Save As vs Exporting – Why Apple excels at UI Design?

Most users think, Mac UI is all about slick graphics and “cool” icons. Well, that might be true partially, but user interface design isn’t about photoshopping or designing cool looking icons. According to Jakob Nielsen, aesthetics is just one aspect of usability. There is much more to user friendly software than just the “cool factor” or great icons.

Recently, I was using Microsoft’s Excel to edit a dozen large  CSV files. As a matter of fact, in Excel,  whenever you save “anything” you do as a CSV,  you will practically lose out features that aren’t supported natively by the underlying file format. For Example, CSV doesn’t support coloured cells. So when you colour a cell, and try to “save” it as a CSV, Excel pops up this dialog.

When you click “Yes”, all that Excel does is to “export” whatever content your file has into what the underlying format can support. So since, excel supports coloured cells but CSV doesn’t it ignores your colouring and proceeds saving it to CSV. Excel even goes one step far and doesn’t clear the “dirty flag” because, Excel hasn’t saved *every* change you made into the CSV.

Sounds good so far. But what’s really wrong here? The real problem is, Excel gives you a sense of feel that “everything” have been saved and you are safe. Things become bad when you quit Excel. Because the dirty flag isn’t cleared and the file haven’t been saved completely, Excel prompts you to “save” the file again. Specious, not wanting to take chances, some users like me, save the file again. Again the same thing happens and the end user is still just dumbfounded and asks, But, why the heck should I save it again?

Microsoft UI designers have failed to understand the end users. In this case, it’s because Excel fails to speak the users’ lingo. According to the user, when he “saves” a file, he saves a copy and he is contended that he can always re-open when something bad happens. But excel just “exports” the file into CSV format and tells the user that it “saved” the file (when it in fact didn’t). As a result what happens is data loss. No not just cell colours, in cases, when the users doesn’t know that CSV doesn’t support multiple sheets, excel doesn’t export (or save) the second sheets data and the user just loses the entire content from the second sheet. Disaster! In one of the cases where I work, a co-worker of mine, has got used to these prompts which Excel shows after you “save” your file as CSV

and he just closes Excel assuming that these prompts are nothing but “bugs” in Excel. (Yeah see, he is a half techie and a little knowledge is dangerous.) Things went fine when he didn’t lose data, but just lost some formatting here and there. But the real disaster happened when his second sheet containing over 1000 lines and 3 hour work was lost.

Now, lets’ see how Numbers, the equivalent software from Apple handles this.

Apple doesn’t even include CSV or other “lossy” formats in the save as sheet. That doesn’t mean, Numbers can’t “save” your data as CSV. But rather Apple calls it as “Export”. Files you export as CSV aren’t yet saved. So, when the user quit Numbers, and get a prompt to save the document, he will not confused.

Because Microsoft does it this way (wrong way), other software makers like Adobe too make the same mistake. Photoshop “saves” a file as PNG and still give you a sense of feel that you have saved the file. Another such example is audacity and paint.net and even those “save as PDF” plugins. They actually don’t “save” your data, but rather export it. Apple gets it right, but the whole world gets it wrong, Unfortunate!.

Follow me on Twitter

• Tweet

No related posts.