How to come up with better CTA buttons?
Is it ok to put that much effort to create a cancel CTA(call to action) buttons in any game?
Once my colleague shared that the cancel button is more appealing to me in comparison to other buttons, will this be ok? questions started popping up, How to create buttons, which are easy to use and convey what players need to make an informed decision in a game? How do different games use different ways to make CTA button, if any? These are a few questions I was trying to find the answers of…😃
Eagerness to find the answer to these questions led to searching by myself but as I don’t have much time to find the answers of these so followed
An indirect and quick approach to design any UI element and collect feedbacks:
Step A: By looking into competitors and successful games screens and buttons their placements, size, colours etc. How and why they are used?
Step B:Collecting how players responds with these buttons when shown separately and along with thier respective screen and understand why so
Did tried to do this and see what comes out ..
😃Let’s start…
Step A: Collected the screenshot of at least 10 games in which 5 may be from well known games which are loved by every one and 5 from those who will have similar traits with ours
As all these screens are collected, then we can sort these screens into four major game genre:
A. Casual
B. Mid-core
C. Sport & Driving and
D. Casino**
Step B: After that few CTA buttons are extracted from these game screens belongs to different game genre and shared with players(users). And asked what they feel about these? what come in there mind first, after seeing these buttons, icons and colours? What they think, what it will do or type of action that can performed by these buttons?
What players shared:
- Buttons which has icon along with their action written in text(Icons with text) are most easy to understand as they already seen most of these icon while playing other games(general icons) as well and text helps them when they are confused.
- Buttons having action info along with text(2000 coin button in above image) are very clear at first but require reading few times as these buttons changes in the game.
- Only Icon are very difficult to understand initially but if used that once in a game then were able to quickly know(recognize) these buttons but need to be explored first(very game specific).
- Only text buttons are easy to use but need little attention to read that (their colour helps a lots red, green, yellow).
- Screen where game character size & style are very prominent & distinctive, leads to these types of questions what is this game about? Is it action or puzzle game?(As I shared few game screens as well)
After doing all these, it would be great to have a better understanding of who are the players of these games according to their genre, their demographics, regions they are famous in, how frequently these players play these games, etc… To find the answer to those I looked up into the Gamerefinery and their Annual report, which have some of the answers to the above questions
In this way, we can try to create UI elements for our games that are easy to use, informative as well as discoverable on any screen of the game for your players
Conclusion:
- This process helped me to quickly discover what color & size of CTA buttons can be used, which have great findability in any screen of your game and are also relatable to your game
- Also helped me to find, which type of CTA buttons will be easy to use, informative and leads to an informed decision by the player for our game
- Involving peers and doing this as a collaborative exercise is more fun than doing it alone 🤩
- This process can be used for other mobile application
