Standardise label voice across your UI

#ui #ux #html #css

Hey, big news this week 👋

Unicorn Club began as a broad digest, useful, but not always the quickest way to act. From today it becomes a practical pillar for your week with a structure you can trust:

🏗️ Build - actionable UX and interface craft you can use now
🧩 Shape - shared foundations and ways of working
🚀 Ship - release habits, measurement and iterate

What changes for you?

Two things, clarity and momentum.

Clarity - you will see where each idea fits and why it matters to the work in front of you
Momentum - you will leave with specific next steps to try this week

The aim is simple, turn reading into progress in the same week. Same 4-6 minute skim, just with more momentum.

Thanks for being here, this is the foundation we will keep improving with your feedback.

Adam at Unicorn Club 🦄

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🏗️ Build

Make better interfaces.

"Your" vs "My" in user interfaces

Clear guidance on when interfaces should use "your" (system to user) versus "my" (the user's voice in control labels), and when to drop the prefix entirely.

Why it matters: Consistent person and voice reduce cognitive load and support across help, emails and UI labels.
Adopt this week: Audit nav/help copy: use bare nouns or "Your …" in UI, and switch to "my …" in radio/checkbox labels where the user is speaking.

Improve your visual skills with Gestalt principles

A practical tour of closure, similarity, proximity, continuity, common fate, Prägnanz, figure–ground, common region, and symmetry/order with UI applications.

Why it matters: Gestalt gives predictable grouping and hierarchy, cutting cognitive load and speeding up wayfinding.
Try this: Refactor one dense screen using Proximity/Similarity: Group related controls, align labels, reduce separators, then spot‑check task time with 3–5 users.

You’re loading fonts wrong (and it’s crippling your performance)

A rigorous teardown of web‑font myths with concrete fixes: WOFF2‑only, subsetting with unicode‑range, sane font‑display, metrics overrides, fallbacks, preloading and Early Hints.

Why it matters: Fonts sit on the critical path; done badly they blow LCP/CLS and legibility, costing conversion and trust.
Adopt this week: Self‑host your primary text face as WOFF2, add font‑display: swap, preload the above‑the‑fold subset.

🧩 Shape

Shared foundations across teams.

Glue teams vs back-office teams

A sharp distinction: user‑serving “glue” teams own cross‑cutting product areas (auth, billing), while back‑office teams serve internal needs, and should come later.

Why it matters: Owning horizontal UX seams prevents decay in critical flows and keeps effort tied to user value.
Try this: Map cross‑cutting user‑facing areas (auth, billing, SDKs) and assign a glue team with user metrics. Keep back‑office work distributed until ROI is clear.

The History of Themeable User Interfaces

From early GUIs to CSS custom properties and design tokens, this traces how separating structure from aesthetics unlocks themeable, multi‑brand systems.

Why it matters: Tokenised decisions (colour, type, spacing) enable dark mode, brand families and platform parity without forking components.
First step: Document 10–20 core tokens as a source of truth, map to CSS custom properties, and pilot a second theme to prove the seam.

🚀 Ship

Release, measure, iterate.

Minimally Viable Consistency

Define the smallest shared language that still works, using release tiering and launch calendars to align teams without double lives or overloaded labels.

Why it matters: Clear, common release terms reduce launch thrash, improve customer comms, and speed cross‑team coordination.
First step: Draft 5–7 definitions (e.g., release tiers, commercialisation language), name an owner, and socialise via the next launch review.

🦄 Join the conversation

"What actually changed a decision last week?"

User conversation or Metrics in your dashboard

This is the question we've asked the Unicorn club this week.

My personal vote was "User conversation" after tackling a recent release we had some users talk about their confusions. We had weighted things in our UI a little differently to how they were using it, so had to make some changes based on their feedback.

Cast your vote - and share your insights