Ragdoll’s Rag Times

What’s this? Hi, I’m Ragdoll and I like art, underground subculture, and pop culture nerdery. I’m a web designer for The Evergreen State College and maintain my long-form blog at Revolt Puppy. If you like, you can
Jul 17
“ Think of the icon for the “save” action in most applications. When was the last time you saw a floppy drive? Exactly. Sometimes the world shifts beneath us, and we have to adjust. Failing to do so, we could get stuck in dangerous ruts.
—

Design Patterns: When Breaking The Rules Is OK | Smashing UX Design

On the whole, this article is pretty good, but I keep seeing this floppy disc argument being flogged over and over, and I just don’t think it has any merit. Nobody has ever produced any hard numbers on it, so I’m just as likely to think that everybody who sees floppy disc icon is just going to think, there’s that weird square pattern that has always meant “save.”

But really, the solution seems to be solving itself. When was the last time you even saw a “save” button? Google Docs auto-saves. With OSX Lion, Apple will automatically restore unsaved open documents.

Microsoft’s Office is the only example I can think of, and they’re a company who are just as unlikely to ditch it from their interface as they are to change a tried and true icon that everybody still recognizes despite its origin now being obsolete.

  1. ragdoll posted this