
The most common area you’ll find ghost buttons is centered beneath the main text in the home page header. This isn’t a matter of above the fold or below the fold, as you will see in the examples below. With ghost buttons, however, you don’t want to run the risk of them getting lost in the shuffle, which means you need to place them in predictable locations. One of the nice things about traditional buttons is that there’s leeway in where you place them on a website. They are clear demonstrations of how ghost buttons should never be used. If you’d like to see an example of the above three cons in action-familiarity, readability and transparency-pay close attention to the Fresh Egg research examples provided in the case study further below. The same goes for parallax scrolling, where an image might move behind the button and, again, make it difficult to find the button on the page or to read it. While the button might look fine when you’re testing a new design in your desktop’s browser, the button might sit atop a busy image on smaller screens and compromise the readability of the message within. The transparency of a ghost button can be problematic if you don’t think through what exactly it’s sitting on top of. Instead, they have to rely on a darker and easily readable font color, which limits the choice of colors that can be used. Whereas traditional CTAs can use a bright color for the button and a lighter color for the text, ghost buttons don’t have that flexibility. Ghost buttons take away that familiarity and require visitors to adjust their brains to look for something new. In some cases, those buttons are strategically designed with shadows and 3D effects to make them look like buttons that can actually be pressed. We’ve conditioned visitors to look for the traditionally bold and filled-in button design when they’re ready to move on to the next page or step. I think this A/B test from Elevated Third is a good example of how ghost buttons can fail to impress when used as the primary button design - whether on a website or in email. Elevated Third tested a set of ghost buttons against solid buttons in its email newsletter. Other elements will have to come into play, like animation or the placement of other eye-catching graphics or companion CTAs near it. Because color is applied only to these elements, it won’t be a major factor in drawing anyone’s attention to the button. But a ghost button is colored only in the thin outline of the button and the text inside. The reason why CTAs are often designed with bold colors is to easily guide visitors’ eyes to the parts of the website where we want them to engage. So, let’s get the bad stuff out of the way and then focus on what we can do to actually get more conversions out of them. I just believe that there are very specific use cases in which they actually work well. That’s not to say, of course, that I’m against the use of ghost buttons in web design. There are a number of arguments against ghost buttons, and, to be honest, they’re valid. Regardless of how you feel about ghost buttons in web design, you likely ask yourself these same questions when it comes time to using them.īefore we explore what the research says, let’s examine the pros and cons of this design element.

What colors will attract the most attention? Or even the right kind of attention?.In these guides, they try to make sense of the questions that so often plague web designers and developers:
#BUTTONS IN BUTTONBAR SHOULD BE BORDERLESS USE STYLES FOX HOW TO#
Web design bloggers spend a lot of time talking about how to design better buttons. What I’d like to do today is talk about the known pros and cons of ghost button design and then delve into some case studies in order to set the record straight. Yet, research shows us that visitors don’t necessarily see them that way.


Logic would dictate that ghost buttons are no good for web design because they don’t appear to be tangible or clickable, and they’re devoid of the attention-grabbing elements of traditional buttons. The outlined transparent buttons on the left and right are ghost buttons. The blue button in the center is the standard flat design button we’re accustomed to. This Dropbox tooltip is a great example of how a traditional button looks compared to a ghost button: A Dropbox tooltip with two ghost buttons (on the left and right) and a solid button (in the middle) as choices. They’re call-to-action (CTA) buttons for your website, like any other. Ghost buttons aren’t much of a mystery, despite their eerie-sounding name. While they may seem like a very simple UI element, they are still one of the most important ones to create. Buttons are a common element of interaction design.
