When button and call-to-action design is worth the effort

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Button and call-to-action design is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

When it is worth it

Buttons should say what happens next, not "submit". In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to decide

Touch targets under 44px cause mis-taps on phones. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

In practice

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

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.