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.

The big omission here is the third person, which is why I always prompt my LLMs to talk in the third person.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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" :)

> 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?

Anyways, this message is just feel-good bullshit UI/UX design. I prefer to have just "Loading: 90%" and that's it.

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.

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."

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).

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.

"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 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.

> 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.

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?

It's a problem in Spanish too. You'll sometimes see buttons with the infinitive and others with the 2nd person command form.

I recently saw a major company's app using both in the same dialog. It's madness.

Well myspace didn't have any issues, did it ?

I seem to remember Windows 95 had "My Computer" and the iMac came out in 1998, so the "My" labeling was already underway.

The first time I remember seeing "My" was "My Computer" on Windows 95.

I hated then, still hate it now.

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".

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.

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.

It's not really your computer anymore...

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.

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.

Could you elaborate? I hadn't noticed such a correlation before. Especially in relation to children on the autism spectrum.

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"")

> 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.

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

French fellow, 100%. It reads really unserious.

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.