A while back, I came across a screenshot of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. It looked like a fine enough upgrade, visually, but one thing stuck out like a sore thumb: the save icon.
Observe:
If you’re reading this blog, odds are you can spot the Save icon immediately. For those of you who don’t recognize it, it’s the fourth icon from the left in the top row — between the folder and the printer.
Now that you see it, I have two problems with it.
Reason #1: It’s a floppy disk, f’r cryin’ out loud!
I haven’t used a floppy disk since 2003. I don’t own a single floppy disk, nor do I own a single device capable of reading a floppy disk. Why? Because the floppy disk is dead.
The icon works for most users because they know what a floppy disk icon represents. For many of us, that icon has always been a floppy disk. But what about the kids that are in school these days? Most of them have never seen a floppy disk, so you can forget about them ever actually having used one.
This raises a couple of questions:
- Why not update the icon with a new image?
- What should we use instead of a floppy disk?
As far as I can tell, the most prevalent argument against changing the icon is that “the save icon has always been a floppy disk”.
That’s fine, I suppose, but at what point do we hamper ourselves by continuing to do things a certain way simply because that’s how they had always been done? Ignoring that sort of groupthink is one of the most essential elements to innovation in any field. This sort of leads me to my second point …
Reason #2: Why do we even have a Save icon anymore?
In a day when you can buy a gigabyte of storage for less than $0.10, many of us have more storage available than we could possibly use in the foreseeable future. I easily know a dozen people with more than 500 GB of free space on their main hard drive, so why not put that space to use?
Instead of forcing users to manually save their work, and having to teach new users the mantra of “Save early, save often.”, why not do the dirty work for them?
Applications should save your work automatically, at regular intervals, and store the last several versions of your document in a single file. Add a “Browse File History” dialog to your application (or, even better, to the operating system itself) and you’ve added the ability to go back in time to undo something that you may have done, then saved, then wish you hadn’t done.
For most things (like Word documents), the file sizes would remain trivially small (under 1 MB in most common cases) and the user would never again have to worry about losing a term paper or an important proposal because of something like this:
As a bonus, you can unclutter your toolbar a bit by knocking out that ridiculously outdated floppy disk icon.
Solving the second problem also solves the first. It’s a win-win for everyone and the implementation is trivial, so why don’t more developers do it?
My guess is that it breaks the habit of how things are done. No one wants to train users that they don’t have to save their work for their work to be safe, nor do they want to be blamed when the data file is corrupted or some underlying problem (such as hard disk failure) prevents the save from executing successfully. That only makes sense to me if you’re a lazy developer.
Interestingly enough, Apple has been trying to solve this problem in a lot of its most recent consumer-oriented software. iPhoto and iMovie both save your work on exit, although I’m not sure if they save on any regular interval while those applications are running. The same is true for the iWork suite (Keynote, Pages, and Numbers) on the iPad.
iWork on the Mac still requires the user to save manually, but the Save icon is absent from the toolbar. Instead, saving your work is done through a keyboard shortcut (⌘S) or a menu command (File > Save). Apple goes so far as to recommend this keyboard shortcut as a de facto standard in its Human Interface Guidelines, so this is fairly consistent on the Mac platform and makes sense to most Mac users. I almost expect the next version of iWork to make autosaving its default behavior.
Microsoft Office? They have an icon that has been essentially unchanged since 1992:
The floppy disk is dead, folks. Please let it rest in peace.
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