used more by children than by adults. I don't think I personally find that that makes it feel infantilizing in the way it sounds like you do. But I do find the Windows "My X" stuff patronizing and maybe unconsciously I'm associating it with childishness.
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.
Linux has one single standard, all that software doing random stuff is non-standard.
And the standard says it's configurable, so I don't know what of your examples is the correct one on your machine.
> A number of efforts have been made in the past to standardize the layout of home directories, including the XDG Base Directories specification [9] and the GLib conventions on user directory contents. [10] Additional efforts in this direction are possible in the future. To accomodate software which makes use of these specifications and conventions, distributions may create directory hierarchies which follow the specifications and conventions. Those directory hierarchies may be located underneath home directories.
So one standard saying you should look at other standards. XDG from freedesktop.org is the most popular (and probably the one you are referring to). However, it relate to Linux desktops, it says nothing about non-desktop applications (ex: bash, ssh, git, ...). About git, it would a bit ironic for git, made by Linus himself for working on the Linux kernel to not follow the "one standard".
"My ..." is for files intended for the user to access directly. For instance photo apps will naturally save their photos in "My Photos", but just the photos, and with the understanding that the user can reorganize them, open them with other apps, etc... Apps that put their crap in "My Documents" are likely not following the best practices.
Note that not all folders in %userprofile% are called "My ...". For example "Downloads" (you are not supposed to modify stuff there, just read and delete) or "Desktop" (you are not supposed to access it through the explorer). The OS won't stop you, but the fact they aren't "My..." is a hint that it is not their purpose.
> 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-...
A much more elegant solution and I think the criticism stands correct; Microsoft Research just didn't realize how to solve the problem and everything else is justification after-the-fact.
That is, imo, awful. I'm not sold they've got everything right
This was because they hadn’t yet implemented security. (Was probably Win98 or so.)
In the meantime unix and alike use /bin, /lib, ... and everybody is happy.
> https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/certificates/1223p.pdf
- programs go in /bin
- configurations go in /etc
- libraries go in /lib
- your personal user files go in /home/username
It was supposed to be the user directory, but because someone didn't have enough space on /, it was somehow decided to put some stuff in there, so you have /usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc... But the user directories moved to /home, making /usr hold everything but user directories. Decades later, we still don't know what goes in /usr and what goes in /. In theory, what you need to boot the system should go to /, the rest goes to /usr, but in practice, there is no real rule, just don't break the scripts. Nowadays, distros tend to link one to the other in hope of making some sense without breaking too much stuff.
All that because someone was lacking disk space at some point in history.
‘Bin’ is a generic empty container, and specific slang for a trash can. It might stand for ‘binary’ but what’s the difference between ‘binary’ 1s and 0s and ‘binaries’ aka compiled executables?
‘Etc’ is a dismissive way to refer to there being more things, too numerous to list: X, Y, Z, etc. in no way does it relate to configuration or options or settings or preferences.
‘Lib’ is fine I guess, but also what are libraries. If I ask my mom “what libraries do you have on your computer?” She’s going to be 1) confused and 2) assume I mean ebooks. I’m a programmer so I have a concept of what a library is - but how does that relate to my OS? Is it packages? Is it utilities? Is it frameworks?
accessible, intuitive, usable UX is a Very Hard Problem, there’s a reason it isn’t trivially solved with directory names like ‘bin,’ rather with elements of layout, colour, iconography, typography, you know, a GUI.
Users don’t want to solve a logic puzzle in order to interact with their computer.
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.
I haven't used Windows in a long time, but, at least back in the 95 days, "My Pictures" wasn't the name of the folder; the name was (IIRC) just "Pictures", but Explorer displayed it as "My Pictures" when you were in your home directory, making it just an additional affordance over the structure you indicate. So Alex wouldn't see it for Tony's "Pictures" folder.
But yes, I do quote all my paths excessively in shell scripts because of Program Files…
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...
*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.
Simpsons did it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vihwYGENbFg
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."
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.
"Let's add your Microsoft account." No, let's not.
I mean, it literally does, but language is not literal.
For the record, I also dislike the familiarity.
Let us go / Let's go / Let's
If you don't want to use the full form, it shan't stop me.
(Example, "Is this a good idea? Yes, it's!" sounds wrong. But "it's" still means "it is". It would just sound weird to use a contraction in that context.)
Same as how "let us pray" is frequently used as well.
@ninkendo shared an insightful video below about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic
Let also means "to cause to" as in "let me know", or can be "used in the imperative to introduce a request or proposal", as in "let us pray". (Or "let there be light.")
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/let
The definition you're referring to matches definition 2a, "to give opportunity to or fail to prevent", or definition 4: "to permit to enter, pass, or leave".
"Let's go" absolutely means "let us go". There's no way around it. It's just not the version of "let" that you may be used to, but that doesn't change anything.
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.
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.
Every time a dialogue box has “Sure”/“Ask me later”, they are preventing you from expressing “No”.
Would you like to share the 'My Pictures' folder?
‘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.
Over use of first-person pronouns occurs because a person struggles to extrapolate outward from themselves and their speech reflects the center of their thinking, which is just themselves. Low social intelligence describes the inability to relate to other people in a normal capacity. Not everybody is excellent at empathy, but for people with low social intelligence its a massive gap.
It is such a gap that many people who suffer from extremely low social intelligence realize its a gap because they eventually figure out other people don't want to be around them and they don't have the social relationships they see other people casually having.
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.
I stopped caring (and actually used to remove Windows Search from the "Turn Windows features on or off" menu) once I heard about Everything.
"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
https://dcurt.is/yours-vs-mine
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