Button and call-to-action design for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about button and call-to-action design assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

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.

What to keep

Buttons should say what happens next, not "submit". The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

What good looks like

Touch targets under 44px cause mis-taps on phones. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The short version

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

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