Paratext save icon discussion

Question

What autosaving behavior to users expect?

For the local team I have to say, that most of them have never used nor seen any of those “not-very floppy disks”. So the save-symbol in PT is outdated and not helpful here.

Do you have any recommendations for a different icon? This isn’t the first time I heard this, but wondered what could be used instead. So I looked around my computer and found that quite a few “mainstream” programs actually still use the floppy disk icon: Microsoft Word/Excel/Outlook/PowerPoint, LibreOffice Writer/Calc/Impress, Paint, Mozilla Thunderbird, Notepad++, and EditPad Lite. Others don’t have a “Save” option or icon in the toolbar, but instead just have “Save…” written in a menu item. I didn’t find any that used a different icon: they either used the floppy disk, or just “Save…” text in a menu item.

So, even for users who haven’t seen a real floppy disk, they may be familiar with the “Save” icon through using any number of other programs. Knowing so many other popular programs use the floppy disk icon is helpful for me in thinking about this topic.

Answer 1

An interesting discussion! The outcome I sense here represents what we try to do in Paratext in general already. Here are a few things that come to mind about how we try think about icons:

• Don’t change things unless the long-term advantage to all users outweighs the pain for those who have already learned this thing.
• For the last few years, we have tried to make icons which can be verbally described (if that can be done without knowledge of what the thing is, even better; though this is not always easy). e.g. the triquetra symbol for Biblical Terms is “a curved three-pointed or triangular knot”, the Parallel Passages icon is “two blue pages of text side by side”, Assignments and Progress is “a bar chart with an arrow above it on a blue circular background”.
• Icons should not look like other icons we are already using (so that people can describe them unambiguously).
• Spend a while figuring out whether icons which appear to have meaning may also have some other meaning.
• Be very careful of bucking trends from other applications and operating systems.
• Avoid anthropomorphic imagery as some cultures don’t find that appropriate.
• Where possible, don’t rely on just color or just shape, use both so that an icon can be disambiguated more easily in a training environment or for people who don’t have full color vision.

Similar to points others have made in this thread, each user must learn many things in an application as extensive as Paratext and some of those things will be icons. It’s inevitable that every icon can’t have a clear semantic meaning which transcends cultures, languages, ages and so on. We try to make it as simple as possible to understand new icons and we’re really careful about changing existing ones.

Some random asides …

We nearly changed almost all icons when PT9.0 released, but feedback from our user community convinced us not to. We also realized that familiar icons would provide some visual signposts in PT9.0 which could help users get oriented faster.

We use off-the-shelf and freely-licensed icons when we can, but often we need to create something bespoke. Creating a 16x16 pixel icon which actually means something is rarely as simple as I might hope. Depending on where the icon appears in Paratext, we may need versions for .net and/or versions for HTML (which need to look like they’re using the same theme). Each icon needs a standard, hover and disabled state as a minimum; and sometimes also a clicked state or binary on or off states. One icon can be a surprising amount of work.

We try to err on the side of caution because it’s not often that it turns out to be worthwhile to make Paratext work differently to some other tool out there with a similar feature. Sometimes we can be innovative in how we present things to users when we’re doing something that no other software does, but most of the features within Paratext take some cues from places which we think users might have already learned skills. We hope that this can give some users a head start, however small.

Comments

I no longer expect icons to mean anything predictable to users in Nigeria. The flower (or gear) and the 3 lines for menu seem well established. Here in Nigeria (though Shegnada may know better) few translators have used computers for very long so the issue of transferable icon associations is less relevant. Mobile operating systems are known better than desktop OSes, and the idea of ‘saving’ is reducing. People expect everything to be saved. Sometimes they share or export things. Possibly naming or labelling is better known. So in the future we may want to consider just cutting saving out of the Paratext UX.

I don’t think the translators I help really notice any icons, except perhaps send/receive and project notes.

Finally, maybe it’s easy enough for people to supply their own icons if they wanted to as part of the localization, to cope with the situation that what is helpful for one place is unhelpful or taboo elsewhere.

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Very helpful insights, thank you. I have my special pains-in-the-neck for PT ergonomics, as a keyboard user, but in general I really love it. I can sense the care that you put into it.

Answer 2

You have a really good point here on the icon usage! If there is going to be a save button, it would either need to be the floppy drive or the word “Save.” That’s my thinking, anyways.

Answer 3

I read you. I just did a quick search and found for example icons for save this page. So traditionally it is established, and you could say “users just have to learn it like vocabulary”.

But: I have once held training in West Africa for an earlier generation of digital cameras: There you have plenty extremely condensed icons, where the “underlying reality” does not exist here: tulips, fir-trees, a mountain-range, magnifying lenses, traditional film-cameras with film-spools on top etc etc. And facing our team, I noticed how we struggled to explain each icon and its function.

So the main problem with the floppy disk, for all those who never held one in their hands, is that it is totally abstract. Each icon is different and some are wrongly designed. And if you do not know that the weird shape on top (and sometimes on bottom) used to be a metal slider-cover-thingy and that the other main element used to be a paper-lable and that the cut-off corner was litterally a missing corner, then it is very hard to learn this vocabulary. Like a Chinese character. It feels “unfair” to me, to expose our youth and our Africans to symbols that are totally obvious for some of us, from our life, and so abstract for them.

My recommendation for a modern “save icon”:
Use the most generic symbol of a container, for example a circle (which could represent a “container”, a bowl, a spinning hdd, a sack, an african grain-container) and place an arrow going into this container.

enter512×512 8.08 KB

attribution: ‘image: Flaticon.com’

There is a related symbol/icon about a square upright door and an arrow going out-of-it which often means to leave or to quit.

And similar for entering into something, again with a square upright door. This is why I propose a round symbol for the storage to not confuse with doors and not confuse with the user entering or quitting.

I have just had a look at my PT9 and I went “oh dear”. If we think “world”, then we might consider a re-design for a next generation.

People in our region have possibly seen some binoculars in some old action movies, but they have never held any in their hands. The PT icon for binoculars is not very pretty.

People here do know and use scissors, and paper-folders with tabs for documents. They do not use clip-boards but a fraction of the population will have seen some.

I myself had to learn the symbol for “source languages”.

The very icon for PT is abstract. Nobody here has ever written anything with an actual bird-feather in decades. I would say 99% of the population are unaware that people used to write with feathers. So having a feather without any written “output” from it, writing in the bottom of a green-circle is very charming to me, but does not communicate anything to my team.

I do not want to sound negative. I learnt all those symbols over the years; was easy because I use most of those things, even clip-boards. I love PT, really do. I am just throwing ideas (that is my calling in life) and say it is not urgent. But either we could consider a re-design for “world” for the next main version or we need to include icon-vocabulary-learning into the PT training. hth

Comments

Good points @Tim. Maybe we do need to bite the bullet! Making icons that are better understood worldwide will be a challenge, and there will be no perfect solution, but I think we really could find more understandable icons.

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UX designers debate which symbol to use for the save icon. I completely believe you that new users find the floppy disk icon confusing. I would only add that I find your icon confusing as well, it looks like the share icon or the forward icon to me.

My I suggest we split off the conversation about the icon of the save button in a separate thread?

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Yes, split away. If you have access, you are welcome to move my last contribution also. Otherwise I might copy it and delete it here (if I am authorized).

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Let’s consider the other side of the coin. The icons are part of an established vocabulary that has been in place since the beginning of computer usage. We all “learn” this language to use computers. What you are doing is asking all those of us who speak this language to suddenly learn a new language. We should not introduce new icons until the main computer world introduces them and they have already become the language spoken everywhere. Meanwhile please don’t ask the very large community of lower level users who are quite successful to adjust to something totally unnecessary. The very youth you are speaking of are the most able and eager of all the users to learn and accommodate to what the whole IT world is doing.

The technology keeps upgrading very fast and it has been an unnecessary added burden to have it change so very quickly, forcing the very large community of contented productive users to again and again learn to do things a new way and taking the time of their supporters to upgrade them and provide new training materials yet again.

I agree that change is necessary and new tools are useful. But changing the language and moving so quickly (the latest changes in the middle of covid when we could not help our people very effectively) could be thought through more carefully with an understanding attitude toward those who do not ride the wave of technology as effortlessly as others and those whose responsibility it is to make them successful in the task of getting God’s Word to their people.

9.2 and the still yet unsolved interlinear issues are a case in point. My teams are upgraded and then cannot work with their consultant because their interlinear does not work anymore, so they revert. A big unwanted bump repeated in multiple versions of Paratext upgrades. We love Paratext, it is VERY effective. Just give us a little peace please and let us use it.

Blessings,

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A small note here, I’m not an uninitiated user, but a right-facing arrow (even in a circle) means “Next” to me. It’s already a basic icon for anyone using a browser or many of our simpler tools.
In partial, but not committed, support of the proposal to consider other options, the current save icon may be losing its referent even if people know what it does. I’ve seen video of Generation Z people seeing a physical floppy and calling it “a 3D-printed ‘save’ icon”.
It seems to me that the basic save/open/copy/paste icons are basics of visual vocabulary that just need to be taught. I’d only be tempted to move to another icon set AFTER other tools move.

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Matthew_Lee:

I’ve seen video of Generation Z people seeing a physical floppy and calling it “a 3D-printed ‘save’ icon”.

I like that! Maybe there’s a market for all my old disks after all!

Answer 4

Overall, I agree with Shegnada.

Have a look at some of the replies to this topic on this UX question-and-answer site: Save icon, is the floppy disk icon dead?. Admittedly, some of the answers are pretty old, but there is almost complete consensus that the floppy disk icon is the best icon to represent saving. The floppy disk icon has become a symbol at this point that users have learned means save, just like they have learned that the envelope icon means message, and the hourglass icon means wait, and the magnifying glass icon means search, even though we rarely use envelopes, hourglasses and magnifying glasses in modern life.

I was trying to be brief in my previous reply, so I hope I wasn’t misleading. Even though I can see that users new to computing would be confused by a floppy disk icon, I think they would be confused by almost any icon. The arrow icon is not clearer, both to new users and to users who already have a mental model that the floppy disk icon represents saving. I don’t think the save icon should be changed without pretty convincing usability testing with real users that it really is clearer, both for new users and old users.

Answer 5

Very good discussion, thank you all. You have challenged and enriched my thinking, and I hope to return the favour below.

I had been asked and provided a quick alternate “save” icon. Today I would turn it, with the arrow going down into the circle. But please read on, before you shout:

In this thread already most users are saying that icons need to be “learnt”. That is frustrating to me, because it used to be, when I grew up, that icons “explained themselves”. But not these days, to our local team.

We have learnt to read (and to know/speak) English. So if many people no longer believe in self-evident icons, I want to throw you this idea: Why use icons and force “more learning” when international users already had to learn English or another lowc?

I just checked; you might also check in your PT set-ups: Please do not give me “space” as the reason to keep icons. In my sub-windows and my menu-bar or tool-bar there is plenty empty space to the right. And PT is so much word-based that hopping between text and those tiny icons might even slow me down. And the drop-down menus use icons next to text - but only for about one third of the menu items. So searching for something specific, I have to look at the words anyway.

So we could un-clutter all the menus in PT and get rid of icon-learning.

And a personal note for smiles: I am remoate-coaching my own mother on her first ever Android device (a tablet). When she is trying to refer to certain icons, we often struggle until for example I figure out that the “frying pan” is the magnifyer, the “button” with the six button holes is the caller for all the apps, or something “weird” is the mobile signal strength with included network-symbols and I forget how she saw the battery symbol. Most of those are rather funny. And she is enjoying the tablet and the extra color photos from us, so her attitude is positive… Again an example where icons are not obvious to the user and no option to have simple text, as far as I know.

Answer 6

And one more question for fun and for better understanding this obsolete beast, since I just followed the given link:

Why do you call it floppy disk in English? It is not floppy. There was a previous generation, larger in size, which I only used a few years and that was floppy, i.e. you could bend it some or flop it if so inclined. But you had to take great care, because it was open in several places. I believe in my school days we called the new no-longer-floppy disks the 3,5 inch disks, in contrast to the what 5(?) inch floppys.

Comments

Tim:

Why do you call it floppy disk in English?

My guess is that it was because it was still floppy on the inside. That could be noted when manually pulling back the metal slider. (Or when you ripped open a broken one to mess around with it, as I would do in middle school .)

Maybe not the best name, but

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Back in the day the disk was indeed floppy.

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Well, this discussion has gone far afield.

Floppy disks refers to a class of magnetic disks. 3.5" and 5 1/4" were the most common “floppies”, but I’ve seen 8" and even one 12" disk my old boss kept. As anon094061 says, the internal disks were always floppy even if the cartridge was semi-rigid. (Most would still class Zip Disks as floppies, even though the cartridge is more sturdy.) Floppy disks contrasted with optical discs (that contained CDS, DVDs, MiniDiscs, and eventually BlueRay) and Hard Disks (which internally are some type of rigid fiberglass-like material).

Further down the rabbit hole:
In English, “disk” with a “k” tends to be the name for the cartridge ones (hard disks and floppy disks). The inside of a hard disk is called a “platter”. “Disc” with a “c” tends to refer to those that are actually round, like CDs (compact discs) or frisbees.

merriam-webster.com

‘Disc’ and ‘Disk’: Is There a Difference?

Or, why you shouldn’t toss a floppy like a Frisbee.

MiniDiscs are optical discs in a cartridge…so that blurs the line further, I’ve seen both spellings, but it is most often written with a “c” by the manufacturers.

It would be a bit much to get into magnetic tape media or grooved media like vinyl discs and wax cylinders.

Answer 7

I think the disk spelling came as a result of shortening “floppy diskette” - to floppy disk.

Whatever you do, don’t ask a south African what they call a 3 1/2 inch disk.