> 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.
I don't know the Microsoft guidelines about that. But my understanding is that apps should put their stuff in AppData.
"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.
Microsoft has been inconsistent, both in recommendation and what they've done in their own programs. Probably the most inexplicable is that in the Windows Vista timeframe they recommended that games place their save games into a folder under My Documents despite the Saved Games folder having also been introduced in Vista.
That was often a sticking point that broke compatibility with programs between XP and Vista. Starting in Vista only programs running as administrator can modify the Program Files directory, but many programs for XP would dump config files and such directly in their installation directory. You'd have to run those programs as administrator every time or else they wouldn't work.
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
There is definitely not one single standard. If you look at the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" (LSB standard, which is not universal), on the section about the home directory, you can find this:
> 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".
> 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.
I'd buy this except we have existence proof of how Apple solved this by instead making .app folders act special in the UI and having an /Applications folder you drag applications into.
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.
I'm not a mac guy - but I was playing some sts and for some reason my _data_ was embedded inside an Application which is kind of a package of files and I have to "unzip it" from a context menu to see the save games (but everything still functions the same).
That is, imo, awful. I'm not sold they've got everything right
Except that "Program Files" contains also folders, so it should be "Program Files And Folders", with all the nasty caps and spaces. What's the point of pushing the details to such level if you destroy usability?
In the meantime unix and alike use /bin, /lib, ... and everybody is happy.
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.
But do you put extra programs in /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/, ~/bin. ~/.local/bin or somewhere else entirely. Or if you're using homebrew, who the hell even knows how to make those the first choice in your PATH.
It should have been /shr for shared resources rather than unix shared resources (usr) to prevent people from confusing it with something related to user
god I wish it was that simple. Anything using the native package manager mostly follows this convention (with a variants like /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt). As soon as you need to install something that's not available from the system package manager all bets are off and you need to get ready for your home directory to never look the same again.
‘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.
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.
> 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
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.
I've never seen Explorer show any name other than the folder name, for what it's worth. Then again, I don't remember Windows 95 having "my" anything, except for "my computer".
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).
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.
> I'm not convinced by your string of "my"s as showing that it's childlike
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.
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.
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.
Compensation ain't about how hard something is in an absolute sense. At least that's only one part of it.
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 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.
I once worked with translating an application to polish, and found out we had to have separate placeholders for "name" for persons (nazwisko) and for things (nazwa).
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...
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
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.
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.
Back in the early 2000s, there were gaming magazines — notably Incite and PC Accelerator — that tried to inject "babes" and other lad mag content into a publication ostensibly about video games. I sniffed this out for the pandering it was. Not only was it needless noise, but it detracted from the video game content. In the 2000s, gaming was largely done by kids and young adults with not much money, who needed guidance on which games to buy since they couldn't afford to get very many. So some semblance of detailed evaluation and a critical eye were necessary, even if gaming mags were nowhere near objective even way back when. Making your entire magazine look like an energy drink ad, with tits splashed on every other page, meant you weren't even pretending to take your ostensible subject matter seriously.
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 :).
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)
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.
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.
Telegraphic style is not grammatically incorrect, it’s a feature of instructional English.
Consider “insert nut into bolt”, “slice onion thinly”, or “sprinkle vinegar over chips”.
I agree that your counter example does not work, but that’s due to the ambiguity introduced by having both an indirect and direct object. In a list of short instructions, “give apple to me” would not be ungrammatical.
> The closest analogous sentence would be "Give apple", which works perfectly well as a choice to select in a textual medium.
Definitely no, "Give apple" is baby talk. Completely unacceptable in a choice. That's not proper English. I will die on that hill.
I'm actually shocked by the amount of people here who thinks it's acceptable and fine.
> Those are not analogous. You have added a direct object without preposition, which is not standard usage in such contexts.
The "apple" in "give apple" is a direct object without preposition. It's entirely analogous to what I wrote. Are you confused by the "me" in my sentence. "Me" is an indirect object here.
We basically have the same sentence. It just became entirely obvious that omitting the article is erroneous as soon as you had an indirect object. It's equally erroneous without it but apparently people have somehow convinced themselves it is acceptable after years of misuse in poor computer interfaces.
There is no officially sanctioned authority specifying the English language so "proper English" is not a defined concept in any way or form. You can choose to die on that hill, but you're fighting a war that doesn't even have defined sides.
> Do you actually think this is an unacceptable and grammatically incorrect way of phrasing these provided options?
Yes, I do.
That’s Sierra-like poorly phrased English to save characters in a constrained support. Completely incorrect in any context, inacceptable when you don’t have to save bits.
It’s only somewhat understandable because the zero article is used with proper name. Actually I find it interesting that you found the need to capitalise.
Well, then you are at odds with the vast majority of English-speakers, and will just have to come to terms with the fact that the language is moving on without you.
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.
That's commonly called Grandma's rules, sometimes shortened to gram's rules. I've never seen the spelling "grammer" before, even though gram'r is arguably more correct than gram's.
> 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.
This kind of phrasing is so common (in American English directions) that I remember examples from when I was very young:
(on toothpaste) "Squeeze tube from the bottom and flatten it as you go up."
(on a kerosene heater) "Rotate wick adjuster knob clockwise until it stops."
Australians tend to prefer more conversationally phrased directions from what I've seen, e.g., the rail station signs that read "Keep off the tracks and use the walkways provided to cross. Or catch a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate!"
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 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.
> 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"?
If the user is to report a bug, then any additional information would be better than "Something Went Wrong." "Something Went Wrong" is the equivalent of the guy who calls into the IT helpdesk and says "My computer isn't working."
Surely, somewhere in the code, there is an if() statement, and you're displaying the "Something Went Wrong" dialog in the else() clause. You could at least add some context that the user can copy down, so that the bug report that will come later helps you find the bug.
I'm not a user, but to me the problem with the empty "something went wrong" is not that it that it obscures the error details but that it obscures the failed action. What exactly went wrong? Should I retry my last action? Is my data safe? Is it safe to close the program/app without saving?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
True, but the point was not that they were asking permission, it's the "let us do this together" meaning to which the OP takes offense. He feels like it implies he cannot do it on his own.
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.
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.")
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.
"Let us go" does not only mean "you should let us go" but it is also the first person plural imperative implying that we go. Whether you shorten it to "let's go" or not does not change this.
Same as how "let us pray" is frequently used as well.
Abbreviation does change it; it narrows the meaning. "Let's go" never means "you should let us go" and "let's pray" never means "you should let us pray".
I don't know if I'm being clear. Say you and your family were imprisoned. You would never demand to be released by saying "let's go!". Your bemused family might well ask "Where, to the other corner of the cell?"
English contractions are weird in general in that it doesn't always "work" to contract two words. Tom Scott does a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZyZFa5qO0
(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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
We tend to simplify and gloss over things outside of our expertise. I'm sure UI folks think a lot of the problems developers obsess over are boring and pointless, too, even though they are important. "Should we use inheritance or composition, here?" Yawn--whatever, just make the button!
Absolutely agree with you, which is why I appreciate them, it's just so wild to see what the priorities are across the fence! To be honest, I imagine their bike shedding is way more interesting.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The best pronoun is "we" but it can only really apply when entities with empathy are all we are talking about.
This account is not "I" nor "you".
When the present attention face anything like "I", "you" or even "we", it should reflect on where is this likely coming from and how it’s likely aligning with its own goals.
Let’s remember that ego is illusion, and yet a powerful tool to manipulate the present attention. Take care, enjoy actual life!
I pretty much only ever use 'you' when I need to explain something to the person behind the keyboard. Most of the time though I just don't use any pronouns and let the subject be implied.
I do use 'I' when the message is from me, the developer, and not the program as a separate entity.
Though sometimes I do find it cute for the program to refer to itself in the first person. Not often though
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.
Not all autistic people do this. It is just one symptom among many in a big mixed bag called a spectrum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
I've always thought it was presumptuous for Microsoft to claim ownership of hardware be labelling it as "My Computer". Yes, I get that it's supposed to be referring to the person's computer, but it should have been labelled "This Computer".
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.
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".
I don't know the Microsoft guidelines about that. But my understanding is that apps should put their stuff in AppData.
"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.
Microsoft has been inconsistent, both in recommendation and what they've done in their own programs. Probably the most inexplicable is that in the Windows Vista timeframe they recommended that games place their save games into a folder under My Documents despite the Saved Games folder having also been introduced in Vista.
That was often a sticking point that broke compatibility with programs between XP and Vista. Starting in Vista only programs running as administrator can modify the Program Files directory, but many programs for XP would dump config files and such directly in their installation directory. You'd have to run those programs as administrator every time or else they wouldn't work.
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
> \s I guess we'll just need to create a brand new standard, that will make things better. \s
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.
There is definitely not one single standard. If you look at the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" (LSB standard, which is not universal), on the section about the home directory, you can find this:
> 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".
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-...
I'd buy this except we have existence proof of how Apple solved this by instead making .app folders act special in the UI and having an /Applications folder you drag applications into.
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.
I'm not a mac guy - but I was playing some sts and for some reason my _data_ was embedded inside an Application which is kind of a package of files and I have to "unzip it" from a context menu to see the save games (but everything still functions the same).
That is, imo, awful. I'm not sold they've got everything right
That is very weird and suggests the App developer made a weird choice and ignore the HIG. Not a problem with the approach IMHO.
I remember when you’d look in that folder in old versions of Windows, explorer would actually tell you, “Hey, don’t look in here!”
This was because they hadn’t yet implemented security. (Was probably Win98 or so.)
Except that "Program Files" contains also folders, so it should be "Program Files And Folders", with all the nasty caps and spaces. What's the point of pushing the details to such level if you destroy usability?
In the meantime unix and alike use /bin, /lib, ... and everybody is happy.
But Unix isn't a good system for a person that isn't a computer geek
Macs seem to sell just fine to people that aren't "computer geeks".
> https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/certificates/1223p.pdf
this makes Unix-style directories seem downright logical:
- programs go in /bin
- configurations go in /etc
- libraries go in /lib
- your personal user files go in /home/username
And then, there is /usr
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.
But do you put extra programs in /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/, ~/bin. ~/.local/bin or somewhere else entirely. Or if you're using homebrew, who the hell even knows how to make those the first choice in your PATH.
i thought /usr was a mounted shared volume for files that were static for everyone in the lab/office and the local machine machines files went in /
It should have been /shr for shared resources rather than unix shared resources (usr) to prevent people from confusing it with something related to user
god I wish it was that simple. Anything using the native package manager mostly follows this convention (with a variants like /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt). As soon as you need to install something that's not available from the system package manager all bets are off and you need to get ready for your home directory to never look the same again.
These labels are unintuitive.
‘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.
except...
The types of people digging in PROGRA~1 were pretty likely to understand the difference between executables and DLLs.
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.
> 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
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.
I've never seen Explorer show any name other than the folder name, for what it's worth. Then again, I don't remember Windows 95 having "my" anything, except for "my computer".
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).
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.
> I'm not convinced by your string of "my"s as showing that it's childlike
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.
(tl;dr on reflection I mostly agree with you)
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.
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.
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.
It would be nice if they employed some of those dedicated tech writers for external documentation (sorry for the snark, couldn’t help it)
> 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.
Compensation ain't about how hard something is in an absolute sense. At least that's only one part of it.
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.)
> 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
One simple example is slavic languages where you have different forms of plural depending on the number.
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)
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.
For example, in Arabic, nouns have three forms: singular, dual, and plural. Dual and plural are not interchangeable.
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?
https://projectfluent.org/ comes close. The syntax is hard to read though. I guess you can't have the cake and eat it too.
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
I once worked with translating an application to polish, and found out we had to have separate placeholders for "name" for persons (nazwisko) and for things (nazwa).
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...
This is fascinating, thank you. The intricacies of languages is so interesting. I especially love the insane way we danes spell out numbers.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Back in the early 2000s, there were gaming magazines — notably Incite and PC Accelerator — that tried to inject "babes" and other lad mag content into a publication ostensibly about video games. I sniffed this out for the pandering it was. Not only was it needless noise, but it detracted from the video game content. In the 2000s, gaming was largely done by kids and young adults with not much money, who needed guidance on which games to buy since they couldn't afford to get very many. So some semblance of detailed evaluation and a critical eye were necessary, even if gaming mags were nowhere near objective even way back when. Making your entire magazine look like an energy drink ad, with tits splashed on every other page, meant you weren't even pretending to take your ostensible subject matter seriously.
[dead]
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 :).
I used to work with a guy who when asked "What's the problem?", he would answer: "There's no problem. But the problem is xyz."
You're absolutely right.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Telegraphic style is not grammatically incorrect, it’s a feature of instructional English.
Consider “insert nut into bolt”, “slice onion thinly”, or “sprinkle vinegar over chips”.
I agree that your counter example does not work, but that’s due to the ambiguity introduced by having both an indirect and direct object. In a list of short instructions, “give apple to me” would not be ungrammatical.
obviously you insert bolts into nuts, not the other way round.
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.
> The closest analogous sentence would be "Give apple", which works perfectly well as a choice to select in a textual medium.
Definitely no, "Give apple" is baby talk. Completely unacceptable in a choice. That's not proper English. I will die on that hill.
I'm actually shocked by the amount of people here who thinks it's acceptable and fine.
> Those are not analogous. You have added a direct object without preposition, which is not standard usage in such contexts.
The "apple" in "give apple" is a direct object without preposition. It's entirely analogous to what I wrote. Are you confused by the "me" in my sentence. "Me" is an indirect object here.
We basically have the same sentence. It just became entirely obvious that omitting the article is erroneous as soon as you had an indirect object. It's equally erroneous without it but apparently people have somehow convinced themselves it is acceptable after years of misuse in poor computer interfaces.
> That's not proper English.
There is no officially sanctioned authority specifying the English language so "proper English" is not a defined concept in any way or form. You can choose to die on that hill, but you're fighting a war that doesn't even have defined sides.
Would you like to give them the apple or the pear?
] Give Apple
] Give Pear
Do you actually think this is an unacceptable and grammatically incorrect way of phrasing these provided options?
> The "apple" in "give apple" is a direct object without preposition
My apologies, you're correct. I mistyped—I should have said "indirect object". That does not negate any of the rest of what I said.
> Do you actually think this is an unacceptable and grammatically incorrect way of phrasing these provided options?
Yes, I do.
That’s Sierra-like poorly phrased English to save characters in a constrained support. Completely incorrect in any context, inacceptable when you don’t have to save bits.
It’s only somewhat understandable because the zero article is used with proper name. Actually I find it interesting that you found the need to capitalise.
Well, then you are at odds with the vast majority of English-speakers, and will just have to come to terms with the fact that the language is moving on without you.
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
That's commonly called Grandma's rules, sometimes shortened to gram's rules. I've never seen the spelling "grammer" before, even though gram'r is arguably more correct than gram's.
> 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.
> I have never seen this.
Genuinely question, where do you live?
I imagine it can't be the US or the UK.
I'm wondering what your local dialect of English is that this construction is uncommon.
To be fair, I think I was mixing it up with instructions on packaging, like "replace cap after use" on tubes of glue.
This kind of phrasing is so common (in American English directions) that I remember examples from when I was very young:
(on toothpaste) "Squeeze tube from the bottom and flatten it as you go up."
(on a kerosene heater) "Rotate wick adjuster knob clockwise until it stops."
Australians tend to prefer more conversationally phrased directions from what I've seen, e.g., the rail station signs that read "Keep off the tracks and use the walkways provided to cross. Or catch a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate!"
Maybe it's a cultural thing.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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"?
If the user is to report a bug, then any additional information would be better than "Something Went Wrong." "Something Went Wrong" is the equivalent of the guy who calls into the IT helpdesk and says "My computer isn't working."
Surely, somewhere in the code, there is an if() statement, and you're displaying the "Something Went Wrong" dialog in the else() clause. You could at least add some context that the user can copy down, so that the bug report that will come later helps you find the bug.
I'm not a user, but to me the problem with the empty "something went wrong" is not that it that it obscures the error details but that it obscures the failed action. What exactly went wrong? Should I retry my last action? Is my data safe? Is it safe to close the program/app without saving?
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.
Oops, something went wrong, lol! emojis
Oopsie doopsie, computer made a poopsie! I mean, at least give me an error code that I can type into Google to see if someone else is hitting it!
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.
Older Windows had "My Computer" icon on the desktop, now they have "This PC".
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?
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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'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.
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”.
Phrasing things like a buddy is not an example of what you're describing. They're separate issues.
"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.
True, but the point was not that they were asking permission, it's the "let us do this together" meaning to which the OP takes offense. He feels like it implies he cannot do it on his own.
"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.
Words have more than one meaning.
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.
Let literally means a lot of things, one of them being "allow us to". But that is only one of many of its literal meanings.
"Let's go" never means "let us go". Just try to articulate it as such! I can't.
"Let us go" does not only mean "you should let us go" but it is also the first person plural imperative implying that we go. Whether you shorten it to "let's go" or not does not change this.
Same as how "let us pray" is frequently used as well.
Abbreviation does change it; it narrows the meaning. "Let's go" never means "you should let us go" and "let's pray" never means "you should let us pray".
@ninkendo shared an insightful video below about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic
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 don't know if I'm being clear. Say you and your family were imprisoned. You would never demand to be released by saying "let's go!". Your bemused family might well ask "Where, to the other corner of the cell?"
English contractions are weird in general in that it doesn't always "work" to contract two words. Tom Scott does a good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZyZFa5qO0
(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.)
You can't always replace "let us" with "let's", but you can always replace "let's" with "let us".
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.
> 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?
This is extremely dangerous to Our Democracy.
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".
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!"
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.
Heh, Malaysia's two-letter country code is "MY". Guess what the national identity card is called?
Well myspace didn't have any issues, did it ?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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
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.
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.
We tend to simplify and gloss over things outside of our expertise. I'm sure UI folks think a lot of the problems developers obsess over are boring and pointless, too, even though they are important. "Should we use inheritance or composition, here?" Yawn--whatever, just make the button!
Absolutely agree with you, which is why I appreciate them, it's just so wild to see what the priorities are across the fence! To be honest, I imagine their bike shedding is way more interesting.
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.
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.
In Windows, with the right settings, you might have a 'Shared Pictures' folder or a 'toast0's Pictures' folder.
how about people visually impaired
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best pronoun is "we" but it can only really apply when entities with empathy are all we are talking about.
This account is not "I" nor "you".
When the present attention face anything like "I", "you" or even "we", it should reflect on where is this likely coming from and how it’s likely aligning with its own goals.
Let’s remember that ego is illusion, and yet a powerful tool to manipulate the present attention. Take care, enjoy actual life!
I pretty much only ever use 'you' when I need to explain something to the person behind the keyboard. Most of the time though I just don't use any pronouns and let the subject be implied.
I do use 'I' when the message is from me, the developer, and not the program as a separate entity.
Though sometimes I do find it cute for the program to refer to itself in the first person. Not often though
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.
Not all autistic people do this. It is just one symptom among many in a big mixed bag called a spectrum.
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.
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.
Or be a proper comrade and only use our :p
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.
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.
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".
OMG, flashback to Windows 95's "My Documents".
I agree with the article's "It's a trick question" paragraph --- avoid using either.
For what it’s worth capitalization fixes a lot of this. “Go to my account” vs “Go to My Account”. Pretty clear to me.
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
I hate that too, and especially because it’s a very well known problem with a very well agreed upon solution since ages
https://youtu.be/wX1x7pfH8fw?si=aEGLYtBTSbCrbRBJ
"No thanks, I love missing out on amazing deals"
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.
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.
I've always thought it was presumptuous for Microsoft to claim ownership of hardware be labelling it as "My Computer". Yes, I get that it's supposed to be referring to the person's computer, but it should have been labelled "This Computer".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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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.
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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.