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Why Cancel Buttons Should Never Have a Color
- robertcope 8y agoWe use Teams for video conferencing at work. When someone calls, there are three buttons. One of them, the hang up button, is red; the other two are blue. I hit the red one half the time. Maybe I'm not very smart, but it sure seems like it wants me to hit it!
- duxup 8y agoThe "Not Now" example looks disabled to my eye just as much as the disabled example. I think the rule here makes sense as far as design works now, except that "Not Now" example.
- auraham 8y agoI was to post the same. It could be seen as an disabled option.
- MK_Dev 8y agoSame with other Cancel examples. The advice is not good!
- beatgammit 8y agoIDK, the advice is sound, the examples aren't. There needs to be a clear distinction between cancel and disabled, and I just don't see that here. In fact, I think the light border is better than the neutral one in the first example since you shows that I can cancel.
- yongjik 8y agoEven worse, "Not Now" (and all other options) doesn't even look like a button, so when it is greyed out there's nothing that tells it's even clickable, any more than "Start Your Free Trial" above.
- pier25 8y agoI agree a cancel button should not be as prominent as the default button, but a greyed out button is terrible UX as it looks disabled. Cancelling IS and action too.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoA couple of years ago I accidentally cancelled my Adobe CC subscription because instead of being a fallback to safety as it normally is, the "Cancel" button immediately ended the non-refundable subscription[0]. I don't remember what the actual fallback to safety button was—probably "Now Now". Adobe fixed that glaring problem soon after. I expect I wasn't the only one to make that mistake. [0] You have to pay for whole year in advance and I was only one month in, which meant that was a $300 mistake. Fortunately, Adobe gave me a refund going through the rigaramorole of calling support, and they told me to create a new subscription. Which was great, because for some reason it gave me the one year student discount again, which I had already used the previous year.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoThis is why some designers advise not to use the word “Cancel” at all. It’s pretty ambiguous what it really means.
- nevi-me 8y agoWhat about instances where cancelling loses all the data that you've been typing in a form? Should it not have a red colour as a form of warning?