This is a question that comes up frequently when designing interfaces:

For example, should you use:

• “My account” or “Your account”?
• “My orders” or “Your orders”?
• “My cases” or “Your cases”?

It’s actually a trick question, because often you don’t need any prefix and can just use:

• Account
• Orders
• Cases

Amazon is a good example of this in action because it’s obvious that it’s your account and your orders:

But what if your product contains things that belong to you and to others – for example, a case working system that contains your cases and everyone else‘s?

The problem with “my”

You could use “My cases” in a navigation menu like this:

This seems fine on the face of it.

But screens are not only accessed or referred to through a menu.

For example, you might need to sign post users to their cases in an onboarding flow, email notification or help article.

Saying something like “Go to my cases” is awkward and unnatural – if I told you to go to my cases, you’d think I was telling you to go to my cases, not yours.

Similarly, a support agent might tell you to “Go to your cases” over chat or a phone call. This is confusing if the label in your UI says “My cases”.

These issues just don’t come up when you use “your” – I’ve used “your” in multiple products over the years, and seen exactly zero issues in user research.

So that’s good.

“But what if the user is communicating to us using radio buttons, for example?”

This is easy if we just work through a simple example:

The options just don’t make sense – they read as if you’re instructing the computer to share someone else’s profile, having been asked about your own profile in the question.

But it clear if you use “my” instead:

In summary:

• Use ‘your’ when communicating to the user
• Use ‘my’ when the user is communicating to us

If you’d like to design forms that nail basic details like these, as well as super complex problems found in enterprise systems, you might like my course, Form Design Mastery.

Here’s a recent testimonial from Laima, who signed up a few weeks ago:

​https://formdesignmastery.com​

See you soon,
Adam