Gray out the election voting buttons for users that don‘t have enough rep to vote

Question

You need 150 reputation to vote in a moderator election, which is noted in the sidebar and in the footer of the election page.

If you have less than 150 rep and visit an election page, you still see the vote buttons (1st choice, 2nd choice, 3rd choice) and you can click at them, at which point you get a little warning that you can‘t vote.

Proposal: deactivate (gray out) the vote buttons if you have less than 150 rep.

Having voted several times on several sites, I no longer read these, didn’t have the rep limit in mind, read the introductions of all candidates, wanted to vote and only then noticed that I’m not allowed to.

Answer 1

From a UX perspective, this is a good approach. Greying buttons out should usually be reserved for occasions where a feature is usually available but currently isn't, and that there is a specific set of actions / situations that will activate it. In this case, the user needs to increase their reputation in order to use them.

I would suggest giving some additional feedback too though. Tooltips on the button that reveal on hover that 'You need an additional XXX reputation to vote in this election' coupled with that text being displayed near to the button (not everyone uses a mouse to hover over things) and I think this is a winner.