Calls to action
Calls to action is one of the more important Ux (user experience) elements on your site, the question is how you best use it !?
Every site have more or less have call to actions elements on them even if you don’t notice it and think about it when your on there.. As well there are certain ways to “catch” the users attention with them to create an action or attention to an area.
So what is it and how do you use it?
As we said you see them all over, just on our posts where it says “read more..” that is one and another one is sign up for emails / leave a reply and so on, so basically anything that asks the visitor to your site to do an action. Either if it is in the form of leading the traffic to a certain place or having them download / sign up /buy or do a certain thing, there are of course more ways then those we just mentioned.
Above we see a calls to action, that you either
can sign up free or take the tour first.
There are as well different levels of action to each call to action, this can easily be seen or created via using for example to different options, being if it is to get either a “free version” vs. a “bought version” if it now is a product/service that is! Or it can be just saying “join now” vs. “take a tour” another simple way of displaying and getting the attention from a visitor.
Getting the focus from the visitor and having them do this action will matter on the way it is displayed!
so by using different colors, sizes, placement, texts and more to convey the message or a sense of urgency for the visitor which gets them to do what the action is.
Of course here comes the problem with the whole thing! We all see the actions all the time over and over… So are we not a bit tired of them and ignore them without even thinking about it? Yes that is the case in so many situations!
But by having the calls to action vs. not having them will conclude the action to be preformed sometimes rather then never.
What has to preformed is that the site gets the visitor to reflect on the action at hand! That is the first step and then from there it is more or less in the visitors hand, but you got them to think and reflect on the action.
Of course everyone that visits does not preform a action, that is why there is bounce rate!
(bounce rate; being the people that more or less leave your site directly)
Some things to think about with calls to action:
- Draw visitors attention with prominent positioning
- Place them in a distinguished area
- Color contrast to surrounding elements to have it stand out
- Displaying secondary actions beside the primary action
- The size of a call to action button can be bigger or smaller depending on less important call to actions
- Tell users that taking the action is easy / fast.
