Conversion killers—does your site contain any “Nuke Buttons”?
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!
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Brilliant points. I am trying to get my clients to be aware of simple things like this. Its so easy to lose a visitor with poor design.
Really excellent – the shopping cart example is good as many of us who run shopping carts want the user to be able to edit it, but quite often the functionality is not named correctly.
Something that goes into the same direction (not nuke button, but makes a visitor nuke it anyway) is the payment screen in Clickbank. When you buy from an other country than the US, it tries to geo-locate the visitor and apply their local currency.
It is negatively impacting the user experience as the advertised amount to pay is not identical to the numbers shown on the payment page. Thanks for this useful reminder.
Yamato
Hey there, I must have seen this a million times! One of the worst forms of nuke are the shopping carts that erase all your delivery information if you miss something out. I remember once I forgot to put a postcode in and as a result it took me back to an empty form having just filled out all the info. I didn’t bother twice.
It’s easy to do too I think, user testing has to be the way forward!
Nice article, guys. It’s amazing how many times you see things like this.
Oops…thanks. I’ve now removed/changed all mine.
Thanks for this great informative post. I would like to know more about the factors involved which prove helpful to increase conversion rates to the maximum.
Great article! I would love to hear more about conversion killers, especially how the button should look.
I love this site! Not just for the great conversion tips, I love that little critter in the top right of the screen – I want a mascot for my site – can I borrow him and see if he increases my conversions?
Thanks. I would have never thought about this on my own. It’s given me a clear view of what I might be doing wrong.
I SO agree with Shashi Kapoor!
Great article guys, informative and very entertaining! Loved your material at UK System Intensive 2008 and Chicago 2009. Keep up the great work!
(I also publish AdWords Ad Bloopers on my website, as some of these can be inadvertently hilarious)
Really great article guys. A lot of businesses could dramatically increase their ROI by spending time on their website and the different paths to goals. More traffic isn’t always the answer, sometimes a more effective website is :)
Some of these are built in as standard. Why is this??? I’m thinking of the reset form button which may have a reason but the empty cart is truly bizarre.
Simply beautiful, first rule or principle for building a profitable sales funnel is to eliminate any points that leak (bleed money). Just what the doctor ordered guys.
Seems like basic usability to me, but it just goes to show how low on the priority list basics can go in relation to other things. Good post, thanks!
I was once asked to redesign my BUY button to make it smaller and less “gaudy”. When sales dropped by half with the new and improved smaller buy button you should see how right quick the owner wanted the old [BUY] back.
Do I understand you guys.
In one of my first projects, just eliminating the nuke button (what’s the point of having a reset button on a form anyway????) and decreasing the number of form fields gave us an amazing increase. Go figure ;)
Every article I have read from you company has helped me with my website and made me laugh. So Kudos to you!
Category links on my blog sidebar next to a buy now button in the main body area. Click, g’bye lead. You are the weakest link!
Another great article – wish you guys did these more regularly as they’re always so insightful.
Hi, great article!
I was wondering what you would suggest then to empty a cart? It could be massively frustrating for a user who changed their mind (I am that sort of female, I change my mind SEVERAL times during shopping) to have to search high and low for the “delete item” options.
I was thinking of two solutions:
1. tick boxes and a delete text link next to the main buttons at the end or…
2. a delete button next to each item.
Your thoughts?
Great! I love this site! I remember once I forgot to put a postcode in and as a result it took me back to an empty form having just filled out all the info.
Excellent article and great information, I especially loved the intro and the link with the movie! Great stuff!
Great clear info and advice we should all follow……but there are also a lot of websites I would like to place “Nuke Buttons” on!
Steve Krug wrote the classic book, many years ago now, titled “Don’t make me think! The common sense approach to web usability”. It always comes down to simplicity so the easier you make it for your users then conversions should follow.
All your nuke button examples are spot on in terms of adding extra thoughts into a user’s head and the result can be disastrous. Great article, will follow the hall of shame with keen intent. Does the Google “I’m feeling lucky” button count as a nuke button? I never use it and I don’t know anyone who does.
Very useful post!
I’m going to have a little run through our order process and have a good look for these, I know how annoying it is to lose a lot of time due to some poorly designed feature so definitely don’t want my customers experiencing this.
The “empty cart” button should never be that close to checkout. Don’t even give the option to remove everything.
It’s easy to do too. I think user testing has to be the way forward!
Great article; love the “Monster vs. Aliens” story as a way to prove the point.
You guys rock! Thanks for an informative, easy to read and follow website. Nicely done.
Awesome article, thanks.
It’s really hard to understand why some of those buttons started being used in the first place. This post was a great reminder to eliminate all of them from our conversion page.
I don’t know how many times I’ve been filling out a form, I make it to the “Country” section and when I change it, it deletes all my information and refreshes the page to “update” the state/province list.
It’s extremely frustrating.
I’ve also had the usual menus popping up when you’re trying to click a link, or you click a “useful information” link that should open a pop-up with information about what you clicked on, instead it takes you to a different website that makes you search until you find what you were looking for, and by then you’ve forgotten which website you were on and must keep clicking the “back” button a dozen times.
Fantastic post! I just talked about this on a podcast I recorded.
Hello, our website is full of nukes ! And other things…
The website was developed in html by a freelance developer, the design is very nice but it is extremely difficult to change design elements around, thus to try different options with GWO… what do you suggest we do?
I do not want to redesign everything from scratch, ideally I would like to have the website redesigned to make it look almost the same as it is now but using an “easier to modify” technology, it does not even make use of CSS!
A web guy who has been helping us with the SEO (he is great at SEO btw) is recommending his own CMS, I am not opposed to CMS in principle but I am reluctant to use one-man-bands especially for something so pervasive like a CMS (but maybe Joomla?)…
I would appreciate your comments. I am a fairly tech-savvy user and I dont have a problem with fiddling with a wysiwyg editor or adding some code to the html, but at the moment certain things – like switching a tab from the left to the right, or to the top, is simply impossible. Thanks for your help.
one more thing…
There is a trend as to how sites are designed, but has any study been done regarding best practice on overall page design layout? e.g. logo on the top left, buttons on the left v. tabs at the top, etc.
As I mentioned earlier, we are planning a redesign and would like to incorporate best practices on this.
Dan, I don’t think you want to go crazy with an unconventional layout. People expect your logo up top, navigation on the top/left/right so don’t try to confuse them (or make them think).
Fab article. Quickly going off to check my site.
Great page, made me laugh… we got a company to do most of our site for us am now going to test every button and box possible for bugs and pitfalls lol…
… me too… I thought it was okay, now not so sure!!
Great article.. I’ve found some bugs on my site between ie, firefox and opera particularly in positioning and formatting of text, is there any list anywhere of discrepancies between them so its not so time consuming to check your site?
Hi Carl,
You can quickly view your website using different browsers and screen resolutions with handy tools like browsercam.com and browsershots.org.
Thanks for the links to those, will try them out, many thanks.
Great article and comments. When I start with a client, the first phase is called Brilliant At The Basics. Adwords doesn’t mean a thing if your site design is running the shoppers off. Keep it simple stupid…. Everybody wants bell and whistles, but they divert people from the real reason they are on your site. If you insist on having bells whistles and other scripts, put them on your thank you page.
Very solid info. When I asked myself the questions from your article I was surprised to find that I was lacking in many facets of usability.
I’m now going back to checking our other 9 sites and putting number 10 on hold for a while and going bug hunting!!! :(
I’m so good at doing websites.. after reading this I may as well scrap mine!! lol
ok, you’ve got me. “empty cart” has got to go.