I've thought about this for a considerable amount of time last month and decided the simplest way to do it was to use Enter and Exit in our upcoming sports app, because they have real world connotations and also have meanings and symbols that are easy to get, even by utterly non tech savvy people. Hope that doesn't end up introducing even more confusion.
To play devil's advocate: to me, "logging out" and "exiting" are not the same thing. Particularly, the first is just a change of state--I'm still in your app, but now I'm no longer signed in. On the other hand, "exiting" is more like a motion; I expect to actually leave your app and not just be logged out. In UI terms, I see "exit" as a synonym of "quit".
Now, perhaps this makes sense for your app. However, if it makes sense to interact with it without being logged in, I think that is the wrong terminology. So I would definitely not use it for something like HN because browsing stories works regardless of whether I'm logged in or not.
I'm sure you thought about this far more when you were making your decision, so this is just my impression. You can always try to test the alternative empirically once you have a bunch of active users :).
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree one would indeed expect to not be signed out by chosing exit. We happen to use google auth and are in this uncommon situation where the sign out action, actually signs the user out of their google account, which so far has annoyed every sigle one of our testers.
We are looking into a few other alternatives including the most obvious where we convey that they are indeed leaving the app but in the next screen let the user know that their google account is still signed in and provide an option if they still want to sign out. Thankfully we have quite a while to launch, so I have time to run a couple other iterations and pick the one which seems most clear.
My thoughts exactly. But since so many websites nowadays expect the user to be logged in all the time, I wonder if the distinction will remain much longer. On many websites, it's virtually impossible to get anything done without logging in. For someone like me who prefers to stay logged out for as long as possible (for reasons of privacy and security: you can steal my session all day long and it'll be useless if I'm not logged in), this trend is infuriating. Thank God for HN, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and a few other sites that continue to welcome anonymous users.
Sort of off-topic but only partly because the original article asked for origins of terms, exit has a fascinating etymology. Unlike most words, "exit" is a loan word in a conjugated form. It comes from the third person singular indicative of a Latin verb, exire ("to go out"). In other words, it means, in Latin "He or she leaves." Most loan words come from some sort of base form, which tells you there is an interesting backstory here.
From what I understand it entered into English as a stage direction, but by the 16th century it had become a noun referring to a doorway for leaving.
