Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

MapHub's UI has remained largely consistent since I launched it eight years ago, with a prominent "Save" button visible in the top-right corner of the map. It turns orange when a save is needed.

For years, everyone understood they had to click the "Save" button to preserve their changes. However, recently, I've been receiving more and more support requests along the lines of:
"I lost all my work" or
"I've been working on a map for days, and now I can't find it."

I explained to everyone that there's no need to worry; even if they accidentally edit or delete their maps, they can always recover previous versions or even their deleted maps by clicking on the "Version History" or "Restore Deleted Maps" buttons.

But more and more users were telling me they couldn't find anything. That's when I realized that many users today simply aren't used to saving files manually.

They've grown up using cloud-based editors like Google Docs, where autosave is the default. Of course, autosave is only possible if you have a robust, automatic history-tracking system built into your app, which Google Docs certainly has.

The thing is, you can only offer this feature if your app's architecture is designed from the ground up to support it. Since MapHub wasn't built that way, I had to come up with a solution to remind users that they need to save their work regularly.

I added a notice reminding users to save their maps. It appears three times for each new user and also when there was no save for 10 minutes.

This solution has worked wonderfully. It's one of those features where, after shipping it, we didn't hear anything more. The support requests stopped overnight, and no one is losing their work anymore.

You can also follow me on X: @hyperknot