Comment by alsomike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alsomike | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with this, but for different reasons. The difference between "Edit my profile" and "Edit your profile" is really a difference in how the relationship between user, interface and back-end system is conceived. When the interface says "Edit my profile", it's represented as speaking for the user to the system, so you have [user+interface] <---> [system]. Which is a technically accurate representation of client-server architecture, and also generally the way the world looks from the perspective of any system - the UI is decoupled, and speaks to the system on my behalf, in my voice. This is the system-centered perspective.

To the average user, the world looks quite different: [user] <---> [interface+system]. Here, the interface isn't part of "me", it's outside, part of the system, so it should speak as the system, not as "me". This is the user-centered perspective, because it reflects how users see the world.

I think this also speaks to why programmers generally tend to be bad at user experience - it's almost an ontological problem. What is software, really? Is it just system, with interface added in later, almost as an afterthought? Or is it interface+system?

Hmm, somehow I have the inverse mental model, though it might be because of correlation with where I see each usage rather than anything inherent. I associate the "my" usage with cutesy/friendly AOL-style interfaces, where we're trying to make the user feel fuzzy ownership over their stuff: "Change my buddy icon", "update my profile", etc. I associate the "your" usage with a more cold, detached system-centric Unix model, where the programmer/system sees this as your stuff and responsibility: "enter your password", "choose your username", "wipe your home directory [y/n]?", etc.

Perhaps at the extremes, something like: "Hello, I'm Clippy! Let's edit our files together!" versus "Computron 5000 online, please state your request."

This reminds me of some observations by Douglas Hofstadter and self-referential expressions. I forget where he wrote this (Metamagical Themas, perhaps), but he wondered, when you come across a dirty car with "wash me!" drawn into the dirt, to what does "me" refer? Why do we assume it's meant to be the car; perhaps those words are some desperate plea from a passerby in need of a bath.

The funny thing with seeing a folder named "My Documents" is that since I did not create that folder, and did not pick that name, my gut reaction is to attach "my" to whatever entity did create it.

"Update profile" seems more in the style of Computron 5000 to me, but yeah, the move to "update my profile" was an attempt to make it friendly and now it has that connotation. But I think it works mostly by making the idea of a dialog (in the sense of conversation) more explicit, not so much about ownership. Like you also started seeing prompts like "Would you like to...?" or "Are you sure you want to delete?" rather than "Confirm deletion."

Dialog works because my perception of my interaction with software is that I'm in a dialog with it. When the interface mirrors that idea back to me, there's a fit or congruence and it feels comfortable, in the same way that an ergonomic handle is something like the inverse of the shape of your hand while holding it - I say "my profile" so the interface should say the linguistic inverse: "your profile". IMO, it has nothing to do with humanness or friendliness or emotion -- which is nice if it's contextually appropriate, but it can be irritating -- and more to do with cognitive ergonomics.

The idea of making computers more friendly, like a human, to make them easier to use is kind of a dumb idea when you think about it, like saying screwdriver handles should be shaped like human hands because we find it comfortable to hold someone's hand. Anyway, human-to-human interaction is often very awkward and definitely not intuitive, why should it be the ideal for human-computer interaction?

> What is software, really?

The part you can't kick, of course.

How to kick software: Three finger salute.

Alt-SysRq-B works more reliable in Linux.

Or perhaps:

    kill -s HUP <pid>

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