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 or bsky @hyperknot.com

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Update, 1 Nov 2024:

This post appeared on HN, I wrote the following comment:

I'll try to collect my thoughts into one comment here about why there is no auto-save.

If you implement auto-save, users will expect every click/keystroke to be saved, like how Google Docs does it. Simply adding a 1-minute timer will make people lose work in the last minute, as they switch tabs, go offline, etc. and forget about it for days, when the browser clears tab state.

The other reason is that there is no Undo-Redo implemented on MapHub. Implementing Undo properly in a web app is not trivial if you haven't designed the whole app around a time-traveling state management. It's actually a really difficult problem to solve, even though it looks simple on the surface. Combining it with real-time collaboration is even more complex. Short story: there is no Undo-Redo.

So if you don't have Undo, then Save button plays the role of making a checkpoint, trying out something, reverting if needed. With autosave this could be ruined.

Also, you write that you expect every web app to auto-save, but this is still not the universal case today and definitely wasn't the case a few years ago. I agree that most VC-backed startups with hundred-million-dollar valuations have autosave in their web apps. Again, the proper solution is to have a time-traveling diff system implemented, which can easily get really complicated with real-time multi-user collaboration. Have a look at Figma's technical blog post about this topic.

You might be right in saying that it's not a generation of users, but the same users being conditioned to web apps doing auto-save. I agree this is probably the case. The point of the article is this definitely wasn't the case all the time, and how I've experienced this on my side, during my 8+ years of running MapHub.