How to get button and call-to-action design right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to button and call-to-action design is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The reason this keeps coming up
Buttons should say what happens next, not "submit". There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- One primary style, used sparingly, keeps it meaningful
- Touch targets under 44px cause mis-taps on phones
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Touch targets under 44px cause mis-taps on phones. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Where to go from here
The short version
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. 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
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.