I'm working as a UX/UI designer at a startup where we have a Saas product. Currently I'm working on making improvements on the design made by a different designer.
On our pages we have a Page title with some buttons immediately next to it. Currently those buttons only have an icon with some of them showing a tooltip on hover (but not all of them). I know icon buttons are bad since most users won't know what a button does from just looking at the icon so I'm reworking them to always have an icon with some text.
Now what I'm wondering is what the best placement would be for those buttons. I did some research but was not able to find any best practices or research about this issue. I looked into some other Saas apps and content management systems and I've noticed that a lot of them have the title in the top left and the buttons in the top right. So far I've only found Wordpress having their main button right next to the title. (Though there are probably others who do this as well) Someone also suggested to maybe put the buttons underneath the title but that placement feels a bit weird since on some pages we have a description underneath the title and I also don't want to push down the content of the page.
*(small note, our web app is desktop only)
Here are some of the quick wireframes I made of how some of the other apps place their title and buttons;
And this is how we currently have it;
I'm inclined to put the buttons in the top right. I know consistency is key, so maybe it doesn't really matter where I put the buttons as long as it's the same on all pages, but I also don't just want to put the buttons in the top right just because that's what others are doing.
I think visually it might look best in the top right but I also wonder if that's maybe too far out of sight for the user since you have a title (+ sometimes a description) in the top left and then the page content underneath it taking up the full width of the page.
So I was wondering if anyone has some thoughts, findings, research that they could share about this.