I heard that votes have been changed to behave closer to how people would expect, and boost is staying here as well. So I had an idea how to bring it all together in the interface.
Sidenote: you don’t have to click the links here, the images are also posted inline in the comments below.
An app (either Artemis or an official one) might use a swipe gesture to visually hint at the relation between upvoting and boosting, as shown in the attached animation. Here’s a static app mockup with both swipe levels displayed. I’d also imagine that there should be a setting that auto-upvotes posts when boosting.
And on the web, it’s probably a good idea to consolidate all the voting buttons into a single block by adding an additional button at the top.
Edit: I’m disappointed in you guys. How come no one noticed the memes? :)
Have you seen how it works on iPhones? You release the block at one of the positions, it upvotes/boosts the post and returns to normal. It’s not patented, it’s part of system interactions and is included in Apple’s human interface guidelines. Apollo used a similar thing, for example, but it’s used everywhere from notes to mail.
Boosting and upvoting are separate actions, and as I suggested in the post it’s probably a good idea to give users a setting to upvote on boost or simply boost the post. So it would be down to user preference, nothing forced. So if you were to turn/leave this option off, the boost action would only boost the post.