61–70 of 106 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think pronouns should be reserved more for interactions, where a UI's personality really shines through. So when refreshing your inbox, you may see "Fetching your email", for example.
Why does a UI have to have personality? Why can't it just look good and be easy to use? Does anyone actually care if an application is "speaking" as if it is a conscious entity?
Ready? This is going to blow your mind... NEITHER. Just say "Purchases" or "Bookmarks." Not yours, not mine, not his, not hers. Just "it." Now, get back to writing code!
Interfaces and marketing that use "my" always irk me by, for lack of a better phrase, coming on too strong . I'm all too aware of the human hands that typed out that button label - it seems damned impudent of them to be assuming my voice. It implies a certain intimacy. My cart sounds like an appropriate label for something I've filled, but so long as it's empty trying to foist it off as mine just comes across as a de…
I agree. This is something that has been bothering me every since Windows XP. I think less about what marketers want and how desperate it may or may not be, and I spend more time feeling offended that someone is presuming to intrude into my personal space in my program on my machine and tell me how I plan to use it. It's like they're misrepresenting me to myself, and it never fails to provoke much scoffing and eyerolling from me. I consider it a major signal of BS in software.
On the other hand, software which uses "your" or no pronouns at all can do almost exactly the same stuff - like creating a default organization of data - and I don't mind. I see it as a respectful suggestion which has my best interest in mind, and I'm more likely to actually incorporate their idea into the way I do things because I'm not immediately on the defensive.
Edit:
This reminds me of when I was staying at one of those tropical beach resorts and one of the souvenir sellers was announcing "shopping time, everybody!" to everyone that passed by. I didn't like that he obviously wanted me to participate in a dishonest exchange, but he was presumptuously "reminding" me that giving giving him money is a natural part of my day, the same way that I have an "eating time" and a "sleeping time".
Ready? This is going to blow your mind... NEITHER. Just say "Purchases" or "Bookmarks." Not yours, not mine, not his, not hers. Just "it." Now, get back to writing code!
Ready? This is going to blow your mind... NEITHER. Just say "Purchases" or "Bookmarks." Not yours, not mine, not his, not hers. Just "it." Now, get back to writing code!
Ready? This is going to blow your mind... NEITHER. Just say "Purchases" or "Bookmarks." Not yours, not mine, not his, not hers. Just "it." Now, get back to writing code!
This is a really dismissive comment that could be used to trivialize just about any article and debate here on HN. While it isn't a big issue, this topic is something designer's do think about and a discussion about its effects on user experience seems reasonable. Plus I doubt anyone's losing hours of productivity over this.
Ready? This is going to blow your mind... NEITHER. Just say "Purchases" or "Bookmarks." Not yours, not mine, not his, not hers. Just "it." Now, get back to writing code!
Reminds me a bit of the good ol' pre-Vista days of "My Documents" et cetera in the Windows world. :) But hey, even MS took a decade between 95 and Vista to decide to drop the prefix!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think pronouns should be reserved more for interactions, where a UI's personality really shines through. So when refreshing your inbox, you may see "Fetching your email", for example.
Why does a UI have to have personality? Why can't it just look good and be easy to use? Does anyone actually care if an application is "speaking" as if it is a conscious entity?
And believe it or not there are some users who won’t understand that it isn’t really a person. Some minds are very prone to anthropomorphizing especially when they are dealing with something they find hard to understand and unpredictable like a computer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really dismissive comment that could be used to trivialize just about any article and debate here on HN. While it isn't a big issue, this topic is something designer's do think about and a discussion about its effects on user experience seems reasonable. Plus I doubt anyone's losing hours of productivity over this.
I disagree, I think if the OP was attempting to make a fair analysis, he should have acknowledged the third option. My immediate thought was the same expressed in this comment, as My & Your add wordiness. I suppose it depends on the overall tone & genre of the software you're (I'm?) designing, but it's an obvious alternative.
It may have been helpful for the post to consider the effects of using no pronouns on a user's mental model, and a better response to the post would be to explore those effects, not to dismiss it outright as a false dilemma. A much better method of dismissing posts that have obvious answers is to not comment on them.