Why calls to action matters more than it looks

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Calls to action is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Why it matters

One clear next step beats several options. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Say what happens after the click. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Where it usually goes wrong

Reduce the sense of risk near the button. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about calls to action before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Reduce the sense of risk near the button — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.