Thanks Julia and Luca for proposing this idea and working on it! I agree the Book UX needs some love.
I hope you don’t mind that I shared your proposal with Sabina Abellán from the UX team at Moodle HQ. Sadly, she can’t attend this year’s MootDACH, but she sent me her feedback to share with you all in case it helps:
Having several action icons side by side increases cognitive load, and she thinks progressive disclosure would work better here. Her suggestion in cases like this is to use a contextual menu icon (three dots) where all the available actions for that specific item can be revealed.
This would make the interface visually cleaner and also help with the limited space we have for distinguishing each action. From an accessibility perspective, it also improves clarity since the menu can provide proper labels for each action, which reduces the risk of icons being misunderstood.
Of course, this is just a suggestion to explore, she doesn’t want to take away from the design work already done here, which is really solid. She just think this alternative might help balance clarity, accessibility, and scalability.
