On Mar 19, 2009, at 9:09 AM, Jake Trimble wrote:
Has anyone seen any attempts to replace the standard floppy disk Save
icon? Seeing as most people haven't touched a 3.5" floppy in a decade,
is anyone addressing this archaic icon and how we can replace the
current mental model associated with it?
I noticed this exact problem a few days ago, too.
There are two problems here:
(1) You're describing an action with a object. ("Save" = "Diskette")
And since the object in common use for the action has significantly
changed, it no longer logically works to use the old one.
(2) You're dealing with a slowly obsoleting action. "Save" is an
artifact of when we couldn't reliably autosave each action.
What you really need, then, is (a) a modern action to reflect what is
really being done (such as "Save Version"), and (b) iconography to
reflect *that* action.
A decade ago, I tested an app that compiled HTML code into a binary
format, and it had a "Run" command (which didn't actually "run"
anything, note a problem right there). The button icon? A bright red/
orange phoon. In an app aimed at Enterprise and Military customers.
The marketing manager was a bit miffed when I complained about the
icon and how it looked like a Dr. Seuss character -- "We paid a lot of
money for those icons" "You should have paid more" -- but she came
around when I walked her through it: you had to deduce that the icon
was supposed to be a person, then that it was a person running, then
that the command was Run, and then what the Run command would do; you
effectively had to decipher a pun in the process. I think they
changed it to an arrow or even just the word Run (since the app wasn't
localized).
(Phoon? http://www.phoons.com/)
-- Jim
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