Do you believe that the skillset of a simple user of XWiki would be correctly confined in:
"a person that uses often enough a big variety of websites to be accustomed with many types of interfaces and behaviors, able and in need of editing, creating pages, using templates, using the most popular extensions, but that doesn’t have a need or a lot of expertise in adding custom code or in setting very specific configurations in their XWiki instance "?
This definition would imply that these users would recognize the proposed buttons with or without shadows if they can see the buttons (enough contrast).
This is a really good point, thank you for highlighting it!
Do you think that having the icon next to the transparent button would help?
Something like this:
Of course, this solution would still suffer from this:
Related to the last point, I understand your concern on the meaning it may convey. My bias towards it may come from the often encounters I had with the lock icon in the gaming industry. The lock is always used to say “you haven’t unlocked this yet” / “you are not allowed to do this yet”… “but you could at some point or in some circumstances”.
Here is an example of usage in Read Dead Redemption 2:
I totally get that this may be easily understood by the typical gamer, but not by the usual XWiki user, but let me know what you think.
In this article, they explore how to use icons in disabled buttons. It’s a bit different then what I proposed as they signal something is happening different with the button by using a info icon:
I don’t think you need any specific skills to be able to click on a button… Or said differently we can assume that any xwiki user will know how to use a mouse, a computer screen and be able to click on a button (basically have prior experience of using a web site).
Regarding the specific definition of XWiki personae, it could be interesting to refine them and document them on dev.xwiki.org. Caty worked on this in the past but AFAIK it’s not been written in documentation. What I’ve found is:
If you’re ok and when you have some free time, it would be good if you could propose some personae on this forum and once we agree about them we could document them on xwiki.org. ATM we have at least 3 known personae (but probably not clearly defined):
As a side note, I found an interesting presentation about ageism a few months ago, and this topic was a good part of it: Ageism in Interfaces. It highlights how important the choice of icons can be for the UX of tech unsavy users. The timestamp in the link is relevant for generic usability, the rest of the presentation is focused on accessibility.
