The blue "Save Changes" button occurs in two places and does slightly different things. This will likely become moot with additional changes suggested already. Maybe the first button could be "Save Changes..." or "Save Form" but that might sound a little confusing. Maybe the Save Form could just have a "Save" Button. Better might be four edit/view modes: Source, Visual, Preview, Changes.
Thanks for working on improving the editor!
You're welcome.
This idea has been suggested in different forms a few times over the last four years. It does seem to bother a small number of people (some of whom I suspect of having a professional background in UI design :-), but it doesn't seem to stop people from figuring out how to use the button. As you note, there are some changes coming relatively soon, but I don't think that they will address this point directly.
The issue was just mentioned again above. :-)
I like the title "Don't Make Me Think", so "doesn't seem to stop people from figuring out how to use the button" sounds like there is a little room for improvement.
As much as it is nice to jump around between editing/viewing modes, would best practices recommend showing changes to fill in the save comment and show preview to double-check your results before saving (or something like that)? Would some sort of visible checklist (button highlights?) encourage that? IMDB (not that I recommend their method) does checks on the input and can require checking a box when you are doing something slightly odd. Does WP flag some errors, other than looking at the preview to discourage saving with errors?
> some of whom I suspect of having a professional background in UI design
Somewhat, but yet it remains uneffective when you’re an experienced wikimedian user who wants to work quickly.
My main contributions on the projects are about typo and formatting, and for it I need to preview very often (i.e. a change, a look, a change, a look). With the current system, the best solution is to have a second tab in my browser with the initial page while I would prefer to see my changes in a well-thought editor.
Thanks for the work anyway — :-).
Previewing in advance slows down the save process (sometimes substantially, if you're working on a large or complicated page on a slow or busy computer), so I'm not sure that we want to do that. We forced 'Show changes' when VisualEditor was first released, and it got mixed reviews.
I think that phab:T44138 is the central task for the Save button. (You can add suggestions/mockups/comments, etc. there, if you have any technical/substantive suggestions or questions. Login by clicking the MediaWiki logo underneath the username box. Phab's a pretty friendly place overall.)
