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34

This Twitter post sparked me to ask the question:

totally! RT @damienguard: Dear UI designers everywhere. Stop using floppy disk icons for save. Too many people have no idea what it is now.

Floppy Disk Save Icon

So, is the floppy disk icon obsolete? Should it be replaced with something more modern and if so what?

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You might say that save buttons themselves are dead. Why not automatic saving with undo? Microsoft OneNote for example. Save buttons should be placebic in the same way that door close buttons in elevators and street crossing buttons are. – justin.m.chase Jan 12 '11 at 22:12
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Just out of trivia (and because it intrigues me), those things must be a local specific because over here - street crossing buttons need a push to initiate a cycle (though on really crowded streets they're sometimes lit and pressed automatically). Also, I've never seen an elevator with a close button, not even the ones from ~1920 in town has one, but perhaps I'm simply too young or there's a big difference in regulations ^^ (most have a "hold door" button though to let more people in) – Oskar Duveborn Jan 23 '11 at 18:26
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@Oskar (Los Angeles, CA here...) There are definitely some intersections where you have to press the button otherwise you will never get a walk signal but for many of them, it's going to change anyway whether you press it or not, and the button doesn't really do anything. – MatrixFrog May 26 '11 at 18:10
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No. The floppy disk itself is dead, but not the floppy disk icon representing save. – awe Oct 7 '11 at 13:24
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When altering business data, please keep save an explicit action. Auto-backup, sure, but only auto-save robs the user of a very important action: cancelling. – KoMet Oct 22 '12 at 7:09
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17 Answers

up vote 223 down vote accepted

The floppy disk icon is an idiom, not a metaphor. It doesn't matter that we're no longer writing files on 1.44MB 3.5" disks. It doesn't matter that many users don't even know what a floppy disk is. What matters is that users associate the icon with saving.

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Couldn't have put it better myself. – ChrisF Jan 12 '11 at 20:56
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Metaphors are understood. Idioms are learned. Idioms must be taught. – Vincent Robert Jan 13 '11 at 10:04
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@DamienG - What experience is that? I don't think I've seen anyone fail to understand what that icon means. As for the different look, they aren't THAT different. They are all similar enough that one can easily confer meaning from one to the next. Even a VERY below average intelligence knows a phone when they see it, even though different phones look nothing alike. – Charles Boyung Jan 14 '11 at 13:53
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Unless there's a more appropriate icon that is easier to learn or more intuitive, the floppy disk icon is still relevant. The people who are unable to recognize a floppy disk icon just because it's a different size/color or illustration style are going to have just as hard a time with any other save icon. That's why you add tooltips and text labels to important functionality. – Lèse majesté Jan 26 '11 at 13:18
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Having no floppies any more makes them even the better icons. An HDD-Icon could mean there is a distinction, where you like to save your data, and many people, while using hdds, have never seen one. USB-Sticks are to widely used (as modem, wlan, drive, lock, bluetooth, ...). – user unknown Feb 10 '11 at 8:15
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up vote 50 down vote

This question gets brought up every so often. I've found two separate threads (several years apart) on the IxDA list:

http://www.ixda.org/node/19443

http://www.ixda.org/node/23688

I thought it was discussed on UXExchange as well, but I couldn't find it.

In my opinion (and it seems to be the general consensus), the icon is ubiquitous with saving. Changing it would cause more problems than it would solve. Think of it this way - can YOU think of anything to replace it with that would be more universally understood? There really isn't anything.

The same thing holds true for the "phone" icons used on cell phones and even Skype, or (eventually) the envelope icon for email. When was the last time you saw a phone that actually looked like the old, standard handset that is almost always used as the phone icon? I doubt most kids would even know what that icon was if it wasn't the button to talk on their cell phones. Yet, it is still widely known and probably will not be going away.

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YES! Many icons represented how things looked like in the old days, and the looks of things (generally) were more consistent before. Now all things have modern designs, and does not necessary have a uniform look. So symbolic icons are better off kept the same as they have been commonly accepted to represent. Although newer generations does not know what a floppy disk is, they DO know that the symbol means "Save"! – awe Jan 26 '11 at 13:19
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Ask a child to draw a train? What do you think you will get? A Class 42, a Deltic? No. They will draw a steamie - just about every time. It is the archetype of its class. The same goes for icons. – Paul J. Lewis Oct 5 '12 at 12:16
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Similarly, even today the silhouette of a steam locomotive is often used to indicate a railway crossing, or a train station, etc. It is instantly recognizable even if it's obsolete since at least a half century: if you put there a modern locomotive, people would wonder whether it's a bus, a train, a tram, or something else. – vsz Feb 21 at 22:34
up vote 17 down vote

This is also discussed on Graphic Design where there are some good (and some bad) proposals for alternative save icons:

New generation of Save icon that is not a “disk”?

Many icons represented how things looked like in the old days, and the looks of things (generally) were more consistent before. Now all things have modern designs, and does not necessary have a uniform look. So symbolic icons are better off kept the same as they have been commonly accepted to represent. Although newer generations does not know what a floppy disk is, they DO know that the symbol means "Save"!

The folder icon Folder is also commonly used, but it took a while before I realized what it looked like! A reason for this might of course be that in the beginning (when I first experienced it) it was a much simpler version of it: Old style folder
I learned that it was the icon for a directory long before i realized that it looked like an archive folder.

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up vote 11 down vote

The GNOME desktop on Linux/Unix moved away from the floppy disk icon quite a while ago, and nobody seemed to mind... you can see what they use instead in this screenshot from 2008 (on the "Apri" and "Salva" icons):
Screenshot, showing a green arrow pointing down into a representation of an IDE hard-drive as the idiom for 'Save'

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Same icon that ammoQ provided as an option on Jan. 18 - To me, it looks like a download icon, not a save icon. – Charles Boyung Feb 1 '11 at 15:53
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To me, the icon looks like a clock radio with a green arrow indicating where to click the snooze button or something. Even though it's an alternative to the floppy disc, it's not a good alternative! – awe Feb 9 '11 at 13:28
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@Calum - the app that I had to work on at my first job was deployed to tens of thousands of users too - does that mean it is widely-deployed and we should be using it as a baseline of how to design interfaces? No, I don't think so. – Charles Boyung Apr 22 '11 at 19:41
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@Charles Gnome is used by default by the top 3 Linux distributions: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora. That said, by your logic one cannot use Mac stuff as examples given that Apple controls around 10% of the desktop market :) – Atanasio Segovia Jan 12 '12 at 23:38
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I think the reason it works on this environment is because it explicitly says "Save" next to the icon. – ferrari fan Mar 10 '12 at 0:35
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up vote 6 down vote

Because the floppy disk is so widely used, it does not really make sense to change it. Specially with something like a hard disk. Why should we replace a well known icon (even the users under 18 associate the floppy disk with saving even if they don't know what it is). Especially using a hard disk, which comes into ages right know, instead. Remember that we move into the cloud era. Arrows pointing down to disk or folders are more known for downloading or importing.

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Absolutely agree. Away from computing, we still talk about power of a car as horsepower or of a lamp as candlepower, even though few people are familiar with horses and candles as sources of power. – DaveP Mar 4 at 16:30
up vote 3 down vote

Yes. Although the floppy icon is still understood it's at it's end-of-life. A replacement is required that's more relevant to today's user and today's context. To a user "save" means "save my new work to the file". The file itself can be floppy, hard disk, usb or the cloud). This has bugged me so I just made some quick mockups put below. I like the one on the left the most; makes it feel like "stuff goes into the file".

Samples

Credits: This derivative work is GPL'd, so use/abuse as you wish. I used pulled the green arrow (also GPL'd) from http://www.iconarchive.com/show/snowish-icons-by-saki/Arrow-right-icon.html. If you want the PSD or something, message me.

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Personally, I interpret the one on the left to mean something along the lines of 'import into document', not 'save document to disk'. – Tharwen Jun 12 '12 at 15:04
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I understand both icons as “Import into file”. – Nicolas Barbulesco Mar 17 at 11:30
up vote 2 down vote

I use the save to folder and load from folder icons instead (a file folder with arrow going in or out).

Even on my old XT I had a small harddrive which I usually used for saving on.

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up vote 2 down vote

I believe we should not stop using floppy icon for save. As its widely accepted and there isnt a alternate design known. The only modification i can think of is introducing the small tooltip text for those who do not understand what floppy or any of the old icons represent.

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up vote 2 down vote

The floppy disk icon seems neither dead nor alive, but somewhere in between on its way out. A lot of users won't recognize it as Save, though those with a lot of experience using more traditional apps like MS Office or enterprise-ware will likely be very familiar with it. If in doubt, test with your audience.

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+1 for test with your audience. This will give better answers than any discussion here on UX. – awe Jun 19 '12 at 8:18
up vote 1 down vote

I see more and more the "upload into the cloud" button in stead of a floppy. I believe this will eventually replace the floppy.

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up vote 1 down vote

Ask anyone under 18 what a floppy disk is. Even the name floppy disk is a legacy from when they were actually floppy. Yes, it's still understood to mean save, but that's like saying "tape it" when using your DVR or calling iTunes the record store. Soon even the file folder will be outmoded.

The down arrow into a box does look like download, because it points down. Into a load? But as for a new save, is there a newer metaphor? Maybe the red dot on a video camera or a safe. Ziploc? Maybe it's check-in and should be a check. Something like the Apple time machine logo?

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Im 15 and know what floppies are – Cole Johnson May 16 '12 at 14:14
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3.5" floppies were still floppy. It referred to the disk, inside the plastic casing, not the casing itself. – Charles Boyung Jan 18 at 22:01
up vote 1 down vote

When you click the save button you can save your file to your hard drive, a USB stick, an SD card, anything. It seems pointless having a picture of an arrow going toward a specific storage device, especially as anyone who knows nothing about computers will see a hard drive icon as nothing more than a grey square. The point is, you want your file to be remembered, so why not have an image of something relating to memory, e.g. a brain? (Also, I'm 15 and I know what a floppy disk is, just saying)

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But, technically speaking, the file is already in memory. Saving is writing the file from the memory to the disk. Let's not confuse things even more ! :-) – Nicolas Barbulesco Mar 17 at 11:33
up vote 1 down vote

Just to back some of the previous answers with an excerpt from one of my favorite UX books "The Design of Everyday Things", in chapter 7:

7. When all else fails, standardize.

When something can't be designed without arbitrary mappings and difficulties, there is one last route: standardize. Standardize the actions, outcomes, layout, displays. Make related actions work in the same way. Standardize the system, the problem; create an international standard.

Remember, standardization is essential only when all the necessary information cannot be placed in the world or when natural mappings cannot be exploited.

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up vote 0 down vote

Last week, I was confronted with exactly this question; I decided against the floppy icon and used a arrow pointing to a harddisk instead, similar to this one:

hard disk save icon

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That looks like a "download" link to me, not a "save" link. – Charles Boyung Jan 18 '11 at 14:25
@Charles I can't think of many cases where those might be confused or would represent different actions – Bobby Jack Jan 19 '11 at 0:36
Although I suspect few people open their machines and have seen their bare hard disk, this should work because to them it looks like 'putting/saving inside a steel box'. – Sid Mar 9 '12 at 21:23
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@CharlesBoyung: Why does this look like a download link? Because it is commonly used as such. This is why also the floppy works as a save icon; it is common use. – awe Jun 19 '12 at 8:22
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@awe - that was my point. The icon he suggests does not work as a save icon because it is commonly used for something else entirely. – Charles Boyung Jun 19 '12 at 19:00
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up vote 0 down vote

Imho Safe is the best fresh idea for new Save icon:

safe

Words "save" and "safe" even sound similar :)

Permalink;

enter image description here

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Imo this is too complex - I had mistaken this for a screen projector at first glance. – kontur Mar 4 at 9:15
@kontur what is your suggestion for "Save" icon? – webvitaly Mar 4 at 10:09
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What I suggest or don't suggest as an icon is of no matter to my comment on your answer; I think the safe is hard to recognize and does not neccesairly communicate saving of state. – kontur Mar 4 at 11:27
@kontur I added new image of safe. IMHO now it is looks like more than safe ;) – webvitaly Mar 4 at 14:04
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But a safe would mean encrypting. In computing, safes and locks and keys and codes are already taken to mean access control and encryption. – Nicolas Barbulesco Mar 17 at 11:36
up vote 0 down vote

Libre office uses icon of drawer or filling cabinet, whatever it is, with arrow going in. Think, that it is perfect.

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up vote 0 down vote

The artifact represented by the icon (the 3.5" diskette) is well past its sell by date or even recognition (some usability studies I've been in have users referring to it as the washing machine or dishwasher icon..;), however the metaphor of what it represents - saving data - persists. Plenty of other examples abound (financial apps using checkbooks for reconciliation, the iPhone using the old-style Larry King-type microphone for recording), and so on.

I would suggest the icon is fine for most users who want to explicitly save content - the context of use is clear and metaphor is strong.

A straw poll on whether replacing it with cloud or pendrive icon option is here: http://polarb.com/9772 YMMV with such a crowdsourced poll. Ultimately, I think the question reminds us never to assume anything with users, but to test it in realistic contexts and design and deploy accordingly. In these days of automatic saves, backups, influence of implicit save models on mobile device and how user expectations are changing, that testing best practice comes to the fore now even more.

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