Save icon: Still a floppy disk? [closed]

Answer 1

Unfortunately this floppy disk icon has become the universal symbol for saving a document. It is even used in Microsoft Word 2007, virtually untouched. Change it in any way, an it is likely that you will make it unrecognizable to your users as a save symbol.

Answer 2

Have you ever used HLSS? They use an image of a SD card as a save icon, yet most of the time, I can't pick it out on the toolbar and have to go to File -> Save to save.

So, they present an alternative modern equivalent, yet it doesn't work as well as the ol' 3.5" floppy icon.

Answer 3

Users using your application will find it more usable if you use a floppy disk icon. For consistency, if it makes you feel better. It's ubiquitous.

Answer 4

So long as most applications continue to use the floppy icon, most users will be familiar with it and your application will benefit from a familiar interface. In economics, this is known as a network externality.

Answer 5

If you deviate from the common icons for operations like save, your users are going to say your programs is hard to use. Even if you simplify everything so that you think it's perfectly intuitive and much better than what everyone else is doing, they'll say it's hard to use, just because it's not what they're used to and not what they expect. Remember, to your users, whatever Microsoft and the other big guys do is "correct," so if you're doing something different, you are, by default, wrong.

Besides, even if your user takes 5 or 10 seconds to figure out where the save button is, that's 5 to 10 seconds of easily avoidable frustration you could have saved them, and it's just one more barrier preventing them from being able to use your app. Obviously, they're not using your app to revel in the joy of clicking a chronologically relevant save icon. They simply want to avoid losing their work and get on with more important things in life.

Stick with the 3.5" disk; it's a financially sound, if creatively poor, choice.

Answer 6

Even though many people won't recognize what the icon actually is, they will quickly learn what it means, so I would keep it for consistency with other apps.

In the future, I think the question will become moot as more and more apps will avoid "Save" actions and save each user action automatically. Instead of discarding changes by not saving, people will use "undo" as the dominant paradigm for discarding changes.