Does this kind of failure—call it institutional cruft—appear in iTunes? I think absolutely. Let’s look at the app.

Look specifically at the horizontal navigation bar, which sits below the scrolling song title and the main window content. Because iTunes inserts a forward and back button to the far left in Apple Music and the iTunes Store, menu options in the bar will sometimes change location after you click them.

So if you’re in your own iTunes Library, then click on “For You,” you’ll find the entire navigation bar has shifted under your mouse: Your mouse is now hovering over “Playlists,” as the software has inserted forward and back buttons on the far left.

From a user-interface perspective, this doesn’t make any sense. Users expect that menu items in a navigation bar won’t change their location after they click on them. When you click on a bookmark in your browser’s navigation bar, all the bookmarks don’t suddenly shift around.

This messiness is as institutionally crufty as they come. With Apple Music, iTunes’s designers had to find a way to navigate a web-y, browser-like environment in the main content area, and that requires back and forward buttons. In a music library, though, the content area also needed to scroll through a stable list of MP3s. The designers couldn’t move the forward and backward bar any higher, into the playback area, because the logic of that area is that it’s all music control—and, besides, there’s already a forward-arrow and backward-arrow in there, on the left, which control tracks.

iTunes had to serve two different purposes, so the forward and back buttons had to go in the navigation bar.

Keep looking at that bar, though, and I think a different kind of user-interface failure emerges: the kind that results from poor decisions. In other words, I wonder if iTunes’s failures can’t just be entirely blamed on Apple’s crufty, legacy obligations, but on a deeper inattentiveness in the company.

Focusing on that bar, here’s what sticks out to me: iTunes can’t decide how to address the user. The user’s MP3 library sits behind the menu title “My Music.” But Apple Music’s recommendation interface is accessed by clicking on “For You.”

Is the user “my” or “your”? Is iTunes an extension of the user or is it in conversation with them? Designers have thought about these issues before; Yahoo’s own interface guide suggests:

Labeling stuff with ‘My’ imitates the point of view of the user. It is as if the user has printed out labels and stuck them to various objects: My Lunch, My Desk, My Red Stapler. Except the user hasn't done this; you (the site) did it for them. Labeling stuff with ‘Your’ instead reinforces the conversational dialogue. It is how another human being might address you when talking about your stuff. Even with MySpace, people say things like ‘I saw what you put on your MySpace.’

I’ve also seen financial apps use “your,” because a bank saying “my money” is a little weird. That $200 in my savings account isn’t yours, dude.