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The buttons for acting upon a question or answer — share, edit, close, flag, sometimes others — are presented as tiny gray words. Here's what you see reading this question right now, for instance:

enter image description here

It is easy to overlook the buttons, and even if you do notice them, there are no visual cues to tell you that they are clickable. This is both a user experience failure and an accessibility failure. Based on my experience trying to salvage insufficiently detailed questions on Stack Overflow, I'm pretty sure that many newcomers to the site don't realize they can edit their questions, so they try to respond in the comments instead, even when what they've been asked to do is, like, provide more code. And if I take my glasses off, well, I can't read the site at all, but this row of buttons in particular becomes a gray smudge that might be mistaken for a horizontal rule or something.

For questions, I think it might also help to move the tags somewhere else, maybe right under the title. The design of tags varies from subsite to subsite, but often they look a lot more like buttons than these actual buttons do, so they distract you from them.

Previous request along the same lines: "Make share, edit, etc buttons larger to enhance new user experience" but merely making them larger is not enough; they should ideally look like buttons. At the very least, please make them blue, which is something of a "this is clickable" cue. (Note how "Add a comment" is already blue, and also farther away from the row of tags, so it isn't nearly as eclipsed by them.)

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  • they are not buttons. One clue to that is that they don't look like buttons. They are links, like the blue links beneath them. Commented Aug 27, 2018 at 22:27
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    They are buttons because they are actions and they don't open a new page. Just like add comment here next to where I am typing. The tags look more like buttons, but they really are links since they open a new page.
    – Elin
    Commented Aug 28, 2018 at 1:29

1 Answer 1

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As already suggested, a user interface tour may help new users.

A solution for better visibility is adding icons and colour, like many other webpages do.

Here is an example for the Share Edit Report buttons. Sample user interface with icons.

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    I'd regard that as visual clutter and not welcome it.
    – W.O.
    Commented Jun 17, 2022 at 13:23
  • Who uses a pen anymore?
    – DWin
    Commented Dec 17, 2022 at 1:27

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