Disk metaphor for "save" icon is out-dated

[Denis Washington]

Binary package hint: human-icon-theme

The current "save" icon in Ubuntu is still a floppy disk, which seems outdated in 2007; only few mordern desktop PCs ora laptops have floppy drives these days. The GNOME and Tango icon themes already use a hard disk with an arrow pointing onto them; this seems more appopriate for a modern desktop. The Human theme could contain the Tango icon with Human-specific arrow color changes.

[Marnanel Thurman (marnanel)]

Are we talking about a series of platters (which would presumably be meaningless to most people) or a plain box (which looks like, well, a box to most people, and besides I doubt most people have never seen a hard disk even in its casing)? It's a difficult question. Can you attach or supply a link to the Tango icon?

[Denis Washington (dwashington)]

Here is a link to the Tango save icon:
http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/tango/tango-icon-theme/32x32/actions/document-save.png?view=co

And here the one from gnome-icon-theme (SVG):
http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-icon-theme/trunk/scalable/actions/document-save.svg

Note that hard disks as icons are already used in the Human icon theme, like for partitions and the "File System" place, so users probably are or get used to the association with their saved data.

[antistress (antistress)]

i agree to say that the floppy disk is not a valid metaphor anymore (new users have probably never seen one !) but i wouldn't suggest to replace it with the hard drive metaphor : the hard disk drive is not a good metaphor either since a hard drive is usually hidden in the PC box and a lot of users have probably never seen one.
Besides, like the floppy metaphor, the hard drive metaphor will also be obsolete since it is based upon a hardware component.
Both are wrong metaphors.

Let's think about it.
What is the symetric action of "save into a file" ? it's "open a file".
Look at the "open a file" metaphor : it's based on a folder (you see a file going out a folder).
Therefore the logical metaphor for "save into a file" would be something like a folder with an arrow pointing onto it (and not onto a hard drive)

To sum up, concerning the folder with an arrow pointing onto it as a metaphor for document-save-as action :
that metaphor would be logical considering the metaphor of the symetric action
that metaphor would be as good as the metaphor of the symetric action
that metaphor would never be obsolete (on the contrary to the floppy and the hard drive metaphors, both based upon hardware component)

See also Apple HIG :
"Take advantage of people’s knowledge of the world by using metaphors to convey concepts and features of your application. Metaphors are the building blocks in the user’s mental model of a task.
Use metaphors that represent concrete, familiar ideas, and make the metaphors obvious, so that users can apply a set of expectations to the computer environment. For example, Mac OS X uses the metaphor of file folders for storing documents; people can organize their hard disks in a way that is analogous to the way they organize file cabinets"

good metaphors mean better usability.

See also :
http://schulzeandwebb.com/blog/2006/10/10/editing-documents-as-playing-music/
http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/06/25/the_end_of_an_icon/

[antistress (antistress)]

it looks like that article says the same thing http://awarmgun.net/archives/newsaveicon/

[antistress (antistress)]

see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531460

[Denis Washington (dwashington)]

As the save icon is not a floppy disk anymore, I consider this bug as closed.