Five too many ways to save!
We upgraded our in-house wiki recently (TWiki), and the save dialog now looks like this:
So there’s now, what, six potential ways to save a page? Three save buttons, plus a force new revision toggle that can be applied to each? Plus preview, plus cancel? Aren’t wikis supposed to be simple? (The help, by the way, doesn’t help, although this isn’t the point.)
Can we replace the entire conglomeration with one button: “Preview”? Should there be “Save” as well? Is “Cancel” needed? (Since there’s no automatic save, simply navigating away from the page works like cancel, although perhaps this isn’t obvious.)
(There’s a similar post about choices confounding users at Joel on Software, “Choices = Headaches“, in which he talks about the 15 (!) different ways a user can shutdown a laptop in Windows Vista.)
Agree it’s way too much.
Trouble is that Cancel releases the lock, so should always be used instead of ‘back’ etc. But Quiet save and Checkpoint seem unnecessary 99.9% of the time, as does Force new revision.
well I dont agree. For a twiki poweruser all buttons definetly make sense! The only button that I could go without is maybe Quiet save. But in case those buttons disturb, just change the template and remove them.
Save makes sense.
Force new revision is a great help in case you make some large changes you are not sure about within your editing period.
Checkpoint will make sense because i sometimes keep editing one page a whole day long and just want to be sure things are beeing saved once in a while. A automated autosave might be the better instead.
Cancel is important as Ace mentioned before.
Quiet save needs explanation, otherwise users won’t understand what it is about…
Given that e.g. Wikipedia can manage with “Save”, “Preview” plus a “minor revision” toggle, AND our internal wiki “power users” don’t know what all of the options do, I don’t agree that all six save combinations need to be available in the UI. (This also isn’t a case where you need to make a rarely-used function highly visible and accessible, as is the case with e.g. the emergency stop button on an escalator.)
A few days ago I changed the buttons on the edit page to “Save” and “Preview” only, and on the preview page to “Save” only. I take your and Ade’s point about cancel releasing the lock (I’d forgotten about this), but if two people edit a page at the same time the second gets a message allowing them to break the lock if they choose, which is sufficient for our purposes at least. (Also, even with a cancel button in place, you can’t guarantee that people will hit it when they’re supposed to.)