Social design issue: Your vs. My

I have been wondering for some time how wording affects directives in user interfaces. Essentially, does it make a difference to say Your account versus My account in an interface? When people fill out a question on a form asking for their email address, does it make a difference whether it says Your email address or My email address? From my own perspective, it seems using your is like a two-sided conversation with the interface, whereas using my is putting the interface in the user’s perspective. Very curious to hear your thoughts on this.—from Josh Pyles

Tiny tip for iPhone developers. When in doubt, the correct possessive pronoun for your apps is “my”, not “your”. It’s best to stay consistent and follow Apple’s lead.I’ve only spotted two examples (I’m sure there are more): * In Phone: “My Phone Number”; * In Settings/Mail, etc: “Always Bcc Myself”

How shall we, the designers, address the user when speaking to them this way? Is the user the “other”, an external, second person with respect to the site or the company, or to the site’s designers? Shall I address the user conversationally as “you”?, or should we try to keep the user distant and only use the third person?

Good point. Using the word “you” in documentation can risk implying, if only subconsciously, that the reader of the documentation — usually a developer, designer, etc — is the same person who will actually use the system.Still, I think I have a workaround. If the whole point is to foster empathy for the end-user of a product, explicitly demanding that the developer think of themselves as a user.

First-person narrations may be told like third-person ones, with a person experiencing the story without being aware that they are actually conveying their experiences to an audience; on the other hand, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason. In extreme cases, the first-person narration may be told as a story within a story, with the narrator appearing as a character in the story. First-person narration is used somewhat frequently.

The second-person narrative is a narrative mode in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun "you".

When describing how to use something to a friend, you (there I did it) will usually say things like “You press the button on the top, then you slide your finger across the slider at the bottom” or “You enter your name and password in the upper left corner”. This is how we already talk about user experiences and indeed about almost anything descriptive, and it is an immensely empathetic manner of speaking. It is the linguistic manifestation of pure empathy: Me imagining what it’s like to be you, and describing my own knowledge through your eyes and actions, using (in literary terms) the second person perspective.

There are two schools of thought on this, which can be called “Your” or “My.” The names of some popular sites hint at this dilemma: MyYahoo, MySpace, YouTube.Labeling stuff with “My” imitates the point of view of the user. It is as if the user has printed out labels and stuck them to various objects: My Lunch, My Desk, My Red Stapler. Except the user hasn’t done this, you (the site) did it for them.

Labeling stuff with “Your” instead reinforced the conversational dialogue. It is how another human being might address you when talking about your stuff. Even with MySpace, people say things like “I saw what you put on your MySpace.”