In his recent post, Zsolt Ero shares MapHub’s experience with users who struggle with having to manually save their work. MapHub requires users to click a “Save” button to save their progress, which also lets them restore previous versions. But this lack of auto-save is challenging for many, especially as people are used to cloud-based tools like Google Docs or Notion, where everything is saved automatically.
This got me thinking: our own software, used by folks in manufacturing, does have auto-save, yet users still ask for a Save button. It’s like they don’t quite trust auto-save, holding onto that old CTRL-S reflex from the days of Microsoft Word and Excel. Is this unique to our users, or is it just a generational thing? Maybe as Gen Z enters the workforce—never having dealt with saving files manually—they’ll see things differently.
Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?
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.