French web sites seem to have lost the plot completely. Buttons are sometimes imperative, sometimes infinitive, sometimes first-person present ("J’en profite!"), and probably others...
Japanese use of "my" as a loanword creates a lot of these. Please park your my car in our my car parking lot.
So you're at the counter with the clerk going "Please show me your My Number card".
I recently saw a major company's app using both in the same dialog. It's madness.
Clicking a button that says "I register" or "I want to pay for a parking ticket", feels so bizarre to me. It's like the website telling you what to click. Like it's holding your hand.
I don't usually get mad at petty stuff like this, but this one just pisses me off somehow.
French has the added difficulty of requiring to choose between "tu" and "vous" if you want to use the "your..." style. So you can instantly see if the website is trying to fake being your friend.
I think Flemish websites just use "jouw whatever" but it's much less direct and jarring than being called "tu" in French by a corporate entity (not a native Dutch speaker though, but I've been living in Flanders for quite a while now).
For something like Facebook, it's OK to use je/jouw. But for something like a government website, or perhaps things like banks or insurance companies, je/jouw is not appropriate and u/uw should be used.
I just checked some samples: Facebook uses je/jouw, LinkedIn uses u/uw, government website MyMinfin uses u/uw. That all seems appropriate, so the choice is perhaps not as delicate as I first thought.
This kind of soft infantilization, especially coming from the government, has always been rubbing me the wrong way.
I really couldn't think of a more ridiculous name. It closed down this year anyway.
So, if you use a caption like “Delete Your Files” on a button, it would mean the files of the app, not the files of the user. Or, if you have a dialog titled “Delete My Files”, that would imply an app is asking the user to delete the app’s files due to the differences in the formality.
That’s a problem I’ve been encountering while translating Bluesky. If devs follow certain simple rules while writing UI text, it would make a tremendous difference for translation quality.
As a UI Developer that has accidentally focused my whole career in building (complex) forms, I can tell you there is a night and day difference from when I worked alongside User Assistance professionals vs when UX designers had to come up with the texts. These “User Assistance professionals” were usually English/Language-majored that would exclusively take care of how to properly write the texts on the screen for the users. From help texts to button labels, to release notes and RCA, and especially taking care of how to write texts in English so the app would be easily translatable, they would own all. The apps that had that sort of handholding with the devs were extremely easier to use and input data to, even when the UX itself was subpar.
I used to think it was standard to have English-focused professionals helping UI teams to deliver easy to understand products, only to find out that that company was kinda odd in that regard, and having UX or even product people coming up with labels is quite common. I do miss being able to fire an email when I need a quick text reviewed to be sure that a button is well labeled for the user and translation.
Which is a bit of a shame, because English/Language-majored people's time is cheaper than techies' time.
Google is another outlier in a related way: they have dedicated tech writers to produce internal documentation.
The trick with tech writing is retention!
Which is odd, because it's harder to communicate unambiguously in English than it is in code.
Playing an instrument is harder than being a code monkey. On the one hand, you can make good money being a top tier musician, there's almost no money in being a mediocre musician (or even an above average one). On the other hand, it's fairly easy to get by as a mediocre code monkey.
Even as a somewhat subpar software engineer, you can make enough money that you don't have to be waiting tables as your day job.
(Waiting tables itself is a good example at least to contrast with acting or making music or writing novels. None of these aspiring artists and poets is necessarily any good at waiting tables, but it still pays the bills compared to even pretty good acting skills.)
Edit: Also have to note that education in language or literature doesn’t make person a good UX copywriter automatically. It’s a cross-domain job with multiple career paths towards it. You were lucky to work with someone who really excelled in it.
A company I worked for some 20 years ago had writers who mostly thought about the "happy path". When things went wrong, the error messages were left up to the programmers.
I discovered this when I tried to install our product on an old Mac and got this message:
Your hard disk is too small
Wait? My what is too small?
Later, on Windows, I got this popup:
You are not here
WTF?
I searched for this message and found it came from a function called CantHappen(), which was kind of like an assert(false). Something you throw into a code path just to note a place that you really know the code can never reach. Until it inevitably does.
I went on a rampage through our code, finding all these crazy messages and updating them - and when possible, fixing the code so the error messages wouldn't be needed.
My manager and his manager, to their credit, knew how bad our messages were, and they helped me pull together a little team with a writer and translators to fix these up. And we did. Our messages got a lot better, easier to understand and more helpful.
All because our Mac installer told me my hard disk was too small.
To understand the problem, consider two things.
First, imagine another word that rhymes with "disk". I will just call it "di*k" here.
Second, the problem wasn't that my hard di*k was too small. I could have the biggest hard di*k in the world, but if it didn't have enough free space, there wouldn't be room to install Acrobat.
So the message had an admittedly slim chance of being misconstrued, but more importantly it was just plain incorrect.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/ibm-announce...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...
On every project I ever worked on somebody had thingCount == 1 ? 'thing' : 'things' somewhere and it drives me up the wall having to explain that and pgettext thingy
it can largely be turned into six categories of behavior, with tons of languages choosing different boundaries for those categories. ios/osx and android have tools for this, and probably others (I'm just personally familiar with these).
and even English isn't even that simple in the way many treat it - you don't pluralize sentences, parts of sentences change in contrast to each other (a car drives vs cars drive). so e.g. widely used APIs like https://apidock.com/rails/v7.1.3.4/String/pluralize are blatantly misleading merely by existing, and it leads to mistakes in many (most?) languages, and also English, even though the authors of the API speak English.
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.
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)
1 osoba
2, 3, 4 osoby
5, 6, 15, 21 osób
22 osoby
25 osób
101, 112 osób
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" :)
_('There are:') _('%d items', count=len(items))
`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.
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.
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...
As a dev that often writes UI text, which simple rules do you recommend that I should follow?
For example, don't have a button that reads "Go to your profile", that screws up translations in languages like Turkish.
> MS Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines suggests the following:
> Use the second person (you, your) to tell users what to do. So use second person for error messages, help, window or page labels, on-page documentation, and other places where the app is telling the user about the user’s content.
> Use the first person (I, me, my) to let users tell the program what to do. So use first person for buttons, menu items, and other controls where the user commands the app.
> Don't use My or Your. In most cases it's obvious whose they are.
> The only case you might want to do it is to differentiate e.g. between the user's documents and everyone's documents. In that case I would follow the Microsoft guidelines cited by Michael and use "Your Documents" and "All Documents".
> One of the worst UI bloopers in Windows XP is the use of the prefix "My". It's ridiculous: want to see your photos? Look under "M" for "My Photos". Received files? Look under "M" for "My Received Files". It's like the old joke about the secretary who files everything under "T" for "The Payroll", "The Rent", etc.
I have sometimes used "your" to differentiate between things like private, shared, and global, resources. More often than not this is not needed as there is a better word to use (local, private, shared, …) but sometimes the extra “your” or “by you” does help (for differentiating objects shared by others and those shared by you it can be more concise and clear than listing the name of who shared/owns the resource, for example).
I do in fact talk about my computer[1] and my files on it. The problem isn't that I wouldn't call them "my". It's that (1) when the computer labels them that way it feels like it's putting words in my mouth and I don't like that even if I'd have chosen similar words, and (2) it's unnecessary because if something's already in my home directory then calling it "My Whatever" rather than just "Whatever" is unnecessary. Of course, Windows rather wants to cover up all the evidence that you have a home directory, which for me is also part of the problem.
[1] Well, I'd be more specific, because like many people on HN I have more than one computer. But that isn't really the point here.
While I often use “my” like that (“has anyone seen where I put my phone?” etc), the thing with Windows95 was that it was applied to everything and coupled with the crayola-like UI friendlyfication. On its own, or used less judiciously, it might have not felt a bit infantilising like it did.
Also, there are a few things in your list that I would use more passive language for. I always referred to the mortgage on my flat as “the mortgage” unless in a situation where that might be ambiguous, and the bank is definitely the bank not my bank. The distinction generally falls along personal/other lines: within my flat (which I sometimes call the flat) I have my bedroom but also the bathroom, the spare room (or guest room, lodger's room, craft room, junk room, workout room - it has had many names over the years all usually prefaced with “the” rather than “my”), the kitchen, and the living room. For work, when I'm not working from home, I go to the office. If your every day use of the language doesn't have this distinction (this could easily be a regional or generational variation, most others around me follow a pattern similar to mine, for reference I'm a late-40s anal-retentive from northern England) then the Win95 UI's use of that language wouldn't give you the same feeling.
> because like many people on HN I have more than one computer
This may be a time based difference too. Around the time of Win95's first arrival I did have a computer of my own, and it wasn't the only one in the house, though this was unusual: many people did not have a computer at home at all (even if counting game systems or general purpose micros like a C64 that they used exclusively for playing games) and the only computers that they used were at school, at work, or in the library, so were not there's except when they were using them, and I probably spent at least as much time on computers that I didn't consider to be mine than I did on the one that was.
Interesting. I would sometimes say "the mortgage", "the bank", "the car", etc., but I don't think "my" is wrong for any of those except in so far as the thing in question isn't just mine (e.g., it's my wife's -- excuse me, the wife's -- car as well as mine).
Thinking about this some more, I think the pattern is as follows. I would say "my" to refer to something that (1) is specifically mine rather than anyone else's and (2) might be thought to be someone else's, or otherwise be ambiguous, if I didn't say "my". For something that's in some sense mine but for which #1 and #2 don't both hold, I would more often say "the".
So, e.g., "the mortgage" or "my mortgage"? If I'm living on my own, "the" because there's no one else. If I'm living with a partner, "the" because it's joint with them, or because we both know that they don't have one. If I'm living with a minor child, "the" because they can't have one. But if I'm talking to another adult, typically "my" or "our" for disambiguation.
"The office" or "my office"? "The" if it's the office I go to with all my colleagues. "The" if it's a room in my house and it's the only such room. "My" if two of us living in the same house have rooms they use in the same way.
(In my actual house there's a room that we originally called "the study" which we envisaged being used by whoever needed it, but in practice it's basically always me. My wife calls it "your study". I feel kinda bad about having usurped it -- there's another room my wife uses for similar purposes but it's substantially smaller and I've clearly got the better end of this deal -- and I often call it "the study" but when I do I know I'm being a bit dishonest.)
If you're a child then probably there are lots of things that are specifically yours. You might refer to "the teddy bear" because there's no one else it's likely to belong to, but your parents won't because it's not (in the relevant sense) theirs so "the" isn't appropriate for them. And if you're a child and you regard something as yours, you're probably painfully aware that (1) any siblings might try to lay claim to it and (2) in some sense your parents could lay claim to it, so you're going to use "my" whenever you can.
So I think I agree that "my" is proportionally used more by children than by adults. I don't think I personally find that that makes it feel infantilizing in the way it sounds like you do. But I do find the Windows "My X" stuff patronizing and maybe unconsciously I'm associating it with childishness.
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...
You have to put it into context, it was the fist multi-user system for most people. Before that, they considered the whole filesystem to be theirs, no pesky permissions or anything like that. So "My" is a good indication for where to put their stuff (instead of, say, C:\).
I think it makes more sense than "Your" as "Your" is more like "stuff the computer gives you / read only" rather than "stuff you give the computer / editable" and a folder like "My Photos" is more of the latter. Matching the idea of the article where "your" is the question, a question is not something you change, and "my" is the answer, which is the thing you act on.
And by the way, the more I look at it, the more I respect the UI designers at pre-Windows 8 Microsoft. So many stupid things that turned out not to be stupid at all. It doesn't mean perfect, but when we see the mess that we have now, it pretty much was by comparison.
Another one is why have folders with spaces in them: "Program Files", "My Documents", etc... The rumor is that it was to force programmers to take handle spaces in filenames properly, because if they don't, it won't work at all. And seeing how terrible the situation is with Unix shells, if true, it is definitely justified. Most of the shell scripts (and not just shell scripts) I see outside of popular public projects fail to handle spaces properly, sometimes catastrophically.
Linux has one single standard, all that software doing random stuff is non-standard.
And the standard says it's configurable, so I don't know what of your examples is the correct one on your machine.
> A number of efforts have been made in the past to standardize the layout of home directories, including the XDG Base Directories specification [9] and the GLib conventions on user directory contents. [10] Additional efforts in this direction are possible in the future. To accomodate software which makes use of these specifications and conventions, distributions may create directory hierarchies which follow the specifications and conventions. Those directory hierarchies may be located underneath home directories.
So one standard saying you should look at other standards. XDG from freedesktop.org is the most popular (and probably the one you are referring to). However, it relate to Linux desktops, it says nothing about non-desktop applications (ex: bash, ssh, git, ...). About git, it would a bit ironic for git, made by Linus himself for working on the Linux kernel to not follow the "one standard".
"My ..." is for files intended for the user to access directly. For instance photo apps will naturally save their photos in "My Photos", but just the photos, and with the understanding that the user can reorganize them, open them with other apps, etc... Apps that put their crap in "My Documents" are likely not following the best practices.
Note that not all folders in %userprofile% are called "My ...". For example "Downloads" (you are not supposed to modify stuff there, just read and delete) or "Desktop" (you are not supposed to access it through the explorer). The OS won't stop you, but the fact they aren't "My..." is a hint that it is not their purpose.
But yes, I do quote all my paths excessively in shell scripts because of Program Files…
> Some people suggest that one thing Microsoft Research could do with that time machine they’re working on is to go back in time and change the name of the Program Files directory to simply Programs. No, it really should be Program Files. Program Files are not the same as Programs. Programs are things like Calc, Notepad, Excel, Photoshop. They are things you run. Program Files are things like ACRORD32.DLL and TWCUTCHR.DLL. They are files that make programs run. If the directory were named Programs, then people who wanted to run a program would start digging into that directory and seeing a page full of weird DLL names and wonder “What the heck kind of programs are these?” And eventually they might figure out that if they want to run PowerPoint, they need to double-click on the icon named POWERPNT. “Computers are so hard to use.” WLCM2DOS
> If you want to find your programs, go to the Start menu. The Program Files directory is like the pantry of a restaurant. You aren’t expected to go in there and nibble on things that look interesting. You’re expected to order things from the menu.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20131119-00/?p=26...
See also:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...
A much more elegant solution and I think the criticism stands correct; Microsoft Research just didn't realize how to solve the problem and everything else is justification after-the-fact.
This was because they hadn’t yet implemented security. (Was probably Win98 or so.)
That is, imo, awful. I'm not sold they've got everything right
In the meantime unix and alike use /bin, /lib, ... and everybody is happy.
> https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/certificates/1223p.pdf
- programs go in /bin
- configurations go in /etc
- libraries go in /lib
- your personal user files go in /home/username
It was supposed to be the user directory, but because someone didn't have enough space on /, it was somehow decided to put some stuff in there, so you have /usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc... But the user directories moved to /home, making /usr hold everything but user directories. Decades later, we still don't know what goes in /usr and what goes in /. In theory, what you need to boot the system should go to /, the rest goes to /usr, but in practice, there is no real rule, just don't break the scripts. Nowadays, distros tend to link one to the other in hope of making some sense without breaking too much stuff.
All that because someone was lacking disk space at some point in history.
‘Bin’ is a generic empty container, and specific slang for a trash can. It might stand for ‘binary’ but what’s the difference between ‘binary’ 1s and 0s and ‘binaries’ aka compiled executables?
‘Etc’ is a dismissive way to refer to there being more things, too numerous to list: X, Y, Z, etc. in no way does it relate to configuration or options or settings or preferences.
‘Lib’ is fine I guess, but also what are libraries. If I ask my mom “what libraries do you have on your computer?” She’s going to be 1) confused and 2) assume I mean ebooks. I’m a programmer so I have a concept of what a library is - but how does that relate to my OS? Is it packages? Is it utilities? Is it frameworks?
accessible, intuitive, usable UX is a Very Hard Problem, there’s a reason it isn’t trivially solved with directory names like ‘bin,’ rather with elements of layout, colour, iconography, typography, you know, a GUI.
Users don’t want to solve a logic puzzle in order to interact with their computer.
Lets say your name is alex and you share the computer with tony. Both of you have folders called "My Pictures". That "My" is simply false if you look at the files in Tonys directory. The conceptually much better solution is to take the parent folder into account. In Linux that usually means /home/alex/pictures and /home/tony/pictures
Filepaths in my opinion are already a perfectly fine abstraction and everything that tries to teach people to not understand them is creating new problems and a new class of idiot that doesn't understand computers. The latter is of course a feature, not a bug from the standpoint of OS manufacturers thar want to smartphone-iphy their Desktop-OS.
I haven't used Windows in a long time, but, at least back in the 95 days, "My Pictures" wasn't the name of the folder; the name was (IIRC) just "Pictures", but Explorer displayed it as "My Pictures" when you were in your home directory, making it just an additional affordance over the structure you indicate. So Alex wouldn't see it for Tony's "Pictures" folder.
*Strawman example because this one could easily just be “Favorites,” which imo is the preferred way: avoid ownership pronouns unless it actually makes sense to use them.
Simpsons did it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vihwYGENbFg
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.
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."
"Let's add your Microsoft account." No, let's not.
I mean, it literally does, but language is not literal.
For the record, I also dislike the familiarity.
Let us go / Let's go / Let's
If you don't want to use the full form, it shan't stop me.
Somebody else brought up the example of “let’s go!” versus “let us go” - not the same thing by a long shot.
“Let’s” in English has a distinct meaning from “let us”, and that is to politely and casually (but firmly) suggest a course of action.
I remember touring a Polish salt mine a couple of years ago. The guide was very good, but her English had a few quirks, among them that she seemed to like the phrase “let’s let me to show you …”. It’s wrong, but you can immediately understand that she meant “please let me show you”.
(Example, "Is this a good idea? Yes, it's!" sounds wrong. But "it's" still means "it is". It would just sound weird to use a contraction in that context.)
Same as how "let us pray" is frequently used as well.
@ninkendo shared an insightful video below about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic
Let also means "to cause to" as in "let me know", or can be "used in the imperative to introduce a request or proposal", as in "let us pray". (Or "let there be light.")
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/let
The definition you're referring to matches definition 2a, "to give opportunity to or fail to prevent", or definition 4: "to permit to enter, pass, or leave".
"Let's go" absolutely means "let us go". There's no way around it. It's just not the version of "let" that you may be used to, but that doesn't change anything.
Yes, literally, "let's" expands to "let us". But idiomatically, "let's/let us <do this thing>" does not mean "allow us to <do this thing>"; it means "I am requesting that we now <do this thing> together".
Now, I'm not entirely sure why simonask felt this level of literality was a useful one to bring up here, but it is true.
I maintain that if it didn’t use such infantilizing wording I may have given it a chance (I had a Microsoft account, after all.)
There’s a certain… dissonance that happens when I’m reading a dialog that pretends me and an app are good buddies, old pals, when in reality I fucking hate the company involved. It can make me feel physically angry, like enough to want to throw my computer. I’m fully aware that this is a flaw in my personality, but I just hate it so, so, so much.
Ditto “Got it!” (With the cutesy fucking exclamation point) and other similar informal language in the buttons.
Every time a dialogue box has “Sure”/“Ask me later”, they are preventing you from expressing “No”.
Would you like to share the 'My Pictures' folder?
‘Click on your “My Cases” tab’
‘Click on “Account”’
etc
Reducing my/your in features is a good start (My Pictures → Pictures, as mentioned in this thread), but always treat specific concepts as proper nouns.
Over use of first-person pronouns occurs because a person struggles to extrapolate outward from themselves and their speech reflects the center of their thinking, which is just themselves. Low social intelligence describes the inability to relate to other people in a normal capacity. Not everybody is excellent at empathy, but for people with low social intelligence its a massive gap.
It is such a gap that many people who suffer from extremely low social intelligence realize its a gap because they eventually figure out other people don't want to be around them and they don't have the social relationships they see other people casually having.
Personally, I detest the Microsoft way of naming directories. "My Documents" is just files. If you're going to name it "My Documents" it damn well better only contain documents, no config files, no videos or images.
In other news, whilst I have my ranting hat on, WTAF is going on with Microsoft Explorer's search? Now sure, getting on the way and preventing you doing stuff is MS's cute thing -- but why does it suck so, so badly. It's as useful as a dingleberry.
I stopped caring (and actually used to remove Windows Search from the "Turn Windows features on or off" menu) once I heard about Everything.
"It is now safe to turn off your computer"
Awesome I'll go turn it off then, it's just across the room from this one that isn't mine that I'm currently shutting down
> 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"
I have been in call centres and watched users many times.
> The way that I would word it and would mentor people to say is "go to 'my cases' at the top"
Haivng to mentor people to speak in a certain way is a cost that should be avoided. Good design propagates out to all parts of the service, including support.
Also, the speech marks around "my cases" don’t get heard over the phone, only seen when written down.
But even if it's about how it's written, I agree it’s clearer, but it's also verbose and tiring for both the reader and the support agent.
But most importantly, it can be avoided altogether by saying “Your” instead of “My” so why wouldn’t you just do that?
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
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
The article is about when you should use my or your in form controls like upload dialogs.
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
No it isn't.
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.
I am being manipulated.
I prefer the machine to reply:
Affirmative.
Unfortunately this billion dollar LLM enterprises are competing for eyeballs and clicks.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Raise anchor, fix bayonets, hands up
I think I'm with crazygringo on this one, there's special command grammar.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
] 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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the second party is not present, that interpretation makes no sense and users wouldn't interpret it that way in native English.
Why repeat the premise of the question in each answer?
Even simpler is a checkbox:
[ ] Share my profile photo.
Thank you, computer, for being totally unhelpful.
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.
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"?
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.
Just another item on the long list of Things Done in the 80s That We Couldn't Get Away With Today.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Now the novelty has wore off and we should go back to those boring computer messages.
Of course if Windows update wasn't so horrible maybe it wouldn't matter as much.
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.
Which is why everyone says...
> Go to "My cases"
...instead.
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 hated then, still hate it now.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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
I agree with the article's "It's a trick question" paragraph --- avoid using either.
In any case, I'd much rather use no pronouns, in most cases it works well and you don't need them. "Cases", "Account", "Cards" works as well as the pronouned version.
bilekas•4mo ago
jychang•4mo ago
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.
ryandrake•4mo ago
bilekas•4mo ago