I think the design in Google Doc is a good reference. It provides both Save & Save and close command, and put them next to each other in File menu. In addition they are provided as button in upper right corner, and Save button in toolbar. The reasons are: 1. Many users has formed a very strong habit to do save now and then, by pressing the Save button or Ctrl-S without even thinking about what they are doing. Removing Save button, or even dimming it, work against users' habit, and thus increase their metal workload: i.e. they need to understand how your application is handling the save. It might take longer time for users to figure out why the Save button is dimmed then just allow them to press it even all the changes has been saved. In addition, even when they understand it, they has to switch mental models between applications handling save in different manners. So it might be good to just stick to the old "standard" always available Save button.
2. Save and close should be put together and clearly labeled. Most of the time, or almost all the time, users want to save the changes and close. It's very logical and easy for users to combine them together. Mentioning both save and close in the command reassures users that their work will be saved before close. If there is only "close" in this command, users may have to guess whether save will be done before they press the button. Or the application has to popup a dialog to ask "do you want to save?". Either is ideal. It's more intuitive to just say clearly "Save and close". But this kind of save may cause problem in case a user does want to discard the changes. At least in Google Doc there isn't a clear way to do it. Using revision history can solve this problem in a not very straightforward way. Since discarding changes is a very rare case, it should be OK to do it in a more difficult way so that the most often use case is better supported. 3. Autosave is also valuable but the use case is different from the Save button. So both can be provided. 4. Putting these two command together makes them easy to find and compare. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=48302 ________________________________________________________________ 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
