Time for a new metaphor

The floppy diskette “save” icon and its discontents

You all know the workflow. You’ve just finished creating your document, and now it’s time to save the file. So of course you click on the floppy diskette icon in the toolbar, navigate to the folder on your hard drive where you want to save the file, and click the “Save” button in the dialogue. Your file is saved—at the cost of semantics—and you get up to go do whatever it is you do when you’re not at the computer.

Twenty years ago, the floppy diskette “Save” icon made sense: many computers at the time—the original Macintosh, for example—had floppy drives as their only storage medium. So when the first applications that made use of a GUI appeared, using a floppy diskette icon for a “Save” button was a completely appropriate metaphor. As time went on, the floppy icon remained because it was familiar to long-time computer users. But with the decline of the floppy diskette, as well as the sundry storage media in use today, the weakness of the metaphor has become more and more apparent.

There are many people today—especially new Mac users—who have never even seen a floppy diskette. For them, clicking the floppy diskette icon means “save” only because that’s the behaviour that they’ve learned and accepted as “the way things are”, not because it’s behaviour that is intuitable. Given this, isn’t it time that we finally kissed the floppy diskette “Save” icon good-bye?

If we’re considering doing away with the picture used for the “Save” button, the first question that comes to mind is obvious—what do we use instead? Microsoft has already begun addressing this question in their Mac OS X software. Open up Word 2004, for example, and you’ll see the following “Save” icon:

Microsoft is now using that ZIP Disk icon for its “Save” icons in all of their Mac OS X software. But this has the same problem that the floppy diskette icon has—it represents a storage medium that not everybody uses. Numerous other proposals have been made, but inevitably they all fail because they make use of other specific media—such as CD-RW discs or hard drives—as icons.

Interface guru Bruce Tognazzini has written about the need for familiar and memorable metaphors:

When designing icons, for example, I always strive for instant recognition—familiar—but I’m usually content if I can achieve memorable. True, I will have to teach people the first time, via a tool-tip or other means, what the icons stands for, but if they will remember that meaning from then on, that can be considered a success.

How does that scale up? If there are 1400 icons and 1200 pull-down menus and 8700 dialogs, as found in certain software I won’t mention, how can software appear either familiar or memorable?

The answer lies in developing a few clear, powerful concepts, embodying them in a familiar, communicative metaphor and then, most importantly, teaching the metaphor.

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Which leads me to my final point: concepts are not a function of the intellectual part of the brain. Concept are born and grasped through intuition. So in a sense, there is such a thing as an intuitive interface if… we look beyond the form of the word. Good metaphors tend to arise from the designer’s intuition. When transmitted effectively through the visual and behavioral design of the program, users will be able to reconstruct the driving principles the designer wanted to communicate.

The floppy diskette icon works on a memorable level, but not necessarily on a familiar level. Its metaphor is outdated, and does not apply fully to the action it is supposed to represent. Clearly, a replacement would be needed that would provide that instant recognition while simultaneously be able to apply fully to the action it is supposed to represent—saving a file.

Saving a file can be thought of as the opposite of opening a file. This seems like a good place to start.

This illustrates an archetypal icon used for this action—a folder (usually open) with an arrow coming out of it. This icon satisfies our requirements for an effective icon in the sense that it both provides instant recognition (you’re taking something out of a folder) and applies fully to the action it is supposed to represent, regardless of storage media (all disks have a “folder” structure). Since all folders are known to contain only files (regardless of file-type), the obvious connection in the brain says that the “something” I’m taking out of the folder is a file.

In the context of saving a file, it can be said that no matter the storage medium in which the file is saved, it will be saved in a folder—even if it’s the “root” folder. This is true if you’re saving to a floppy diskette, hard drive, ZIP Disk, CD-R, DVD-R, USB Thumbdrive—anything. So while with the “Open File…” command we’re taking a file out of a folder, with the “Save” command we’re putting a file into a folder. Our intuitable, instantly recognisable and universally applicable choice for an icon then seems obvious—a “Save” button should have an icon of a folder with an arrow going into it, like so:

Amazingly, nobody seems to have thought of this rather obvious choice, and I personally think this should become the new standard “Save” icon. While it would initially be somewhat difficult for experienced computer users such as ourselves to get used to it, I believe that new users will be able to learn it much easier than they did with the old floppy diskette icon. Now let’s see if any software companies are listening…

[Update: While I am unable to confirm this myself at present, a couple people have mentioned that Apple apparently uses this “Save” icon type in AppleWorks. However this would make only one piece of software that uses this—I applaud Apple for this, but I would like to see more permeation of this icon.]