Five mistakes teams make with button and call-to-action design

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit button and call-to-action design.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Buttons should say what happens next, not "submit"
• One primary style, used sparingly, keeps it meaningful
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Touch targets under 44px cause mis-taps on phones. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to do next

In practice

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.