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Theory
This is a guest post by Guido Jansen.
Hopefully, you were preparing to start shouting at me after reading the title. If you weren’t, you might be making some really wrong decisions when optimizing your webshop and losing a lot of money. Let me explain to you what is so wrong with the title…
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Design
When designing your website or application, one of the many areas you explore “calls to action”. What phrases or statements do you need to encourage the user to take the steps necessary to complete an action? What terms should you include to ensure that your calls to action (CTA) are clear to the user? What language or tone of voice do you use to get your message across?
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Design
Picking the right footer for a design can be harder than it seems. But a good footer can have a great impact—both on the impression you make, and the actual behavior of your visitors. In this article I will show you which footer to pick for the occasion, and have a look at more specific elements you can put in it. I will provide examples from the list of footers I put together on Usabilla Discover.
Like many website elements, we owe the concept of a footer to printed typography. In print, the page number is often in the footer, and sometimes it contains the title of the current chapter or section. In web design, the footer at the bottom of each page has evolved to serve a few different functions. But by definition, it’s always located on the bottom of the page, and its lay-out never changes across the site.
Demo UX Cases
While looking for inspiration on the design of call-to-action buttons, we came across a great thread on Quora about good looking startup homepages. The homepages that are listed show common design patterns and call-to-action buttons that we can test.
Demo UX Cases
The sign up button or link is an important call-to-action on the homepages of most web services. In a recent demo case Usabilla compared the sign up on the homepages of 10 different web services. Users found the sign up button on the Twitter homepage in 1.8 seconds. Animoto was a good runner up with 2.3 seconds. On average it took participants 3.5 seconds to find a way to sign up for these web services.
The differences between the performance of these websites on this important task are big. But what makes Twitter homepage stand out in this test? Why do the sign up buttons at Animoto, Vimeo and MyNameisE catch attention faster than those of Wakoopa, Basecamp, and PayPal? We would love to hear your opinion about these test results.