[sdk] New button style breaks old convention of using gray to indicate subordinate actions

[Robert Schroll]

In the old style, buttons were bright orange by default. When several buttons were present in the same bit of UI, the convention was to make all but the default gray. See, for example, https://design.ubuntu.com/apps/building-blocks/dialog. With the new style, buttons are gray by default, so the subordinate button appears nearly identical to the primary one. See the attached screenshot for a before-and-after view.

[Zsombor Egri (zsombi)]

This is a bug to UX rather than toolkit. The new style guide tells us to behave like that.

[Giorgio Venturi (giorgio-venturi-deactivatedaccount)]

Hi,

The design approach changed as the orange did not perform well in usability tests - too close to red which is associated to errors. The orange colour is used more sparingly in the new design

[Robert Schroll (rschroll)]

Did the usability tests also indicate that the primary action should be indistinguishable from the secondary action? If so, I might as well stop designing UIs, since everything I think I know is wrong. If not, then the current design breaks the UI of existing apps. Don't like orange? Make it yellow. Or blue. Or green. Or black. Or white. Or striped. Or plaid. Or glowing. Or anything other than the color you told us to use to indicate secondary actions.

[Zsombor Egri (zsombi)]

So, teh design guides say that we can have positive and negative actions for buttons. For now you could colour your buttons following this guide, eventually UITK palette may provide you these values in the future. Till then use UbuntuColors.green for positive and UbuntuColors.red for negative actions.