Thoughts & incidents from my rather usual life.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Usability: Auto Saving users' work

I have found many applications ( couple of them from Google) doing auto-save. This is amazing and a very thoughtful move towards better usability. But, though I dont seem to remember where, I was once searching for a "save" button and did not find it. And I realised the site was auto-saving my work and I didnt need to save anything specifically.

Maybe due to legacy, many of us have gotten used to actions like "edit" , and "save". I feel one can actually design a site (and probably an application too) without requiring these. The only concern is, will it actually confuse the users more.

Thinking on those lines, I came up with this small little text box to give the user the assurance that his work is infact saved and he doesnt need to do anything extra. Go ahead! Type in a few characters and see it for yourself. I already know that one cannot click and go back to any part of the typed text and I dont have a solution for that yet. Do you think this is too flashy? Too many things moving? Or is it good ?

Update: Original idea was to paste the javascript here. But blogger is screwing the shit out of me. I dont seem to be able to do that!

6 comments:

calyen said...

first time here,so Hello :)

you can write your javascript code in blogger template and use the methods in blog post.

Kalyan

Anonymous said...

This is interesting. The text box shifting with every word, though intended to communicate the 'save' action, seems like an irritant after the first couple of words.

shivku said...

kalyan,
good to see you man! What I really wanted to do here is to write ad-hoc JS, which doesnt really belong to my template. I really just wanted to get the text box working on the blogpost. So, is that possible? The wysiwyg seems to screw it up

shivku said...

Anonymous,
thx for the honest comment! :)

calyen said...

afiak, blogger rips of < script> < /script> inside post entry.so there is no way to write single post specific js. write it in template.use the methods in your entry.


yes, take a look at this.
http://golusukatha.blogspot.com/
ignore the telugu stuff, show/hide buttons will fetch posts on demand.the js code is there on template.

Anand said...

If <script> tags are allowed inside templates, then what could be the motive behind stripping them off from the posts?

I liked the idea of this auto-save thing, but I think users are so accustomed to a text area (or an edit-area in general), and the features that come with it, (like select-and-cut/copy/paste content) that we need to decouple the notion of auto-save from inside the UI of the edit area itself.