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In addition to the related posts that JonW, called attention to, I think the biggest question to answer is using 'My' vs. 'Your'. We've had a previous question on the subject ("'Your' vs 'My' in user interfaces"), which is a great resource, but my favorite resource on the matter is the Yahoo Design Pattern Library. Yahoo advises to use 'Your' as the ...

MS Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines suggests the following: “Use the second person (you, your) to tell users what to do.” So use second person for error messages, help, window or page labels, on-page documentation, and other places where the app is telling the user about the user’s content. “Use the first person (I, me, my) to let users tell ...

Don't use My or Your. In most cases it's obvious whose they are. The only case you might want to do it is to differentiate e.g. between the user's documents and everyone's documents. In that case I would follow the Microsoft guidelines cited by Michael and use "Your Documents" and "All Documents". One of the worst UI bloopers in Windows XP is the use of ...

My favourite method is the one employed by Stack Exchange, Google, Flickr, and many other large sites with a strong focus on UX: use their username / real name combination as a clickable link. This has the dual benefit of hinting to the user if they are logged in as someone else, ans is more personal than the [pronoun] Account approach. Combinations of ...

I believe the cause is that handwriting generally has a higher x-height than printed type. That makes all-caps handwriting look more like printed small-caps, which are generally not considered rude, and actually end up looking formal. It's also true that all-caps used on the web now carries the connotation of screaming by convention (as mentioned by Juan ...

All capital handwriting is easier to read because it takes more time to write and forces the author to slow down. This increases legibility by requiring the writer to compose each individual letter one at a time. The variations for capital letters are less compared to lower case or cursive characters. Architects and engineers developed their particular ...

Caps are more difficult to read. This is because all letters have the same height, requiring some additional scrutiny to recognize each word (we read word by word, not letter by letter). So you can use caps to EMPHASIZE a short heading, but if you use it all along the text your readers might quit reading early because of the additional effort, i.e., slower ...

This is probably a bit tangential to your question, but when it comes to registration / sign up forms, "My" tends to perform better than "Your" conversion-wise. Check out this article - some really interesting examples there.

In my opinion it's definitely better to identify the user than to use either pronoun. So the answer would be "fredley's account". It's more personal, but more importantly it makes it clear what's going on if the user is intentionally or accidentally accessing someone else's account. In the accidental case, I'd immediately think "wait a minute, I'm not ...

It doesn't matter... much. What you choose will not "kill" the overall experience either way. My suggestion is to find & solve for the bigger experience issues you have. (Or if this is your biggest problem, congrats on a great product!) However, what will kill the experience is if you: Switch back and forth between "your" and "my" with no rhyme or ...

According to Dustin Curtis "My X" makes the interface an extension of yourself whereas "Your X" makes it more of a social creature. To quote him in his great Yours vs. Mine article: I've settled pretty firmly in the camp of thinking that interfaces should mimic social creatures, that they should have personalities, and that I should be communicating with ...

This is an interesting question, and one that actually seems to receive a lot of attention in areas outside of UI design. To take a page from the marketing peeps behind this new wave of "We're a happy, caring part of your family" approach to consumer contact-heavy industries like banking and sales, it's really about how you'd like your user to perceive ...

In short, if the word causes confusion, search for a different approach. In case of "my Photos", it could be replaced with {usersname}'s photos for example. You can easily test this by asking people what they think is meant. If you get a lot of different answers... something is wrong.

In my mind, it's your choice. There's no big difference between your, my or neither, just try to use consistent labeling. Colleen Jones—Partner and Interactive Experience and Communication Consultant at threebrick; UXmatters columnist on Generating Ideas | Your Versus My in User Interfaces: From a usability perspective, I have not seen much difference ...