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Design is about communication. Watch out for cases where what you want to communicate as a designer is not the same as what you should communicate. I believe a
by strogonoff 3y ago
Design is about communication. Watch out for cases where what you want to communicate as a designer is not the same as what you should communicate.
I believe almost every “Saving…” indicator is an instance of that discrepancy.
They were appropriate back when on-the-fly saving was a fresh UX revolution, but today they’re nothing but self serving: us weathered designers, who grew up when the floppy disk icon actually represented the real thing, bragging about how cool our app is—it saves your draft on the fly! No need to press buttons, can you imagine?
Nowadays, as devices are constantly connected, latency is low, and constant saving has become the dominant and intuitive behavior, what the user needs to know is not that stuff’s constantly being saved; what the user needs to know is the extraordinary situation where you fail to save it.
This, if I may be so bold, is what you should be communicating—and if you ask me how, I might suggest a single, completely unchanging line of text informing the user that their draft is being constantly saved (though ask yourself if even that is required; it might not be if you are dealing with digital natives) and an obvious, flow-interrupting error state when that doesn’t work as intended.
- RobotToaster 3y agoI'd disagree personally, but only because I recently found out the hard way that a wordpress plugin I use doesn't have autosave. It's not as universal as one would think.
- strogonoff 3y agoI assume the reason you found out the hard way is that you in fact intuitively expected it to work that way.
- nnf 3y agoI mostly agree that the app should only be communicating when exceptional things happen (like failing to save the draft), and my solution of an unnoticeable (but discoverable) status message is meant to give confidence to the users who aren’t very technical and consciously wonder if their work is being saved, which describes much of my target market. The messaging also differentiates these areas from the parts of the app where there’s no concept of a draft and so where auto saving doesn’t happen.
- Georgelemental 3y agoHow about the case where the network is slow, so the save operation hasn't failed yet, but it will be interrupted before completing if the user closes the webpage?
- strogonoff 3y agoYou can’t avoid that with the indicator either. Closing windows by accident or due to a crash happens. Consider using window.onclose and saving to local storage to avoid data loss. That said, you could use a separate mode for users with bad network. That mode may require more changing and distracting UI elements. I am not prepared to say whether it is a good solution though.