* There are always gray areas in applying a design guide, that's not a good
argument for consolidation. Whether a particular URL should be a link or a
button is often tricky, but we still have buttons.
* Users not understanding the design is no argument for consolidation, I
bet users get an 'D' at best on Material and every other human interest
guideline.
I like Trevor's idea that Constructive makes something. Maybe that's why
the Special:Search button is progressive, or maybe the argument was it
leads to something else. And the way progressive buttons in the middle of a
dialog shift to a constructive button at the [Let's Roll!] stage is a great
UX thing. And Green for Thanks, because in an unfriendly often toxic
"community" it's a nice Constructive thing to do, is a happy byproduct of
the naming conventions. That's at least three uses that go away if we
consolidate Constructive and Progressive.
Trevor wrote
the interface is really loud and confusing because
it's blasted with
giant bright colored squares on otherwise very light white and
gray controls
"Confusing" doesn't follow at all from your aesthetic response to the
design. As I type this I'm "blasted with a giant bright colored [Send]
square", but I think Google knows what it's doing. There are many ways to
tamp down the Skittles appearance of the MediaWiki UI and the style guide
[1] is clear: "Under no circumstance should an interface display more that
one *Primary* button colored with *Intention*." If Quiet and Neutral aren't
sufficient Shahyar prototyped at least two more excellent ideas (I can't
find the link right now...)
If any clarification comes out of this discussion, the
http://livingstyleguide.wmflabs.org [2] should be our one and only
guideline. It can acknowledge grey areas without getting bogged down in
details. Maybe it can have footnotes or § links to Solomonic appendices on
edge cases.
Cheers,
[1]
http://livingstyleguide.wmflabs.org/wiki/Buttons#Sets_of_buttons
[2] See
http://livingstyleguide.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page#Color and
livingstyleguide.wmflabs.org/wiki/Buttons#Button_Styles
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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(a)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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