Ask HN: Should we accept the “floppy disk icon” as the default save symbol?
People have been making efforts to remove or replace the usage of the floppy disk icon as the symbol for "Save", as floppy disks aren't in everyday usage anymore.
However, could efforts like these be considered a waste of time?
Consider the ampersand symbol "&", which is recognizable to many people who don't know the French word "et". The main reason is its continuity.
Should we, from a cultural perspective, recognize the value of continuity in cases like these, instead of chasing design trends, and keep the floppy disk symbol?
41 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI'm tired of designers chasing fads.
- "Hey, why is the character for 'sun' so boxy? The sun is round! Let's make the character a bit rounder! New Unicode position!"
- "Oh, but you forgot to remove the line in the middle, I need a new Unicode position for my variant!"
- "Wait! In my newly designed font, I just replaced the original one. What do I do with the two new Unicode characters? And should I keep the horizontal line in the middle?"
Safe -- regarding obsoletion: probably a safe bet compared to a piggy bank (pun intended)
Notepad++, MS Office and Emacs has the floppy.
I've spent countless hours explaining to my grandparents that the dustbin icon actually means "delete", and if you want to share a picture, you press the button with the three node graph.
Why remove something obvious when it's cost-free (minus a few pixels) to offer another way to get to the same result?
Which - to nitpick - is actually Latin and pre-dates French by several centuries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand
it has a tradition in English as well, where it has actually more use than in other Latin derived languages, and actually the "ampersand" in English comes from a corruption of "and per se and", losing its original connection to "et".
In Italian the character is called "e commerciale" and in practice it is only used in the (anglo derived) names of firms (besides of course programming), in French it is esperluette, in Spanish it is called directly "et" (or Y comercial) in German it keeps the original relation with "et" as Et-zeichen (also Und-zeichen).
It is a very good example, as it is a symbol that originated in Latin, but which meaning was slightly changed by English and actually remained in common use only there, and survived centuries to "land" as a common symbol in computer scripting and programming.
About the floppy disk icon, it is IMHO a higly debatable one, like the (manilla) folder of the type used in vertical file cabinets, now that these are either completely extinct or only survive in a small number of offices.
I.e. the symbols were created in times where the object represented were extremely common, and as such were a good exemplification of a concept, but think also at the icon Winzip or similar use for compressed archives, a file cabinet inside a (compressing) C-clamp (in times when old-style metal clamps have become rare) compared to the (senseless) one where the symbol is a rectangle with a partially opened zipper.
So, personally I struggle to imagine symbols that could replace them "universally", i.e. there is the risk that any developer/designer would start using different images, creating a modern Tower of Babel.
Two other icons I could think of without effort are the telephone icon and the camera icon.
It's been the symbol literally since forever. There's nothing to accept.
And who is this "we" you speak of?
What kind of Narcissistic perspective is this?
Many kids growing up with computers today have probably never seen a floppy disk as an icon, web interfaces usually use 'Save Changes' as text. Even desktop tools like Blender don't use it these days. Krita still does, as an example.
I’ve used computers with GUIs for 30 years, and I can’t remember seeing it on many applications at all apart from pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. And now that the trend goes towards everything you do being implicitly saved when you do it, the need for a button with an icon is even smaller.
The icons are as important as the keyboard shortcuts and menu items
It costs nothing (except a few pixels) to put a visual reminder on screen of something you "should do" frequently
I've watched people only ever copy/paste via right-click
Others via the buttons at the top of the window
Others via the Edit menu
And others using the keyboard shortcuts
Why make a product less usable to some people just because you know a different way to accomplish the same end-goal?
I’ll grant that while Microsoft Office is the only place I can remember seeing save buttons over all those years, for most people throughout the 90s and 00s, Microsoft Office was all they ever used. It might as well have been synonymous with software to them.
I suppose there was a window of time when screens were large enough to support gratuitous toolbars, but before autosave had become the norm, where it may have made sense. But now I’d go as far as to say requiring users to click a button or lose their work to be an anti-pattern.
No one said you are "requiring users to click a button" - it's an affordance to end users indicating more possible actions are available (and, probably, "good")
Just like no one said you have to go to File->Save
Or press [cmd]-[s] (or [ctrl]-[s] if you're not on a Mac)
Sure - if you happen to enforce autosave, it's probably OK to remove the save button: but not everyone wants everything to autosave (probably more often than not, I expressly DO NOT WANT any changes I've made (visually or otherwise) to be expressed into the underlying file)
HyperCard of course didn’t have explicit saving at all, maybe that’s why I like that pattern so much today. Too bad it didn’t have the deep undo stack that modern applications have.
Edit: it looks like ClarisWorks 5.0 may have introduced the button in the form of an arrow pointing into a folder, but that was a pretty late addition, and it doesn’t support the universality of the floppy as a save icon: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1821-clarisworks-5-0-wit...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.o...
What "people'? Who are these "people"?
> Consider the ampersand symbol "&", which is recognizable to many people who don't know the French word "et"
"et" is a lot older than French, my friend - it's from Latin
But as much as possible you should avoid needing one. Saving is an artifact of limited storage and processing. You should instead design a workflow that eliminates the need for saving things. One way is to have a persistent undo stack that is constantly saving -- which has the nice benefit of also being continuously undoable, offers change tracking, and other benefits.
Don't worry about the outdated icon. Worry that the outdated icon represents outdated thinking about what computers are capable of. Computers have changed a lot since the days when we used floppy disks. Use that to your advantage, and get a better product.
Many softwares do that already, computers have the resources to make it seamless, and it just makes sense in most cases.