The important thing here, is what's user's mental model here, more or less, he's like writing on the paper for fill a paper table, if write down, it's/should there ( if he type in, it's there), so save in a just-in-time way meet this very well.
And at the same time, let user could undo what he/her has done before, this makes the application less scary. If possible, i would like a software without open/save/save as, these things just leads to confusing. for more information, you could ref About Face X.X on Undo/redo topic ( i'm not the book seller) Cheers -- Jarod On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 12:10 AM, Michael Micheletti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 8:51 PM, Jessica Enders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > > > Any opinions on when one approach should be used over the other and > > whether the inconsistency matters? > > > > Hi Jessica, > > I've done some work on an existing web-based product configurator that does > something similar - you save your changes but intentionally commit later. > > Although this makes sense from an engineering perspective, this intentional > commit has been the cause of some long-winded product support calls. > > The main problem turns out to be that the application's > committed/uncommitted state is not clearly indicated. A secondary problem is > that the importance of committing changes is not obvious. Application users > go along happily thinking that they've done their thing then wonder why no > changes have taken effect in the system. > > I'd recommend in this case that you bring the product support team a box of > doughnuts and ask them to tell you the things they get lots of calls on. If > they don't mention the commit problem outright, ask them if they ever get > calls related to it. Alternately, if you're setup to do quickie usability > tests for the application, grab a couple newbies and see what happens. > > >From my perspective, though, inconsistent save and commit behavior is more > of a problem than a solution. Hope this helps, > > Michael Micheletti > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > -- Designing for better life style. http://jarodtang.spaces.live.com/ http://jarodtang.blogspot.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
