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Yours vs. Mine

dcurt.is

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Re: Yours vs. Mine

#81

Post by Silhouette »

thejerz wrote: post #48

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!

That's the kind of dismissive attitude that kills web companies. If there's one thing we've learned from usability research, A/B testing and the like, it's that seemingly subtle changes in details can make a huge difference to overall effectiveness. And if there's a second thing we've learned, it's that what programmers or web developers assume is best is a lousy indicator of what is best when you actually measure results.

Presenting material in a way that resonates with the target audience of each particular product or service is important, and a little time spent getting it right will almost certainly generate more benefit than writing code for the same amount of time.

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#82

Post by Tichy »

kyro wrote: post #63
thejerz wrote: post #48

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.

Calling comments dismissive is rather dismissive in itself. I don't see what is wrong with pointing out a better option (in the opinion of the commentator) in a succinct way.

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#83

Post by benaston »

This could be empirically tested. For me "My Computer", "My Profile" reflects the internal dialog occurring in the users head and (in my perception) has less cognitive overhead than the reflexive "your".

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#84

Post by jrogers65 »

This article could be better - it presents a problem but does not resolve it in any meaningful way. It asks the equivalent of "which is better, left or right?" and concludes with "my opinion is that left is better."

This is not a pragmatic approach to the problem - where is the research? Where is the substantiation of why left is better than right? There is a rationalisation provided, sure, but people rationalise shooting heroin too, so that doesn't go too far. It would be interesting to see a study on this.

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#85

Post by dredmorbius »

The descriptor should either be unqualified "Purchases", not "Your/My Purchase", which is redundant and pandering, or, for any feature which can scale beyond a single user, identify the relevant user (your enterprise customers will thank you): "username => Settings". It's also useful to classify groupings, tags, or other attributes (Engineering, Accounting, HR, etc.) and integrate these with security and other aspects.

I always found "My Computer" to be annoying. It's pedantic (no shit, this is my computer), or wrong (no, this is Mike's computer, I'm just borrowing it), or void of useful context (this is a multi-user computer but I'm accessing it from my or someone else's account).

From a testing perspective, individually naming elements based on their ownership attribute makes for hell in scripting, testing, or writing suitable generic instructions (how do you tell Aunt Tilly how to change her settings when "My Computer" has been sensibly renamed "Aunt Tilly's Computer"?).

Sub-par article fails to consider many other relevant alternatives and considerations.

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#86

Post by dredmorbius »

reyan wrote: post #66
thejerz wrote: post #48

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!

Sometimes you have to differentiate (e.g., between all the bookmarks and the user's bookmarks in a navbar).

Which Microsoft also fouled up. A user's desktop could contain elements which were present in the user's desktop folder, in a group folder, or in the global desktop folder for the system. From within the Explorer shell, it wasn't obviously clear where the element came from. Yet another reason I have a rabid dislike for GUI file manglers.

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#87

Post by dredmorbius »

Felix21 wrote: post #79

I DON'T agree with this conclusion. You can easily just test both (with Neither as your control) and survey your users to find out which group is more satisfied with your UI. When it comes to what customers want or will like, what you "think" is almost always wrong, so stop thinking and start testing.

The test shouldn't be what users say they're more satisfied with, but which labeling results in better task performance. Now, if self-reported user satisfaction is your designated task, that's fine, but contexts such as multi-user support, shared system access, single-user use of multiple accounts, and centralized maintenance/access of many multi-user systems might also be considered.

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#88

Post by jtheory »

majormajor wrote: post #53
thejerz wrote: post #48

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!

Their choice of "My" caused a humorous reaction on quite a few people who felt the computer was much more a separate entity than a mechanical extension of themselves (to use the terminology of the OP)...

Remember the joke that Bill Gates reckons he has such complete control over every PC with Windows installed that he goes around naming each one "My Computer" so we won't forget it's his?

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#89

Post by nnq »

His conclusion is totally against the "the best interface is no interface" UI/X design idea. He goes:

> Interfaces are much more abstract, and much more intelligent; they far more closely resemble social interactions than physical tools.

...therefore if I (the user) feel that I have a social-like interaction with the interface, it means that I am definitely noticing it IS there, whereas if I can feel it as an extension of self, I can get more easily to just ignore it once I get used to it and actually feel that there is "no interface". It's easier to ignore the hammer in your hand the person you're talking to, at least for me (and I believe for most social people).

Then again, if you are creating something like the UI for an ecommerce site, you probably want to give the user part of the feeling that he is in a real shop, that implies a real physical interface, so you say "Your shopping cart" - but I'm not sure this is necessarily a good idea.

Imho, OP did a good analysis of the interaction perspective, but somehow managed to arrive at what is 90% of the time the wrong conclusion (but then again, maybe my 90% is his 10%...).

Re: Yours vs. Mine

#90

Post by jtheory »

olliesaunders wrote: post #69
tadfisher wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good UI design is all about effective communication. If you have a UI that is pretending to be something it isn’t (a person) then it is basically lying to you. That’s hardly good communication. It’s confusing and dishonest. 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…

"Having a personality" is going to happen whatever you do.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn't mean your interface pretends it's a person; but all copy is written by people -- words are used by people only (pretty much), directly or indirectly -- and the words chosen are projecting some personality onto the application whether you want to or not.

There are no words/phrases/instructions without baggage, connotations, etc..

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