Snapshot confirmation dialog model is not user friendly

[westonruter]

During QA, this was reported:

Test steps

1. Navigate to site and login as admin
2. View home page and click Customize to navigate to Customizer
3. Make a change (ie. to the logo) in customizer and click [save]
4. View Save Dialog Box

Expected
The user will be able to easily preview and save a ‘draft’ of their edits and understand the options

Actual
On clicking to ‘Save’ the changes in customizer a dialog displays with 2 options for Preview scope:
(.) diff - Previews the dirty settings
( ) full - Previews all the settings

It is not clear to me (or I suspect most users) what those options mean? Is a choice required here and if not, why give the user the choice?

[westonruter]

See also #12 for a UI for listing snapshots in the admin. There could also be a UI in the Customizer to save/load snapshots in a similar way that the Settings Revisions plugin prototyped.

[alcurrie]

Based on the test steps and results above I have some suggestions that may improve usability:
Before clicking to Save

• Change the button from [Save] which is more generic and make it more specific [Save Snapshot]
• Add a brief explanation of what the button will do and what a Snapshot is. I'd recommend moving the current user explanation from inside the Save dialog box i.e. ‘Clicking “Save” will create a new snapshot’ as a good starting point for a user instruction if that instruction was moved from appearing inside the dialog box to appear as an user explanation for the save button.

Once user has clicked to Save and the Dialog Box appears

• Rename the dialog Save Snapshot
• Clarify the User Instruction - The current user explanation from the Save dialog box is ‘Clicking “Save” will create a new snapshot.’ As noted I think the more general explanation would work better before the user clicks save. On the dialog box, I’d recommend more specific user instruction ie. something like ‘Clicking save will save a snapshot of the current state of your page/post without publishing your changes to the live site. Save or bookmark the snapshot URL to return to the page and continue your edits.’
• Consider changing the label ‘Preview Scope’ to ‘Snapshot Scope’. I think the term ‘Preview’ is more general and also applies to what appears in the main window, and the ‘Snapshot’ is more specific.
• Scope Options diff or full- I’d recommend clarifying the options. I don’t think the term diff or full will be clear to the average user. Maybe provide scope options based on user process ie. page/post content only or include all customizer site settings.
• Instead of offering 2 options, consider defaulting to a limited option ie. previewing only the specific page or posts settings with the 'Advanced' option of including all customizer site settings

[westonruter]

Instead of “Save Snapshot” the button could be just “Snapshot”. Also, instead of a button opening a model, maybe there should instead be a new Customizer section positioned at the top for managing Snapshots, similar to Settings Revisions: https://wordpress.org/plugins/settings-revisions/screenshots/

This could provide opportunities for adding UI for loading an existing snapshot.