UI Best Practices – Designing buttons that score clicks!

User Experience Design is one of our core competencies. In this blog, we will share with you the best practices of designing buttons for your user interface that will attract maximum clicks. These UI button practices will help your users prioritize tasks by removing friction on-screen while sticking to the basic principles of UX elements for web/mobile applications.

Many designers take inspiration from various new UI designs and apply in their applications like this:

video showing buttons in UI

But what’s wrong with this elegant on-hover and click state button?

Unfortunately, it’s lacking the very first basic rule of button design – “Make it look clickable”.

UI/UX designers should pay much attention to button designs to make buttons stand out, and read numerous articles, analyze and share ways, secrets, and principles to set the color, shape, position, size, and more factors.

Use those designs that follow basic ground rules of UI design. Especially ones that can not only lead users through a website/mobile app effectively but can also entice them to click for better sales.

And as a designer, you always need new clues, ideas, or inspiration to make a unique and useful button for your web/mobile apps.

So here are 5 latest and best button practices that you cannot miss out in 2020. And hope they can inspire you somehow:

1. Eye-Catching Hover Effects

This Framer button uses a very appealing hover effect. When users move over or across the Play button, the whole button bounces out with a cool 3D Gradient design. Once users move the mouse cursor away, the hover effect will suspend completely. Such designs are eye-catching and interesting.

Video showing buttons in UI
Edoardo Mercati

What can you learn:

You can add various hover or interaction effects to optimize your button designs in your app or web design. They could be very useful to entice users to click and go to the next stage, such as playing a podcast, buying a product, filling contact information, or reading more details, etc.

You can add some changes in colors, shadows, shapes, texts, opacity, frames, and animations of a button according to your action requirements to make it more attractive for users.

2. Microinteractions for Delete Button

You can show the functions of buttons more vividly by using “button + animation ”. Once users click a button to delete, the action gets depicted by an animation showing the file getting shredded. This is a vivid and imaginative way to showcase the “delete button”. It is an effective way to engage the users while they delete multiple files.

Animation showing button in UI
Aaron Iker

What can you learn:

In your button design, you can add vivid animations to your buttons based on different scenarios, features, and labels to make your buttons outstanding and appealing. Overall, this is excellent to improve user experience.

3. Provide Feedback with the Button States

You should always let users know that the command was registered and promptly. This requirement isn’t about how the button initially looks to the user; it’s about interaction experience with the UI element. A good way to make sure nothing is lost in transition is to define the button states in your button design.

Image showing different types of UI buttons
Ryan

What can you learn:

Usually, a button isn’t a one-state object. It should change its state to let the user know that appropriate action is being taken. It becomes essential to provide visual feedback to users to indicate the current state.

4. Buttons with Shadows and Highlights

Drop-shadows make the element stand out against the background. They also highlight it as a clickable or tappable element. Objects that appear as raised give the impression that they could be pressed down. They’re also useful for improving the visibility of light-colored design elements, especially text. Even with flat buttons (almost flat, to be exact), they give subtle interactive cues.

video of buttons in UI
Lucas Haas

What you can learn:

Shadows are key entities in telling your users which UI element they are looking at. Users understand that the element is interactive if a button casts a subtle shadow.

5. Floating Navigation Button

The tooltip uses a very cool floating button that attracts users’ attention and extends the functions of the web/mobile app. It is eye-catching and useful for your users and allows them to easily switch and choose other parts of the web/mobile app. And in this way, such floating buttons can be really interesting, attractive, and impressive for users.

Animation of buttons in UI
Milan Raring

What can you learn:

In your mobile or web app designs, you can create similar multifunctional navigation buttons floating in an interface to extend the functions of a mobile/website app. You can also customize a special way to expand the functions, options, or menus based on users’ interaction with these floating buttons.

Conclusion

Buttons are going nowhere! They will further evolve and get more interactive. Plan them with the utmost consideration, so that your users can enjoy the micro-interactions. Make them flashy, make them intuitive, and make them useful – and let users engage with your application.

Posted in UX

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