Polish: Buttons should have a hover effect and consistently use the same cursor

[I-Al-Istannen]

Hey,

I often stumble upon buttons that have no pointer cursor (). This looks weird and also doesn't really make it clear which elements are buttons.
In some places buttons have neither a cursor change nor any hover effect. You just have to blindly guess what's clickable on a page…

Some examples:

1. The Sign in button
   
2. The navbar
   
3. The project grid/list view
   
4. The upgrade button
   
5. The sidebar
   
6. The document previews
7. Every button in the sidebar in a document. This is especially annoying for things like spelling mistakes and so on. What am I hovering over?
   
   Can I click this? Who knows! It doesn't even have a hover effect.

[laurmaedje]

This is intentional as the app is intended to feel like a native app. On macOS, for instance, it is standard to not have a pointer cursor on buttons. Many of them also don't have a hover effect there, though I agree that hover effects are generally nice and should be more consistent applied in our app.

[I-Al-Istannen]

Why do things like "Sign up", or

or

change the cursor then? They aren't all links either and look visually identical to elements that do not have a pointer cursor.

I would have understood if it was consistent, but it does not seem to be.

[I-Al-Istannen]

Then, to summarize after a minute of clicking through the webapp:

• the eye in the files tab only changes the cursor:
  
• the version control connect button has a pointer
  
• the icons on the document preview only change the cursor
  
• the updates tab has no hover (only cursor changes, but those are links)
  
• the user icon circle thing in the top right has no hover and no cursor change
• the landing page social icons have no hover
  
• the sign up button has a cursor change. This might count as a link, but it is not styled like one.
  
• The new document and start from file button have a cursor change
  
• The sidebar with tips and links has a cursor change (but it styled liked a button, not a link)
  

[laurmaedje]

Why do things like "Sign up", or

Because we aren't perfect and different things were implemented by different people at different times.

I was just saying that, in principle, there was an intent.

[I-Al-Istannen]

Yea, that was just my own intent for why I opened the issue and didn't just accept it as works-as-intended, not an attack on you :) Sorry if that did not come across as such, the phrasing wasn't ideal. It isn't always obvious (at least to me) whether you had some further reasoning behind changes.

And the list in the other comment might be helpful if you ever want to clean things up a bit, I hope :)

[magistau]

This is intentional as the app is intended to feel like a native app. On macOS, for instance, it is standard to not have a pointer cursor on buttons.

macOS doing something doesn't mean it's a good practice. As a better example, when an application tells the system that it wants to send notifications, the system shows a notification "Application may send notifications". After a couple of years of using macOS I accidentally discovered that this notification shows "Allow" and "Deny" buttons when you hover it.

I'm not entirely sure if the pointer should change its shape on buttons, but I believe buttons should be obvious enough. Among the buttons listed here, the "eye" button and the spellchecker buttons are the least obvious since they don't have a border.

Maybe also change the pointer shape on the document preview, since it has that "scroll the code to this position" feature that isn't that obvious currently.