ux

Is Ghost Button an effective UX design?

Posted on by Mario

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Ghost button may be one of the most used buttons that reached its peak around a year ago. But, this button is still popular to this day; you can find them across a wide range of websites. This type of button is usually used on minimalist or flat design.

If you are web designers, ghost buttons can be a good choice for creating an attractive design perspective. Their subtle design can give prominence to other design elements on the page. Moreover, it is also a good choice if you want to work well with responsive websites.

However, this makes it hard for people to see if their contrast with the background image is poor. Moreover, some people find it is difficult to spot the button, as they can be too subtle sometimes.

The Pros of Ghost Buttons

In the right context, ghost buttons will give a great look; they can give an elegant, subtle feel to a design. As a result, your pages will appear more minimal and lighter. Moreover, they can give you a deep visual hierarchy of a design when you can use them well. On the other hand, they will highlight an order of importance when you have more than one CTA on a page. This will give a more subtle effect to a secondary CTA.

The Cons of Ghost Buttons

While providing lots of benefits, in the other hand ghost buttons also bring some issues for users that affect in important page elements being overlooked. This has made Ghost buttons become a very questionable design decision since it often suffers from usability and accessibility issues. Based on the data available, it was clear that the ghost buttons were harder to spot during the tests.

Conclusion

Considering what impact you’d like your CTA to have is important. Only by this, you can decide which type to use. Even though, some experiments have shown that Ghost button grab less attention than solid CTAs. However, for some people Ghost button is still a ‘visually pleasing’ design.

A Simple Guide for Designing Better Buttons

Posted on by Mario

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In website development, the role of buttons is important in determining the next actions. Moreover, having a good button design will automatically improve your user experience. If you’d like to take a look on how to create better buttons, you can follow several steps below:

Make Buttons Look Like Buttons

With visual cues, people can determine the click-ability, then understand that an element is a button. Due to this, it is important to use proper visual signifiers on clickable elements to make them look like buttons.

  • Shape
    For a long time ago, square or square with rounded corners is the most popular button’s design. Due to this, users are very familiar with this button shape. Even though, in some cases, the button shape can be circles, triangles, and etc., depending on the style of the site or app. However, using unique ideas to replace the traditional shapes will be a bit riskier. The main point is to make sure that people can easily identify each varying shape as a button.

But what elements can help you identify icons as buttons? There are two elements that can        give clear and distinct labels to icons as buttons. First, be consistent about the shapes to              provide a more familiar experience for users. The picture below demonstrates this point              perfectly.

  • Shadows and Highlights
    Shadows will help you a lot in making the element stand out against the background. Moreover, with shadows and highlights, you can easily identify an element as a tap-able or clickable. Since the effect makes the elements look like as if they can be pressed down.

Make It Easy for Users to Interact with Buttons

The next step is to make sure that your users have a good experience when they press the buttons. This includes size and visual feedback of buttons.

  • Size and Padding
    A good button should have bigger size than a person’s tap size. This will ensure the buttons you design are large enough for people to interact with. To choose a proper size for your buttons, you can rely on the MIT Touch Lab study. This study reveals that the average size of finger pads is between 10-14mm and fingertips are 8-10mm, making 10mmx10mm a good minimum touch target size.
  • Put Buttons Where Users can Find Them
    Locate your button in an easy to find area. Don’t make your users hunt for buttons.
  • Location and Order
    When it comes to web-based apps, you should determine about which placement truly works best for users. The right way to find out is by testing. If you design mobile navigation it’s worth paying attention to the best practices for buttons location.

Knowing 3 UX Mistakes that Almost Every Designer Makes

Posted on by Mario

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It’s in every designer’s DNA to make the impossible mission happens to be easy, simple, and beautiful. This makes many designers tend to be perfectionists which terrible critics would make their world fall apart and beautiful praise makes them fly. However, everyone will make mistakes and this also works for designers, especially web designers who should cope with user interfaces design. Therefore, every web designers should accept that mistakes is part of learning process since only by accepting it that way, they will learn and grow.

UX Mistake 1: Thinking users will understand what designers understand about.

Since designer will often deal with user interfaces, they use their common sense in everything they do. Their intuitive knowledge about how things work on the web is trained already, and sometimes this situation makes them think that it is a usual thing for people to think the same common sense like they did which cause further problems such as assuming that users: understand the controls, know which questions to ask, know what their icons, symbols and logos mean, will read or follow the instructions we give them, and know how to find what they want.

However, the fact is many users know nothing about design world at all since they come from different work background or etc., some even find that your visuals are confusing them. So, it is designer’s job to explain your design in varied points of view and lead their thought into yours.

UX Mistake 2: Do not know who Your Target Audiences actually are

There are many types of users, and not all users are your target audience, sometimes designers who do not understand about this will create wrong design which in the end may disappoint their target audience. Google’s designers seem to understand the difference between users and target audiences, instead of creating design that would please all users, they create user experience designs that would cause conflict with their goals, and in this case, if you are advertisers, bots, fraudsters, and searchers, you are removed from their user experience goals. They only create design that would please searchers, regular people searching for something.

UX Mistake 3: Not Enough Friction

Not many designers see the importance of having the right friction in their web design. In fact, some designers still believe user friction is bad. But, the truth is all websites need friction. Friction will help you manage things to adjust the users you attract.

There are many kind of good friction that you can use as examples, one of them is Quora, a Q&A site which have simple policy. Quora requires its users to be nice and respectful, unless they will be blocked or banned. Thus system is designed to maximize the user experience and make Quora a safe place for others.

The main point about friction is to know how to adjust the dial to attract the users they want, if you don’t then you will potentially overreacting it or you are chronically abused it. Below are some examples of bad friction:

  • Using captcha forms on a contact form with three or four fields.
  • Applying too many steps which are unnecessary
  • Not using enough form fields so everyone can easily gain access to whatever your design is offering.
  • Asking for privacy information in a matter where you should keep it as privacy.