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Our office recently updated to a new version of the Office Suite, and it still has an icon in the upper-left corner to perform the 'Save' function. Floppy drives have not been in use for years, and many children would not recognize a 3.5 inch floppy disk on sight. Programs have used this icon for years, because we have yet to find a suitable replacement. The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone. Even moving to the more abstract Piggy Bank icon would not work, because they are seldom used in the modern age. A USB Key icon may represent saving in some form, but the may not be around much longer if another medium gains favor. Does this mean that the venerable 3.5 inch Floppy will represent saving information to future generations, or should it be replaced by a different symbol?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:19PM
I've used probably thousands of different applications over the years. From early programs where "save" was some obscure key combination only discoverable by reading a thick manual that didn't yet even use the term "save", to dumbed down Fisher-Price style applications where the only way to figure out how to save is to click on dozens of random looking icons.
It is always difficult to communicate the meaning of a function, and the same function may behave differently between different applications. (A word processor Save may behave differently than a database Save, for example). Boiling it down to one word, or a picture is not easy, really requires a large amount of acceptance and standardization between people and applications, and sometimes gives new meaning to that word or symbol in itself.
Anyway, over the yeas I have found the best use of icons were to supplement text labels, not replace them. I can't even count the number of applications where I'm left guessing "what does this odd vague shaped toolbar icon do?". Apple hit the nail on the head with drop-down menus, and standardized "file", "open", "save" terminology, and the occasional 3.5" disk icon supplementing them. Others copied this way of doing things not because it was cool, stylish, or technically most efficient, but because people easily understood it. It became part of the "language" of computers.
I have to groan every time I hear about some dumb marketing turd trying to make a major change to a time-tested user interface. They might as well just change the language from English to Japanese!
Microsoft made a major fuckup by iconzing everything in to that damn "ribbon". If they weren't almost the only game in town, that would have killed their office product by now. The ribbon interfaces is useless and everybody hates it. (Given the other major fuckups in the Windows 8 and 10 user interfaces, they are clearly trying to put themselves out of business). I'd fully expect a future version of Microsoft Office to do away with all language ports and replace them all with a Microsoft bastardized form of Esperanto. They are so isolated from their users they won't even see a problem with that.