Clicking a button within a form causes page refresh

You should declare the attribute ng-submit={expression} in your <form> tag.

From the ngSubmit docs http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngSubmit

Enables binding angular expressions to onsubmit events.

Additionally it prevents the default action (which for form means sending the request to the server and reloading the current page).

If you have a look at the W3C specification, it would seem like the obvious thing to try is to mark your button elements with type='button' when you don't want them to submit.

The thing to note in particular is where it says

A button element with no type attribute specified represents the same thing as a button element with its type attribute set to "submit"

You can try to prevent default handler:

html:

<button ng-click="saveUser($event)">

js:

$scope.saveUser = function (event) {
  event.preventDefault();
  // your code
}