How much thought do you spend on the order of buttons in your instance? So often I'll see a vastly different button order on pages for different objects and it makes me crazy!
This post is my plea for you to give some thought to those humble, but oh-so-important buttons. Those buttons constitute a huge percentage of the things your colleagues are clicking on. So save them mental effort and save them clicks!
By the way, in this post I'm going to refer to "buttons." But depending on the context in Salesforce these are sometimes called "actions" or "quick actions." The name isn't important. I'm talking about the things at the top right of the page that users can click to do things (and also the things at the top of the Chatter feed and the Activity Feed that users can click to do things).
At the top of the page these always look like square buttons.
In Chatter and Activities they can be tab-like,
or button-like.
Side note: I think it's very confusing for users that those buttons stack similar items (like Task actions) under carats.
So I usually set my Activities component to "Use tabbed activity view," which goes back to the tab-like buttons that were the original design. Salesforce changed the default and all existing orgs to the new style about two years ago, so this is probably a losing battle I'm fighting. But if you have only three or four buttons, as I usually do, I think the tabs are less confusing than the dropdown carats.
But for my purposes today these are all "buttons" in the sense of being places on the page that, when clicked, result in some UI action.
Constant and Curated Order
The order of your buttons should be pretty much the same across all your objects. Of course objects that have more or special buttons are going to mess with this principle. But for a moment let's speak only of objects with the bare minimum of standard buttons such as Edit, Printable View, Clone, and Delete. [Spoiler alert: I couldn't even bring myself to write this post with them out of the order I'm going to recommend.]
Edit - This is the button I assume users will click most often. (Sure, they might double-click into fields directly, but some people are focused on buttons.) If it's the one that gets the most use, I strongly believe it ought to be first, which is to say "farthest to the left" (for left-to-right languages).
Printable View - I struggle even more with whether this one should stay on pages. I suspect it's very rarely used. The result can look terrible, yet it's so much better in a pinch than trying to print or screenshot the lightning page. If left on the page, I still downgrade it. In this grouping, it's second-to-last.
Clone - To be honest, I often struggle with whether to leave this on the page or not. But it's super-useful at times. Among these four, if it's on the page, I figure it will get used.
Delete - Clearly this is needed on the page (for those with delete permissions). But deleting data should be rare. Therefore I always put delete last in the lineup and even behind the carat to remove temptation.
There are other standard buttons you may need to use more or less frequently, such as Submit for Approval, Change Owner, Change Record Type, etc, in which case you'll have to make some choices. Use these principles:
Edit goes first. (Though see below when it comes to custom buttons.)
Delete goes last.
Others are in order of [likely] usage on the object.
Keep things relatively consistent across objects. (So if you add Submit for Approval and Change Owner on two objects, maybe keep them in the same order in both cases.)
Custom Buttons
So far I've only mentioned standard buttons. But if you've seen a screenshot of one of my orgs you know that I use custom actions all the time, whether simple Quick Actions on an object or buttons that launch a screen flow. These start to complicate design choices.
First of all, I hope you've noticed that I almost always put emoji on my buttons. [It's just fun! 🤪] So they end up looking a little different than the text-only standard actions. The emojis kinda' kill consistency in that sense, but I'm not willing to give them up. (Boy do I wish I could add an emoji to Edit everywhere. Perhaps ✏️.) Nine times out of ten custom buttons are going to be inconsistent because their labels are longer than the standard ones. (If you're making a custom button for your users, the chance of naming it something as concise as "Edit" or "Delete" is pretty low.) So custom buttons are going to be inconsistent anyway...
But "Where to put them"? is the question. And I usually answer, "First." As in, "even before the Edit button." This one will vary with circumstance, but I generally figure that if we have need for a custom button, we probably want it to be more prominent than Edit. On the other hand, Edit is a small unobtrusive button, so if you want to keep it first, that's probably OK.
Number Displayed
The other consideration that goes with order of buttons is the question of how many will appear on the page, with the rest sitting under the carat. Don't just leave the Salesforce default here! Show four, five, even six buttons on the page if they're all going to be needed (and have short enough names to fit when screens are resized smaller). Or set the number lower if you would prefer to hide things (like Delete) under the dropdown. (But remember that some users will forget or never discover that there is anything under the carat, so be ready to train and remind.)
[By the way: While you're here in the settings pane for the Highlights Panel, I suggest you always check Hide Follow/Unfollow button (desktop only). Unless you know for certain that your users follow records in Chatter, which I think is pretty rare, it's just clutter on the page.]
Actions in the Feeds
Let me remind you that everything I've written should apply equally to the buttons that appear in the Chatter Feed and the Activity Feed. In most cases there are far fewer buttons to consider here. But briefly:
Chatter Feed - By default, Salesforce includes the Poll button. I strongly suspect nobody ever uses this. So remove it—everywhere. (By editing the Global Publisher Layout.) I think the only button you need for the Chatter feed is Post.
Activity Feed - Here you are likely to have Log a Call, New Task, and Email, among others. (I usually don't use Events.) The first principle I try to use here is to move the more-used tool (email or task) leftmost. On Contact, for example, perhaps we expect to log a lot of calls. I'll put it on the left so it's the easiest to find.
I also try to put the two (or more) task buttons in what I think of as chronological order. Log an Interaction (my renamed version of the standard Log a Call), used for a task that has already finished, goes to the left. New Task, an item for the future, goes on the right. Users might not pick up on this timeline ordering consciously, but I like to think it helps them make the otherwise-subtle distinction between the two buttons.
How to Control Them
But I guess I should briefly mention how to work with these.
The first place to look is the Global Publisher Layout (Setup>User Interface>Global Actions>Publisher Layouts). This amounts to your org's global default setting for placement of actions that apply across objects. If the action layout is not overriden on an object page, what you've set here will control. So take this chance to put things in the default order you'd like.
But each page layout can have its own settings if you have overriden the predefined actions. (By the way, don't be afraid to override the predefined actions!)
The order of buttons on both the page and in the feeds is controlled in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section of the page layout editor.
This is where you'll change the order for a particular object and where you'll add object-specific actions, like the custom buttons we talked about above.
(Of course, if you're not using classic page layouts and have switched to Dynamic Forms, then you'll control button order in the Lightning App Builder.)
You Have the Power
Now that you've got all the tools, go and apply you design sensibility to the order and placement of buttons and actions on your pages!