alt Hacker Newsa button that debounces requests should be disabled until the action is complete instead, so you can only click it once until it is ready to be clicked again. debouncing button clicks is a design failure (it makes more sense for things like requests that happen during typing, where you don't want to stop the feedback)
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There always will be time between the first click and the time the button gets disabled and even more time before the visual representation of the button gets updated to reflect that. Keeping that time so short that it is impossible for a human to click the button again can be very hard.
It would help if GUI elements had a property “automatically disable on click”, removing the need for the “on click handler” to disable the button (in exchange for adding the need to explicitly re-enable it).
I don’t remember seeing GUI libraries that do that, though.
That probably is because it would confuse users if buttons visually get disabled when they click them.
So, the best answer is to visually keep the button enabled, but ignore rapid further clicks. That’s debouncing.
I think that if you'd need to debounce requests, it would be better to put it in a pressed and/or highlighted state until the button is ready again. Then you'd indicate to the user that the press was successfully received and that pressing it again won't do any good.
The buttons in an elevator panel typically work this way. They each light up to confirm a pending request to reach a floor. They each turn off when its floor has been reached. And while a button is lit up, pressing it does nothing.