Jens Meiert

A Plea for Better Software: Provide Auto-Save

Jens Meiert, June 25, 2007 / March 7, 2008.

This entry is filed under Usability, User Experience.

Applications do rarely automatically and/or periodically save users’ work and thus fail to prevent unnecessary, frustrating, and expensive work and information losses. Since this isn’t just a but a critical problem, we need to encourage application developers or their “masterminds”, respectively, to change that.

Basically, I could stop writing now, but I may add some trivia:

So this became another guerrilla post nonetheless, but it should be obvious that we (would) all benefit from continuous-save. So when there’s a web app that might use some auto-save magic, let’s add it. And when there’s an (important) application that might use some work protection mechanism, let’s request and demand it (by contacting Microsoft concerning Office, for example).

Your experiences and thoughts?

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Comments

  1. On June 25, 18:17 CEST, Eric said:

    That’s something which irritated me when I switched to a mac: no apply and save buttons in preferences. I use Textmate a lot which saves your files when switching to another window which is quite good.

  2. On June 25, 18:19 CEST, Jens Meiert said:

    Irritated – and then pleased, right? (That’s why I tagged it “User Experience”, too, apart from the negative feelings an application or system crash causes …)

  3. On June 25, 19:08 CEST, Duluoz said:

    Every now and then, out of curiosity, I’ll try out new versions of design software such as Corel Draw. Corel’s products have had auto-save for years. You can also customize the frequency of saving if you like. However, I and many others have had this feature crash the application when triggered! How wonderful and counter productive is that!? Hahaha.

  4. On June 26, 12:28 CEST, Jens Meiert said:

    Now that’s great – there must be a reason why I never used Corel products yet ;)

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