Button Tips for Mobile Websites
Despite the focus on minimalism in mobile sites, buttons remain an essential part of your web design. However, if they are not constructed properly, buttons can quickly slow down loading times and make a streamlined website clunky. Here are some tips for making your mobile website buttons better.
Round Buttons Are Better
According to Business Insider, mobile website users tend to prefer round buttons over other shapes. The primary reason is not a matter of aesthetics. Instead, it’s because round buttons are the easiest to press. Browsing a website from a mobile device requires using your finger to navigate through the pages. While some people may use styluses, most do not. Round buttons work better for fingertip navigation. When using rectangular or square buttons, finger overlap is much easier. People browsing on mobile devices are not likely to have much patience for choosing the wrong page.
Large Buttons Rather Than Small
Since selecting the wrong button will lead the customer to the wrong page, it’s important that your buttons are large enough to select. For this, you need to ensure that your responsive web design keeps the general size static. In other words, you must put in a minimum size to keep the site from making the buttons too small. When you make a mobile website advertising for mobile devices you may not be able to do this to the buttons without programming them separately. Your goal though is to make sure that they do not get shrunk so small that they cannot allow accurate selection. Most customers will only attempt to reselect a button once. If they still can’t get it, Convince and Convert states that the customers will generally leave the site.
Compress the Button Images
All buttons are essentially images with hyperlinks when put into the simplest terms. However, you will want to make sure that the image itself is compressed. Image quality is not a big deal on buttons. So long as it is not blurry, it will work fine. Compressing the image will just make the file smaller. Another option is to use a flattened UI for the button development. Completing this task will make the file sizes smaller and allow the site to load faster. Just make sure that you treat all of the buttons the same way. Do not compress one and not another. It will cause subtle distinctions between the buttons’ appearances, and that can make your mobile site look tacky.
When you’re designing your mobile site, one of the things that you shouldn’t cut out are buttons. Buttons make it easy to select links and find key places on the website. In developing this, you will want to make sure that you choose round buttons if you can. These tend to be the most preferred because they are easier to select. Likewise, you need to keep the buttons larger rather than smaller. Additionally, you will want to compress the images. This does not shrink their appearance. It just makes them a tighter file, allowing you to include everything you need while still letting the site load quickly.
January 8th, 2014
Really fabulous post bro. Thanks for sharing among us these button.
September 4th, 2014
Interesting insights. I didn’t know that much about the science of buttons. I can see why round buttons are better. Thanks for sharing!