Button and call-to-action design: the questions we get asked most

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The questions about button and call-to-action design that come up most often on our calls.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Do we need to care about this?

Buttons should say what happens next, not "submit". This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How do we know it is working?

Touch targets under 44px cause mis-taps on phones. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about button and call-to-action design before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Touch targets under 44px cause mis-taps on phones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.