One of the outside agencies we work with recently designed and added a button for a new quiz to our Wiley Education Services website. The concern was that it looked entirely too much like the button that already existed on the site that would be just above it. While I know that agencies constantly are concerned at getting things done quickly, I think what benefits the final product is taking a step back to offer a more thoughtful approach.

You might say, “It’s only a button.” However, when it’s new content that you want to drive users to, that one button may make a significant difference in conversions. So not only did I create a design for the button that clearly differentiated itself from the content in the button above it (fortunately, there’s only two buttons in the callout section on the page, so it won’t be “design overload” to have them look different), I also wanted to make it clear to the user that they weren’t going to have to invest a great deal of time taking the quiz. I brought up the stopwatch timer on my iPhone and took the time to read the content on the page, and then walk through the quiz at a relatively breezy pace. It still only took less than a minute (43 seconds to be exact). So I added to the button that it “Only takes 45 seconds” with a little clock icon so that users could quickly understand that they could take the test with very little time and effort. See the before and after below: