“Your courses” or “My courses”? Making personal pronouns consistent in the FutureLearn user interface

If you’ve signed in to FutureLearn recently, you’ll notice that what were your “My courses” are now “Your courses”. Our Interaction Designer Alla Kholmatova explains the thinking behind this user interface (UI) change.

There have been a number of discussions in the UX and design community about using personal pronouns in UI copy. For example, should the interface refer to the user as “your” or “my” when talking about the user’s side of the interface – should it be “My profile” or “Your profile”, “My settings” or “Your settings”?

Why use a personal pronoun in the first place?

In many cases, it’s obvious who an object of the interface belongs to, so a personal pronoun is not needed.

However, adding a pronoun is helpful when differentiating between the content that’s under the user’s control and other content – for example, the user’s photos and everyone else’s photos, or the user’s profile (which they can update or add a photo to) and other users’ profiles.

Choosing between “your” and “my”

So in those instances when a pronoun is helpful, which one should you choose?

On the one hand, we want to make users feel like the interface is their possession, so we could use “my” to make them feel more in control. But something about “My profile” feels artificial or maybe even patronising. It can also make writing copy quite awkward.

When writing copy it’s considered good practice to refer to a screen or page exactly by its title. So if your screen is titled “My account”, in theory the copy about it should say “Go to your My account”. Even though it sounds awkward, that’s exactly how we often had to write copy on FutureLearn:

This can lead to all kinds of inconsistencies with personal pronoun usage, and is something we’ve seen on other sites, as well as FutureLearn.

The interface as two-way communication

The consensus in the design community is that it should be “your stuff”, not “my”. This is because design is, first and foremost, about communication – communication between the people behind the application and its users. The interface is the medium for this communication.

When we’re communicating to the user

When we, as designers, try to communicate something to the user, we should use “you”. For example, “Here’s your profile”, “Here are your settings” or “Here are your stories”:

When the user is communicating to us

But if the user is communicating something to us, we use “my”. For example: “Email me when I have a new follower”.

Viewing the interface as two-way communication can help to guide design decisions and resolve copy inconsistencies, like the recent changes we’ve made to the FutureLearn UI.

When we’re communicating to you where your courses or profile are, we now use “your”. But when you’re telling us what to do – like the email settings above – we stick with “my” or “me”.

Now we’ve made sure the use of personal pronouns is consistent on FutureLearn, we hope you enjoy Your courses (not your My courses)!

Want to know more about the way we approach UI design at FutureLearn? Read more of Alla’s posts. Interested in joining our design team? We’re hiring designers.