On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 6:27 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all, 

This is a heads up about some of the things the Growth team is thinking about and working on with mediawiki.ui.

Thanks for the heads up, which reminds me to do a heads up for Shahyar Ghobadpour's work on mediawiki.ui for Flow. It's all in the Flow extension currently but there are patches to move it into core.
  1. We're in the process of adding optional icon support for mediawiki.ui buttons, with browser support down to IE8.[A] 
Flow frontend-rewrite[1] uses CSS to add Wikifont icons [2] including class="wikiglyph-pencil". I'm not sure how far back its support goes.

As for your points below (arggh, renumbered), Shahyar Ghobadpour's revamped mw-ui-button addresses them, and has a lot of other ideas for both less and more obvious buttons. You can see the CSS for a default button in an old static prototype[3], see the X button. There's a patch to move this CSS to core[4].
 
  1. We're going to get rid of the text shadow on the default mediawiki.ui buttons.[B] It's distracting and doesn't increase readability. We don't use gradients in the colored buttons for similar reasons. 
  2. We need to do some tweaking of the design of the default mediawiki.ui button.[D] We're designing the second iteration of the anonymous editor signup invitation UI to A/B test.[E] When looking at these, you can see that the default mediawiki.ui button ("continue editing") almost seems disabled. We should talk about ways to improve on this design, such as darkening the text color or giving the default button a background color. 
This may come up in the WMF UX team's weekly design review as well, but I wanted to give a heads up about these issues since the library is in MediaWiki core. 
[1] E.g. at http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Flow , click the ... ellipsis target.
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design/Wikifont
[3] http://area51.yar.gs/wmf/flow1/ again probably old.
[4] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/123804/

 
A. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55535
B. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61940
C. These are viewable at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodilia?gettingStartedReturn=true if you're logged in
D. See style guide: http://tools.wmflabs.org/styleguide/desktop/section-2.html
E. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_invites_v2#Version_two

Cheers,
--
=S Page  Features engineer