On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
The hover effect is easy to drop - if we are all
willing to take the hit on
the clutter.
That's probably the best short term option.
The problem with a dropdown is that, while VE is in beta and
experienced users may prefer not to use it for many reasons
(performance, missing functionality, etc.), adding a higher cognitive
penalty for not using it will likely just lead to users turning it off
completely. If we want experienced users to test it every once in a
while, give feedback on how it can be made better, and have them see
the improvements, finding a solution that poses the least burden on
them will give us the biggest win.
That's why I'd argue for icons in the mid-term, but I hear the
argument about those potentially reducing the visibility of section
editing overall and therefore having a negative effect. Any new
alternative approach likely needs to be tested. Until then, accepting
a bit of additional clutter (perhaps that could be mitigated by losing
the second "edit" and going with "edit | source") may be best if we
don't want to go into preferences-land.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation