Topic on Talk:Wikipedia.org updated page layout

The following post describes an A/B test comparing the 'ghost' button style vs. a button with white text and a dark background.

https://www.elevatedthird.com/article/ghost-buttons-good-bad-spooky-part-2

The post suggests that a more traditional button style with a dark background has a higher clickthrough rate than the 'ghost button' style we're currently using. Granted, this post is only describes a single test, and aesthetically I prefer the 'ghost' button, but I'd be curious to see if this style change would effect clickthrough rate.

The “button with the dark background” is also referred to as “primary button”. In all MediaWiki core interfaces we've been agreeing from UX standpoint on featuring at maximum one primary button per view for user guidance. In this case we would break that pattern. I strongly oppose to do this in the above proposed way.

I appreciate the concept of having only one primary button. For me, the discussion would then turn to: How to make the other buttons look like (non-primary) buttons and not just empty rectangles. Perhaps a lighter shading, which seems to be fairly standard. (I'm looking at a google calendar popup right now which does that).

@KSmith (WMF) There's a related task about problems differentiating buttons and text inputs which resembles your comment here in my opinion. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131810 Myself and designers are currently evaluating options to overcome this specific problem of our flat MediaWiki theme.