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My response to Hacker News comments
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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 just be a checkbox with the label: ‘Share your profile photo’. This allows more to appear 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’s boring but it’s definitely not futile. I’ve watched 100s of users struggle to use products because they fail to get details like this right. 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 someone who is 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. But 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: https://formdesignmastery.com See you soon, |
Design tips to help you create products that are ridiculously simple and accessible to use
Join 9000+ designers, content designers and engineers who get my free weekly newsletter with evidence-based design tips (in 3 minutes or less). Mostly forms UX, but not always.
A year ago I posted this on LinkedIn: === I tell my students to avoid select boxes. Because it’s often better to use radio buttons. But students often say “But it’ll make the page too long”. Yep, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad UX. See the page I designed to let users select a course. Huge list of radio buttons. But no issues in user research whatsoever. Does this mean you should always use radio buttons? No. But most designers would balk at a design like this even though it worked...
Last week, I had a meeting with two devs and two designers. The meeting’s purpose was to let developers raise problems and get quick design decisions. One of the devs brought up an issue with a form that had conditional radio buttons. Here’s what the screen looked like (it’s a bit different to what I’m actually working on but close enough): When the user selects “Yes” it reveals a field to enter the name: If you leave it blank and submit the form, the page refreshes and shows an error: So far...
Quick one: Yesterday I sent you an email “My response to Hacker news comments”. I received a few responses asking for clarification in my second illustration – because I screwed it up. Here’s what it should have been: Enjoy,Adam