graphpaper.com - Me vs. You (vs. i) :
Almost every web design team I’ve ever worked with has had to, at some point, wrestle with the “Me vs. You” question. In this great debate, the winner was You over at YouTube and YouSendIt.com, and many years ago You won at U-Haul. But the winner was Me over at MyYahoo!, and at MySpace, and at countless other personalized “my.foo.com” sites. This debate between Me and You, or My and Your, comes up whenever we try to name a personalization feature, or when we need a name the part of the site where personalization appears, or whenever we want to communicate directly to the user in a conversational way. How shall we, the designers, address the user when speaking to them this way?
You’re reading computer generated text about your books, your account. Maybe some site designers feel as if the site’s voice should be your voice, as if you were talking to yourself. (e.g., “This is my site!)
Frequently-asked-questions are also usually told with My voice (”How do I format my Windows hard Drive?”), while instruction manuals are generally addressed directly to You. Product designers, copywriters, and information architects will argue about this forever, but we get really agitated when we see Me and You alternating on the same page! Thank you for being a Beta user for My Times? Wait, whose Times is it? Is it My Times, or is it Your Times?
--Well, if you’re here, and I’m here, doesn’t that make it Our Times?
--Spicoli! yeah.
I appreciate the use of second person at sites like flickr where some effort has been made to make you feel like there are actual humans with a sense of humor behind the site. The use of informal prompts mixed with first person buttons (”I’m not sure of the exact time”) adds to the friendly feeling of the site. By contrast I find that more often than not the first person feels patronizing, like the designers think I am an inexperienced user that needs to have every folder labelled cute things like “My Pictures.” I agree.