I was just leafing through some early screen shots of Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac, when someone pointed out that the icon for save is still a floppy disk. Most of us haven't handled a floppy disk in years (indeed, if you have a Mac you haven't been able to buy a Mac with a floppy drive for years either), and for the youngest of my children, they won't have even seen one. Here it is in all of its "Ribbon and Toolbar" glory.
This set me thinking, and I'd welcome your thoughts on the subjects:
- Should "we" move away from using the floppy icon for save? If so... what should the icon be? Most people don't know what a hard-drive looks like, and with cloud computing... well.. it just gets harder.
- Are there other icons in our UI that no longer make sense? Any good examples would be greatly appreciated.
Personally, I think there is nothing better and consistency (all apps use the same icon) probably means that once you've learned it... you've learned it. However, I'm old enough to remember the introduction of 3.5' Floppies.... and 5.25' (you know, back when floppies were floppy)... so perhaps it's time for me to step back a little.
Footnote: Esteemed blogger John Gruber has some actual feedback from a primary school teacher: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/30/office-mac
I remember saving stuff to tapes on the old spectrum's and commodore c16's....
My 8 year old found
Star Wars on a VHS tape a while back and was really curious as to what it was. After I explained what it was I had to dig out (and dust off) an old video player leaving them to watch it - 2hrs later I was told that it was broken. Aparently the film had finished and they wanted to watch it again but it kept playing the end of the video, when I said "You haven't rewound the tape" they replied "You have to do what?" they thought it was pretty funny you had to rewind the tape for 10 minutes to watch it again!