A better name for "My Stuff"

Hey Savvy,

Some things I can suggest, I thought of using them few months back for a freelance work:

1. Think U
2. My utility 
3. My worklists
4. My personal
5. My list

If you wish I can add more to this, provided you give me more details I can do a quick user research with my contacts here and let you know what people prefer the most.

You could also consider other options:
- Use an icon instead.
- Use a profile picture.
- Use the person's first name. 

What about doing a card-sort or asking potential users?

For me, using a profile picture of the person or the person's name infers information about their profile, ie username, e-mail address, etc..

Bernard

On 7 Feb 2012, at 03:56, savvy wrote:

> we are working on a mobile app that incorporates easy access to personalized content. In that area you can find things like "my shortcuts", my bookmarks, my open cases, my alerts, etc. We are struggling to come up with a better label for the overall category than "My Stuff"- does anyone have any ideas?? (favorites doesn't accurately encompass all of the things you find there- and we need it to be broad enough to scale if and when other types of content is added in the section). > > thanks! > > -Savvy > >

Yup...the discussion continues.
There has been a lot of debate about this for more than a decade. Back in the Enhanced CD-ROM days we used to say "Your"...as in Your Dashboard, Your Favorites, Your Projects, Your Contacts, etc...
Unfortunately I have not seen/found this analyzed in any books.

I just went through the same thing a while back. The concensus was to go with "MY", but I was the lone voter on giving the user the option to rename as they feel fit, thus the possiblity for them to Personalize. I still believe that (depending on the flexibility of your platform - static vs. dynamic).
Alternatively you can drop the whole "MY vs. YOUR" thing altogether and just say Dashboard, Favorites, Projects, Contacts, etc...with the notion that you user already knows it THEIR STUFF.

However, this can get confusing when, for example, if you need to differenciate your stuff from someone elses.

Here is an eaxmple:
There is a group of 10 things.
I can take any number of those things to create another group of things, say #1, 4, and 5.
They still exist as part of the ten, but I need to separate/group only a few, thus I'm "Customizing".
First person ="My Group"?
Second person = "Your Group"?


Here are a few discussions from across the web on the subject:

1) http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/07/generating-ideas-your-versus-my-in-user-interfaces.php#wording

2) http://www.designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php?title=Your_vs._My

3) http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/08-17_me-vs-you-vs-i

4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_narrative

5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-person_narrative

Great topic of discussion. I would love to see where this ends.
Good luck.

I think "pocket" is an interesting idea in terms of trying to introduce an interface metaphor from a real-world connotation, but I would be concerned that it wouldn't be universally recognized; right off the bat, I suspect that "pocket" may resonate differently for women than men since women's clothes often have a frustrating lack of pockets!