On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@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