This content originally appeared on Adam Silver and was authored by Adam Silver
Last Tuesday, my article about whether to use “Your” or “My” in user interfaces went viral on Hacker News.
In case you don’t know, Hacker News is a site where people discuss and upvote ideas in tech and design.
The gist of my article said to use “Your” when communicating to the user, like this:
And to use “My” when the user is communicating to us, like this:
I read through all the comments on Hacker News and picked my top 5 worth responding to (as each one has a useful design takeaway):
Comment #1: “The example is bloated UI. It should be a checkbox labelled ‘Share your profile photo’ to fit more on screen.”
Single checkboxes are problematic – you can’t tell if a user saw it and chose not to tick it, or just missed it.
This doesn’t happen with radio buttons.
Good design prioritises making things simple over trying to save space.
Comment #2: “I’m glad I don’t work in UX. All of this seems so boring and futile.”
It can be ‘boring’ but it’s definitely not futile.
I’ve watched 100s of users struggle to use products because they fail to nail basics like this but:
Good design nails the basics.
Comment #3: “Capitalisation fixes this. ‘Go to My Account’ is clear to me.
It may help sighted users, but it doesn’t help screen reader users or those talking on the phone.
Good design is consistent and clear regardless of the channel.
Comment #4: “As a support engineer in enterprise software, I would word it and mentor agents to say ‘Go to “my cases” at the top’”
You could do that but training agents to speak unnaturally is expensive, error prone and tiresome for both agents and end users.
And most of all it’s completely unnecessary if you just use “Your”.
Good design solves real problems.
Comment #5: “The conclusion I took from the article was ‘talk to the user like normal human beings talk to one another’. This seems like a very obvious and non-controversial idea, in hindsight.”
He took the words right out of my mouth and so:
If you’d like to design (highly complex, supersized) forms that users fly through using what seem like very obvious and non-controversial ideas in hindsight, you might like my course:
This content originally appeared on Adam Silver and was authored by Adam Silver
Adam Silver | Sciencx (2025-09-21T00:00:00+00:00) “Your” vs “My”: my response to Hacker News comments. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/21/your-vs-my-my-response-to-hacker-news-comments/
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