The metaphor becomes the function

I’ve heard quite a few people complain about Microsoft Office. One complaint in particular is regarding the toolbar icon for “Save”: a small picture of a floppy disk.

The argument goes that because many computer users these days have never seen a floppy disk, it is a bad choice of image for a save button. I contend that this makes it a better choice of image.

Back in the days of floppy disks, clicking a floppy disk icon seems a decent choice for “Save to floppy disk”. But what happens when hard drives come along? Does the icon mean save specifically to a floppy disk, or just save in general? The same would happen if we changed the icon to a current storage trend: does the USB stick icon mean save to USB stick? Not to mention that getting a representative ‘hard disk’ icon would be difficult, as most computer users have never seen one. But now there are no floppy disks, the icon just means “Save”.

The argument happens because usability concerns are different for different categories of user. There are the issues of how usable the program is when you’ve never used a computer, when you’ve never used a program in that genre, when you’ve used similar programs but never used that particular program, or when you’re adept at using that particular program. For office apps, the number of people in the “never used a program in this genre” group is really low — and that is the only group helped by metaphorical icons.

The trick is, as long as there is a consistent iconic representation for the concept, in this case a floppy disk for “Save”, it doesn’t matter whether you can derive one from the other. As long as all office apps use the same picture for “Save”, the usability is there. Users will associate the picture with the concept, and never need to care about what the original metaphor was.

Finally, unless all programs changed their “Save” icons at once, changing it just for one program would make that program harder to use, because the new icon wouldn’t be a standard.