The "Vote to Close" button for duplicates is inefficiently placed and shouldn't move away [closed]

Question

TL;DR:

There is a really annoying usability problem with the AJAX loading of duplicate question content that makes user interface elements unnecessarily shift around.

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Current behavior

The current user behavior of voting to close a question as duplicate is as follows:

• Locate the duplicate, copy its link
• Click "Close" on the question
• Click "Exact Duplicate"
• Paste the link
• Wait for the content to be loaded in the background
• Click the "Vote to Close" button (or at least try to click it)

The "problem" with it

Sometimes the AJAX load takes a while. After the content is loaded, the box expands and the "Vote to Close" button moves downwards by an indefinite amount of pixels. That's because it depends on the body size of the duplicate question.

In the way I use it, I don't really have to read the body again. I know it is a duplicate because I already got the link to it. I don't need to read the duplicate's body again because in order to get its link I visit the duplicate's site before.

Now I'm just waiting for the button to become active, and when it does, it suddenly moves away. Somewhere. This is a huge usability problem.

To show a practical example, I simulated a slower network connection and made a screencast:

Proposal

While this may seem like "not a big thing", from a point of user interface design it is unexpected behavior. It obviously would be better to have the button stay in its place, for example here:

This way, I'd know where to click when the button is activated, because it always stays in the same place. Sounds reasonable enough, does it?

_{If the reason of this inefficiency really is that users should read the dupe's text, introduce a timer or force them to scroll down. Don't make them search the button. Also, if you need five people to vote to close, this minimizes errors. And actually, that's not the point of this feature request.}

Answer 1

I have an additional reason to request that the "Close" button be moved: often, after entering the link or clicking the radio button for a previous choice, the dialog resizes so that the button is off the bottom of my screen.

I originally thought this was due to the fact that I run with the browser zoomed a bit to help with aging eyesight, but removing the zoom doesn't solve the problem - there are still some cases where the button expands off the bottom.

I recommend either leaving the button in place, or else adding a copy of the button at the top of the text after the text expands.

Answer 2

I fixed it

1. We now reserve a constant space for the "post preview" and "suggestions"
2. I added a reasonable tooltip on the actual suggestions, to help you avoid clicking on them

There is a slight annoyance, loading a post preview pushed the "suggestions" to the bottom, however I do not think this gets in the way of the workflow too much (other option was to hide the suggestions once a post is "previewed" but that would be slightly less usable, as you would need to click "back" to return to the list of suggestions.)

Answer 3

You say that "the box expands and the 'Vote to Close' button moves downwards by an indefinite amount of pixels". I suggest another possible solution: shorten the question being displayed on the box if it's too long, or place the question in a scrollable box that doesn't change in size. This may be combined with your proposed solution.

Answer 4

I vote against. Especially with mods where one vote = instant close you can paste in the wrong link. Happens many times where you think you pressed Ctrl-C but didn't. Even for non-mods it can still be misleading to future closers.

Having the button down at the bottom forces you to at least glance at the question title as a last verification that this is the right question. This way you don't close "How to merge values into an String format" as a duplicate of "Strangest language feature".