@carmen_pacheco o, si el libro está en inglés, querer tocar una palabra que no entiendes para que te salte el diccionario xD

— Cris Menéndez (@papalbina) May 11, 2013

Sometimes I wish there was a ⌘+F at the supermarket aisles

— Marcela Machuca (@nananaina) November 23, 2011

Me too, badly. And certainly not only for supermarkets.

Upon retrieving your ticket, you experience your seat becoming non-available.

I call it “referral feature”: bring it up and it would tell you how the hell you ended up on that mysterious tab you are looking at right now. A proposed location within the browser IA is behind its window title bar, and a desirable trigger could be “⌥ + click on title bar”, emulating the “cmd + click” used to access to parent location on standard Cocoa apps. Ideally, it would interconnect with other applications so it could deep trace (and link to) obscure referrals such as a link within a Twitter DM you read through the Twitter app.

The really quick mockup that follows pictures a realistic approach to its GUI:

It seems a bit weird, to say the least, that items under “My favorites” and “Stuff you browsed” belong to the same person, doesn’t it?

Some questions arise:

• Wich determiner is right, “my” or “your”?
• Should designers use personal pronouns on their interfaces at all?
• Do users detect this uncoherence or is it just a designer problem (thus, a non-existent problem)?

Because I’ve had this dilemma for quite a while now, I collected some opinions on the issue. Have you got any more? Your own, maybe? If so, please leave a comment.

My Computer. I’ve always hated this icon — its insulting, infantilizing tone. Even if you change the name, the damage is done: It’s how you’ve been encouraged to think of the system.

Ellen Ullman, 1998

“My” also presents the potential for substantial confusion. Let’s say I’m interacting with a widget-selling site. And I have a personal area on the site, and it’s called, “My Account”. Then the system, when referring to me, must call me “I” and “My,” which is weird, because, well, it’s odd when reflexive possessive adjectives are used and you’re not in control (or should that be, “and I’m not in control”?) Also, if I need to talk to The System for some reason (say, send email to the people who run it), how do I refer to it? Usually it’s “Contact Us”, but if I am “My”, than “Us” would be me as well, so that leaves “You” for The System, so it would be something like “Contact You” and, well, that’s weird, too.

Peter Merholz, 1998

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 reinforces 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.

Yahoo patterns — Your vs. My

if you succumb to the peculiar temptation of my, you just set yourself up for totally unnecessary inconsistency.

And, should you decide to brand a whole section of your site with “My”, you aren’t really branding the experience at all. You are inviting your users to draw an analogy with something another company did over a decade ago. It’s a missed opportunity, and that sucks.

Erika Hall, 2010

Difícilmente superable.

When I grow up, I want to be a designer at Transport for London.

Say that you need a drop-down list and you can’t get by on the HTML select element.

Right: Google Translate keeps classic keyboard shortcuts for the list items (that’s me typing POR+ENTER):

Wrong: Zara focuses on aesthetics, but forgets about fucntionality (that’s me failing to select Madrid with the keyboard):

Or… say you want to bring music social networking to the desktop.

Right: Spotify gets the better of both worlds: super fast desktop class performance and persistent back and forward navigation. But above all, it gives everything —artists, songs, users— an URL.

Wrong: Ping, Apple’s just born social network is horribly slow. It displays a “connecting to iTunes” message everytime you click on something, most of its objects are not linkable and the navigation is a mess: suffice to say the Home icon takes you to… the iTunes Store.