A little usability story: my girlfriend spent a good chunk of last night working on a paper for her Copyright Law class in Microsoft Word. At about 4am I get a desperate call: “Help! How do I unclose a document?”
Whoops.
She had written something like 5,000 words, cited sources, added pictures and diagrams. Being in a hurry, she never bothered to save the document in the beginning. After a few hours, as she was getting more and more sleep deprived and the massive jar of tar-like coffee emptied out, it’s only understandable she didn’t bother to read or reason about the confirmation dialog, which I’m sure at this point read “Are you sure yadda yadda yadda?”, with the options “Just do what I said”, “Go away” and “Whatever”.
There probably is some delicate procedure in Microsoft Office applications to deal with this occasion, and that’s exactly the point I want to make: when this kind of human error happens, it is not a good time to bring out an extensive and meticulous procedure. This kind of error shouldn’t even be possible in the first place.
If I dig out my rusty Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter from the spare room, put a sheet of paper in it and start typing, I would have to rip out the paper and shred it or burn it in order to make the words vanish. No amount of sleep deprivation will make that happen accidentally. If Word is trying to conform to that usage model, then this crucial part of it should behave like that as well: not that we should be “burning” or “shredding” digital documents, but that it should be really hard to get rid of them by accident.
Instead – and this is 2010, folks – Word offers me a button with the image of a floppy disk, labelled ‘Save’. It’s a little digital dinosaur, fossilized as one of the most important things this application can do, as a reminder of the tough times application developers had to go through back when keeping two different versions of a text document in memory and disk was considered a desirable luxury. Nowadays, when any decent text processor will have built-in version control and infinite steps of undo, is there even a point in having to hit ‘Save’, ever?
What about your application, the one you’re building now? Is there any jurassic ‘Save’ button lying around? If I pick up a form on your web application, do some work on it, go away and come back after lunch, will it rudely tell me I didn’t save my actions?
Ben | 30-Nov-10 at 1:12 pm | Permalink
I feel very sorry for your girlfriend, we’ve all been there done that. However, at what point do you start taking responsibility for your actions. In this instance, if you write a document, fail to save it yet are prompted to do so when you quit Word and you ignore all messages is that really a design failure on Microsoft’s part? I like the way in such applications as Atlassian’s Confluence that it regularly saves to draft the current document so that you don’t loose it should your browser crash or you loose connection. But in the end, it is up to me to hit either the Save or Cancel button to keep or loose it.
Mike Roberts | 30-Nov-10 at 2:30 pm | Permalink
I switch between Intellij and Visual Studio every day, and every time it jars that in VS I have to hit save and in Intellij I never do. With infinite-undo / ‘local history’ there is no reason for the app not to auto save continuously
Carlos Villela | 30-Nov-10 at 2:55 pm | Permalink
Hi Ben!
I think it is a design failure: try the same thing in Google Docs and you’ll notice that it automatically saves every ‘Untitled Document’ you create, no questions asked.
Naming the document is a separate action, and the Save button is only there mostly as a reassuring feature (most of the time, it doesn’t really do anything besides forcing a sync between server and client that was going to happen in the next few seconds anyway, so it is sort of like that button on the pedestrian crossing). It makes losing work accidentally *really* hard.
Tweets that mention lixo.org :: Don’t Ever Make Me Hit Save -- Topsy.com | 30-Nov-10 at 6:52 pm | Permalink
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz and Alex Hung, Diego Magalhães. Diego Magalhães said: RT @arnonrgo: Carlos Villela: Don’t Ever Make Me Hit Save http://bit.ly/g9lm1j [...]
Flemming Steinson | 01-Dec-10 at 8:19 am | Permalink
Exellent point.. The rationale behind Word’s archaic interaction pattern is of course convention – trying to enhance usability by using well known and widely used solutions to common problems. It is how ever long over due to revise this convention as you so correctly point out. Maybe the the ‘Save’ button is not the only dinosaur in question… Microsoft
JV | 01-Dec-10 at 3:53 pm | Permalink
Mm but you can’t Select All and press Delete with a typewriter either – so this makes no sense without local history / versioning etc (and then what happens if you have 2+ people editing..)
Ben | 01-Dec-10 at 8:19 pm | Permalink
Hi Carlos,
Yea, I too like the fact that Google Docs automatically saves the document for you – gives me peace of mind, though the peace of mind for me is more for the worry of loosing my connection or FireFox crashing than forgetting to save the document in the first place – but then that’s probably because I am a bit old school and I am used to applications like Word (well OpenOffice actually) and am just used to saving all the time.
If Word could provide a list of recent documents upon startup like Google Docs does then I would be happy to loose the save button – if it didn’t I could end up with hundreds of old documents cluttering up my PC
)
Esko Luontola | 02-Dec-10 at 9:45 pm | Permalink
Exactly. Anything with a save button is so 90s or even 80s.
IntelliJ IDEA is the best example that I know of how saving should be handled. In IDEA everything is saved automatically and a history of every recent change is kept, allowing you to selectively revert the changes – maybe just a few lines. It also highlights when test passed or failed, allowing you to easily return to the last moment when all tests passed (a common use case).
Here’s a paper from back in 2001 explaining the saving problem and showing a prototype of how Word could be improved in that aspect: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/papers/CHI2001-Problems-with-Save.PDF
Pedro Nascimento | 13-Dec-10 at 6:17 am | Permalink
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/12/geekpokes-list-of-best-practices-today-how-to-handle-a-npe.html