In the movie Monsters vs Aliens, the President has two big red buttons…

The one on the left launches every nuclear weapon in the country; the one on the right makes a latte.
The President asks, “Who designed this ridiculous system?”
His colleagues reply, “You did.”
Throughout the movie, he keeps almost pressing the wrong button, by accident. Whenever he leans towards it, everyone screams hysterically.
Now, if you have ever carried out a usability test, you’ll know this feeling well. You’ll regularly find yourself screaming, “No!”, (though you have to do so internally), when the participant is about to make a “conversion-killing” mistake. Some website elements are effectively “Nuke Buttons”. In other words, they are “traps” that reduce the likelihood of conversion.
Does your own website contain any “Nuke Buttons”?
Here’s how to find out if you’re making the same mistake as the President did: look at one of your mission-critical webpages—such as your homepage or one of your landing pages—then look at each link and button, one at a time, and answer the following two questions:
Question 1: “If a visitor clicks on this button, what will they see next?” (Open the link in a separate tab, just to check.)
Question 2: “Will clicking on this increase—or decrease—the likelihood of the visitor taking the action we want them to take?”
You may be surprised by what you discover.
Types of Nuke Button
Here are some of the most common types of Nuke Button:
Nuke Button Type 1: The “Empty Cart” button. The internet is riddled with shopping carts that have “Empty Cart” buttons in them. Can you imagine a supermarket in which half of the checkouts are “trap” ones, at which a member of staff would grab your shopping cart and put all the items back on the shelves? An “Empty Cart” feature would never exist in the offline world.
But, online, they are commonplace. Here’s an example of one:

Notice how this “Empty Cart” button is identical in appearance to the Place Order” button. It’s even located on the right-hand side, where you might imagine the “Place Order” button to be. One false click and the order is nuked.
Nuke Button Type 2: The “Reset Form” button. Strangely, it’s hard to even imagine a scenario in which a “Clear Form” button would ever be needed. It’s not like you’d ever fill out your name and address, and then think, “No, wait, that’s not me!” Perhaps “Reset Form” buttons are designed to safeguard people who are in witness protection programs.
Here’s an example of a “Reset Form” button, waiting to catch its next victim.

Nuke Button Type 3: the “Too-Easy-To-Click-Accidentally” button. Hotmail’s “Sign Out” button is tiny, and sits beneath a much larger Nuke Button that jeopardizes the user experience. In the image below, you might expect that the arrow is hovering over the “Sign Out” button.

In fact, when clicked, it opens up a dropdown box for the much larger “Karl” button that’s immediately above the “Sign Out” button.

As a result, it’s surprisingly difficult to work out how to sign out of Hotmail, or to change user.
This usability error isn’t trivial. Many Hotmail users access their email from public computers. Failing to sign out could result in identity theft.
Nuke Button Type 4: The “Your Session Has Expired” feature. Some shopping carts spontaneously destroy the visitor’s data after a certain time period. Why?

Clearly, in some situations, it makes sense to expire a session after a certain period of inactivity, for security reasons. But in those cases, it’s essential that the session be automatically saved for next time, otherwise the visitor’s hard work is destroyed.
The “Your Session Has Expired” Nuke isn’t a button at all, but it has the same self-destruct power of any Nuke Button. It’s really a “time bomb” version of the “Reset Form” or “Empty Cart” Nuke Buttons.
In a way, it’s more destructive, because it doesn’t even require a click; it can be triggered off by a bathroom break.
Nuke Button 5: The “Irrelevant Link”. This one is perhaps the most common of all. It sounds obvious, but a link shouldn’t be on a page unless you want at least some of the visitors to click it. Many links cause the visitor to veer off to an obscure part of the website—or to another website—never to return.
An obvious example of an “irrelevant link” is found in websites that have banner ads on their shopping cart pages. If a customer is about to place an order, do you really want them to see a distracting banner ad like this one?:

“The Nuke Button Hall Of Shame”
We thought it would be fun to have a little game: we want you to scour the Internet for examples of buttons—or links—that kill conversions. Copy the URLs, then add them to the comments below (or screenshot them and email them to us). Then, we’ll incorporate them into this blog post.
By creating this “Nuke Button Hall Of Shame”, we’ll be assembling a library of pitfalls for marketers to avoid. It’ll be entertaining too.
And, who knows, maybe we’ll get sued by DreamWorks for adopting the phrase.
Here are the ones we’ve received so far
1. WashingtonPost.com’s search box: The first person to respond to our call for Nuke Buttons was a visitor called Marisa, who described her frustration with the search box on WashingtonPost.com’s website:

The area above the search box is a “Too-Easy-To-Click-Accidentally” button. As Marisa says, “If you move your mouse up a little too far, the hover drop-down menu of Politics, Opinions or Business appears.

“If you then click, as you normally do when arriving at a search box, you hit the menu accidentally, and end up on a page you never wanted to visit. I can’t tell you how annoying that is, when you have a word/idea that you are actively searching for.”
Marisa also correctly spotted that the Comments feature on our blog has a flaw: it went haywire because she did not enter an email address, and she consequently lost her carefully written comment. Aargh! Already, we’re in our own Hall of Shame! It’s like a scene from Being John Malkovich! Sorry Marisa—we’ll get it fixed.
Send us more examples of Nuke Buttons!
So, Nuke Button Spotters…here’s your mission: we want you to send us examples of buttons—or links—that kill conversions. Copy the URLs, then add them to the comments below (or screenshot them and email them to us). Then, we’ll incorporate them into this blog post.
Together, we can disarm the web.
Right, let’s have a latte.

P.S. We update this post every time someone submits a new Nuke Button to us—so bookmark this page on Delicious!













