Delete the Save Button

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/07/microsoft_office_2013_and_the_save_button_come_on_computers_are_smart_enough_to_preserve_everything_i_type_without_me_hitting_a_stupid_disk_icon_.single.html

by pyoung • 14 years ago

23 19 14 years ago

slate.com

alphakappa• 14 years ago

There is a behavioral impact to the Save button. We are conditioned to think that the changes we make in a file do not apply until we hit 'Save', so it's okay to just close a file if you do not intend to 'commit' those changes.

Auto-save for recovery purposes is one thing, but when completely replacing the 'Commit when I tell you' to 'Save everything in real time' can have unintended consequences.

DeepDuh3• 14 years ago

And that's why we can't just delete the save button. We need to rethink the way users "commit" as you say. Apple's versioning is an interesting take, but its UI is too hidden IMO and they didn't get the "Save-as" feature right, which still applies in a world without save.

My favorite UI would be a mixture of Apple's Lion logic and Google wave: Give me a prominent time slider, give me snapshots each time I hit the save button (which are basically just special markings on the slider) and let me use the slider to easily revert to any state. It gets more complicated with multiple users who commit asynchronously, which is something I will try to solve in an upcoming project of mine.

dllthomas2• 14 years ago

Read up on undo in vim - your edit history need not be linear.

mwexler2• 14 years ago

I keep getting caught by this on Google Docs. I whip in, accidentally change something while scrolling or copying and pasting, then close the doc. Bingo, I've lost information, sometimes entire paragraphs. What a pain. I should have the option to persist my changes when and how I want to.

eipipuz• 14 years ago

It's not exactly what you want, but it may help you. Google Docs provides File > "historical revisions".

dnewcome• 14 years ago

There just needs to be some UX work here indicating the document status. Just like typing a chat message. "blahblah has entered text"-style. Evernote did this early on in their Windows application, we did it with Ubernote - it rocks. Everything should be autosaved+versioned.

kennu• 14 years ago

This no longer applies if you use Mac OS X. Most settings dialogs have no "Apply" button and applications no longer have "Save" buttons. The user expects that things will be committed immediately as you do them.

In fact, there is no "commit". You just do things. And that's the way it should be.

After getting used to that, it's pretty annoying to use Windows, which keeps asking you whether you want to cancel or apply things in every possible situation. Sometimes it even defaults to reverting your changes if you just close the dialog box (like when changing the desktop background image in Win8, for example).

grogs• 14 years ago

This might make sense in office programs, but I'd hate this for program code at least.

I think saving should not be needed except when you want to send the file to someone. Work already creates temp files which autosave? Part of me likes the idea of saving being option... just making word autorestore without being prompted. However, that would obviously be a significant, and prohibitively confusing, change in workflow for users.

Once you save, you've lost the previous version, especially if the program dies and you lose undo history.

In software development specifically, there's quite few tools that automatically pickup/use files when they're saved... Meaning you'll try to compile or use invalid files.

tldr; don't do this. word already guards against losing changes anyway.

damian2000• 14 years ago

It actually does an auto-save for you, silently in the background. But there would be an uproar if they got rid of the save button entirely - people like to feel in control of their important data.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

Wow, I don't say this very often, but tl;dr. Every single argument made in the article has been made elsewhere, but more concise. By the end, I was saying "Yes! I get it already! Enough!"

In summary:

Computers are smart enough to autosave. The save button is an anachronism. We should think about retiring it.

andyfleming• 14 years ago

"Save" -----> "Mark Version"

I think the save button more or less provides a way to save a version or "mark" one. I don't want to see the button disappear, but rather change into a "mark version" button that allows auto-saving to happen, but gives the user the opportunity to set their own points of reference in a document's history. In software that auto-saves, I often feel a bit disoriented. It makes it harder to jump back to a certain state of a document.

angrydev• 14 years ago

While this article makes some good points about modern design borrowing far too much from the past, I fail to see how this is a pressing issue in software today as the author would like me to believe.

iamwil• 14 years ago

If one's going to get rid of the save button, then the program should sure as well give me feedback about when the last time it's saved. Often times, when I want to close something that autosaves, I'm not sure if now's a good time or not.

When it comes to version control, you do actually want to control when a version is saved, because there's meaning behind the different save points, conveyed to others that might want to fork and merge. Wading through a history of meaningless changes is no one's idea of fun, because the intention of the version isn't conveyed well only through the changeset.

Fargren• 14 years ago

Jeff Atwood made a similar argument back on 2004: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/09/do-you-want-to-save...

I think autosave has a significant impact on versioning, and while it certainly has some pros, it's not by any means an absolute improvement.

huragok• 14 years ago

Why not have auto-save and, almost git-like, have a way to add tags or branches to points in time where you did something significant to a document?

Delete the Save Button

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