At some point a couple of years ago, the idea of encoding behavior hints into the colors of the user interface became a major part of MediaWiki UI styling, and OOjs UI had something similar so the two concepts merged. The problem has always been when you start using the buttons in practice, the interface is really loud and confusing because it's blasted with giant bright colored squares on otherwise very light white and gray controls. This has always been a challenge, and in OOjs UI we ended up adding "primary" as an additional designation so only the primary action was a bright color and other buttons were quieter with only colored text and outlines. Which is actually a 4 x 2 matrix of buttons. Owch.

I look forward to May returning with some analysis.

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Gergo Tisza <gtisza@wikimedia.org> wrote:

One problem I have run into recently is that for a complex form you are not necessarily able to tell which step is the last. E.g. after you submit the login form and MediaWiki verifies your credentials, depending on your user settings you might or might not be presented with a two-factor challenge; so submitting the user name and password might or might not be the last step of the form. (Arguably login should not be constructive in the first place, but it is now. In any case, similar problems could be present with the user registration form, which does create something.)

Personally, I agree with Bartosz that having four button types (five or more if we include silent buttons) just makes the interface confusing.

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