[d--b]

The overuse of first person on French official websites also feels weirdly infantilizing.

Clicking a button that says "I register" or "I want to pay for a parking ticket", feels so bizarre to me. It's like the website telling you what to click. Like it's holding your hand.

I don't usually get mad at petty stuff like this, but this one just pisses me off somehow.

[tasuki]

For electronic communications with the Czech government, there's mojedatovaschranka.cz - "my data box". The first time I saw the url, I had to triple check it's not some kind of scam. It still weirds me out every time.

[incone123]

I see many English (UK) websites following your second example but none for the first. They need to account for low reading and comprehension skills among users which might explain this style, or it might even be to match search terms.

[flysand7]

This reminds me a Russian localization of the "Search" bar on some version of Windows 10, which reads something like "Type the prompt to perform search". Also weirdly infantilizing, overly verbose and just plain weird. Had a couple overseas friends ask me a few times why the text on the search bar is so long haha

[WesolyKubeczek]

The old school of bureaucratic verbosity (big words cosplaying precision) dies ever so hard.

[jcelerier]

French fellow, 100%. It reads really unserious.

[LaundroMat]

Oh, that's interesting! I always thought French-speaking people (I'm from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) actually expected this type of language.

[seszett]

I think it's just some kind of design trend or something. But I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little bit put off by it from a user perspective.

French has the added difficulty of requiring to choose between "tu" and "vous" if you want to use the "your..." style. So you can instantly see if the website is trying to fake being your friend.

I think Flemish websites just use "jouw whatever" but it's much less direct and jarring than being called "tu" in French by a corporate entity (not a native Dutch speaker though, but I've been living in Flanders for quite a while now).

[roelschroeven]

Software in Dutch has a bit of a tension between je/jouw and u/uw too. Je/jouw sometimes seems to familiar, u/uw too formal. And I feel the balance between the two is different in Flanders vs the Netherlands.

For something like Facebook, it's OK to use je/jouw. But for something like a government website, or perhaps things like banks or insurance companies, je/jouw is not appropriate and u/uw should be used.

I just checked some samples: Facebook uses je/jouw, LinkedIn uses u/uw, government website MyMinfin uses u/uw. That all seems appropriate, so the choice is perhaps not as delicate as I first thought.

[d--b]

Yeah, it looks like the French websites are actually doing it less and less.

[gregoire]

Even their product names follow this pattern, leading to long and childish app names: "Mon espace santé" (My health space), "Mon espace France Travail"

This kind of soft infantilization, especially coming from the government, has always been rubbing me the wrong way.

[seszett]

Remember "Ma French Bank"?

I really couldn't think of a more ridiculous name. It closed down this year anyway.