On Friday, October 10, 2014, Pau Giner <pginer@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Making next logical steps more prominent and using color to do so in a consistent way is a common practice. Google uses red (main actions), green (sharing) and blue (navigation) as detailed in this talk. Bootstrap components (widely used all around the internet) use the same concept but with a different set of colors and meanings. And we can find many more examples in existing UIs and design guidelines...

What I am wondering is which is the better way we can communicate this kind of design decisions to our community? Is it enough to communicate the rationale or more evidence will be needed? Is researching on specific UI components (as opposed to the broader interaction problems those solve when put together in a UI) the best area to invest our research and communication efforts?

Circulate the living style guide (after making sure it adequately explains these choices for that audience).

The disadvantage of the style guide we have is that editors expect guidelines to be described on their local wiki. You can correct for this by creating pages on some major wikis that describe the purpose of the style guide and link to it. This will then allow you to link to it in discussions and have more in depth debates on the talk page(s). It's easy to forget 90% of editors with both reasonable and unreasonable feedback won't come to a mailing list like this one. It's just not on their radar.