I called the grayed out save button "lazy" for 2 weeks, then I looked at the form it was guarding
I spent about 3 days last week building a settings page where the save button starts disabled until you change something, and I was sure it was a lazy design choice that would confuse people. My coworker pushed back and said to watch a few sessions with real users before I ripped it out, so I did. Out of 8 testers, 7 paused and asked why the button was gray, and 5 of them just clicked around the fields trying to figure out what was wrong. One guy straight up said "is this broken?" out loud. So now I'm on the fence, the disabled state did stop accidental saves but it also made people think the page was dead. Has anyone found a middle ground where the button stays clickable but warns you, or do you just skip the disabled state altogether?