The discussion revolves around the “Save Changes” button in the Blue preference settings. jidanni suggests that the button should be gray initially and only turn blue when there are actual changes to be saved. merefield agrees and mentions a similar issue with Category settings.
However, sam disagrees, citing concerns that dynamically changing button states can be confusing for users. jidanni responds by suggesting that the button should not appear at all if there are no changes to be saved, but later retracts this statement and agrees with following the Google and Facebook model of dimming or greying the button.
Jagster and nathank provide examples of similar UI patterns in use, including Discourse settings and Google’s interface. chapoi suggests that dimming or greying the button is acceptable as long as it remains clickable, allowing users to receive feedback on what is missing or not working.
The conclusion is that the “Save Changes” button should follow a similar paradigm to Google and Facebook, with a dimmed or greyed-out button indicating when there are no changes to be saved.
In Preferences this button should be gray, up until the time there is something actually to be saved. Only then should it become blue.
Currently the user’s eyeballs completely depend on looking for that word “saved” next to it.
Yes keep the word, but fix, I mean enhance, the button. Thanks.
Yep, this is also an issue with Category settings, for example:
(Locations plugin installed)
It would really be nice if this was also grey if there were no settings changes to commit …
And if you make any adjustments to your preferences after saving and then you save a second time you can’t really tell if the second time really did anything because the two items just like they used to look after we saved it the first time.
I don’t agree with this… Having elements dynamically change state is confusing to end users and distracting.
What are examples in the wild of these kind of UI?
In a previous life we used to “grey out” the Reply button till you were allowed to post, and it was mighty confusing leading to a large amount of support issues. These days you can click it right away and discover what is wrong.
I tried https://meta.discourse.org/ and fb.com both in incognito mode and found that unclickable links have all been removed, so I have no examples today.
I note that below my post, Share, Bookmark, Flag, Watching all use grey already, but don’t mean unclickable. So never mind grey.
I note in Preferences even if one doesn’t make any changes, one can “Save” 1000 times.
Anyway, so the Save button should not appear at all, if there is nothing changed yet that needs to be saved.
Apparently that is the 2023 style of doing things.
And yet it is widely in use. I have to click at least twice because I don’t get any other response than very quickly vanishing ok. I I miss it I don’t know if saving was succesful or was there some glitch.
Actually… we have samekind system working here already. Every settings for example.
Errr - all the Discourse settings dynamically change (apologies for the ugly video, seems to be a .webm thing). And it is very helpful!
That is a different UI paradigm…
But sure, I stand corrected in that both facebook and google follow this pattern:
@Designers what are your thoughts here, should our user profile follow a similar paradigm.
Should. All of save-buttons should follow that. Is the color grey, dimmed, what ever is more or less matter of taste — but that’s why we have an invention called CSS 
Dimming or greying is fine for me (just to be less visually attention seeking) as long as (and I can’t stress this enough) they are still clickable so the user can get feedback of what is missing/not working after a submission attempt.
And strong disagree with this. Showing a save button is a clear indication one can change things and save them. And completely having new UI elements pop up isn’t great UX either.
I’m for following the Google and Facebook model. (I thought they just took all the buttons away.. but that’s because I was in incognito mode.)
In Have the Save Edit button grey until the user has typed something I report on a different button.
