What alternatives are there for "My x", like in "My Documents"

Question

I'm working on a tool where people place work and other people choose to do that work. The menu now has the following items:

• Choose work (which lists all possible things you could do)
• Place work (which gives you a form to add a new task)
• More

This 'More' page mainly links to pages where you can see work you 'have' something with. Either you placed it yourself or chose to work on it for somebody else. For example to see contact details of the other person, to edit descriptions of work nobody chose yet, or to see work that is done but you want to review.

In restructuring the tool I'm thinking about replacing/renaming this 'More' item in the menu. Because, in my opinion, its title is not clear.

Alternatives

The thing that popped to mind was "My work". But this feels a bit like "My Documents", which doesn't really appeal to me. Alternatives I've thought of now are:

1. 'All my work'
2. 'Manage work'
3. splitting it up into 'Agenda' (for all the work that is in progress) and 'All my work' or 'Archive' (for past work).
4. 'Dashboard'
5. using the start page as a place for this, thus making it 'Home'

But all these suffer from some disadvantages (1 isn't that different, 2 is hard to translate in the language I'm working in (Dutch), 3 makes multiple menu items, 4 isn't that clear, and 5 makes it impossible to have other home pages).

Do you know any other alternatives to the "My stuff" kind of pages? (Or something to solve this specific case?)

Answer 1

Sometimes it is advantageous to mimic the verbiage of existing services in your domain. By using similar phrases, your site will be more approachable by experienced users.

A quick search provided several results (related:elance) that seem to offer similar services to the one you described. It seems most of these services use the term Manage.

2 is hard to translate in the language I'm working in

I am not sure what language you are working in; however, by searching further you may be able to find a better translation for this term.

Answer 2

"My Documents" sits squarely with me as well. Why?

The "My" in "My Documents" is IMO residue of bad design: on a plain windows installation, there's about half a dozen folders in the root, all "off limits" for the user, the only one legally accessible ("Documents and Settings") requires digging deep.

There's a lot of backward compatibility here, so e.g. MS Windows is between a rock and a hard place, but still for a new design, user folders would go on top, root is accessible, etc., there would be one "System! Don't touch! Rabid Tiger!" folder collecting Windows, Program Files and ProgramData.

"My" is justified if you see the actions / documents / data of other people, too, e.g. "My cases" vs. "cases assigned to Joe".

Generally, your interface might present itself as a separate entity (i.e. using "yours" instead of "mine"). However, UI design goes towards avoiding that middleman / gatekeeper metaphor.

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So in your case, I'd consider "My work" actually to be the best choice. Alternatively, if you want to still avoid it:

• "Dashboard" is good.
• "Work assigned to me"
• "To do"
• "What you have picked:"

Or: the interface starts with the Dashboard centered around the "My Work" list, and you add the "Place Work / Choose Work" on that page. If your design is good, you don't need to provide a title for that list. For example, if the list is empty, you can say "Nothing to do! Why not choose some work?" (well, I know how to answer that). If there's anything I picked, there's good chance I don't need a reminder that this is actually my work.

Answer 3

• Dashboard
• (My) Activity(ies)
• Ask users and start voting :) (do this menu editable and trust user to rename it)
• Separated all tasks to separated menus for more clear and quick access (i think, many tasks were used rarely or are unused, ask users how many times they used its).

Answer 4

You should generally use "Your" to label personal objects in social sites because it opens up the possibility of a conversation with the user, but there are some exceptions.

See this design pattern on how to label items owned by users on a website.

Answer 5

To answer my own question: In the end I went with splitting the menu up. Which felt best to do. So I've splitted the 'More' into "Agenda" and "Evaluations". (The latter is now what we call the past work.)

I think this is best because it doesn't try to solve something by just changing its name. The 'more' page was just a bunch of links and therefore not very user-friendly; you went there and still didn't have any idea about the pages behind it.

By taking the most important pages from the 'more' directly into the menu it became much more clear. Even though it created more menu items, they were more clear and thus better.