For about 20 years, the “floppy diskette” icon has meant “save” and this connection persists in UIs across desktop and web apps. It was a great visual metaphor for a long time, but things have changed and many users under the age of 20 will have never laid eyes on a floppy disk—if they know it at all, it’ll be from seeing the icon, not the real object.
Other examples include old telephones with handsets, curly cords, and rotary dials; radio microphones from the 1950s; and reel-to-reel tape recorder icons to mean “voicemail.”
Figure 35.1: Ten years from now, nobody will know what any of these are
Try to think about ...
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