Creating buttons gets easier

The quest to find the right level of abstraction

I'm on a never ending quest to find the right level of abstraction for user interface elements.

If the elements are too low-level, we get lost in the details and the sheer number of choices we can and have to make.

If the elements are too high-level, we would need too many of them to cover all the edge cases - and yet we still couldn't, greatly limiting our options.

The trick seems to be to provide fairly low-level elements, like buttons, then assemble them into higher-level structures and also provide those as high-level "elements". Then we can start at a high-level solution, yet we can also "open the box" to see what's inside and reconfigure the low-level elements as needed.

Buttons 1, 2, 3

Seems straight-forward, so I created a button element a few months ago. But often we need more than one button, like one for a primary action and one for a secondary action. These should be next to each other most of the time, so we would need some kind of a button-group element to lay out the buttons in a nice way.

Horizontal container

But wait! We want to have elements that are useful in a variety of circumstances. Having an element just to lay out buttons horizontally seems too specific. There can be many other elements that need to be laid out horizontally, so why not create a horizontal-container element instead?

So I did. (Again, a few months ago.)

And it kinda works. But not like a well designed thing. I kept writing custom HTML for the important buttons placed on boomla.com. If it's not good enough for me, it probably isn't good enough for you.

Issues with the generic solution

• Users could not figure out how to align the buttons (right, center).

• They would often move out the button from the horizontal container which typically doesn't make sense.

   

• Different screens need different button sizes. Small mobile screens need bigger buttons so you can hit them with your fat finger. Adjusting each button individually is a pain, it would be way easier to set the sizes on the container which would apply to each button in it.

• Different screens need different layouts. Typically, you would use a horizontal layout on desktop but a vertical stacked layout on mobile. Often, the last button on the right is the primary button, while the first (top) button should be the primary button on mobile. That's reverse order.

These cry for a solution dedicated to buttons.

Introducing the button-group element

As a result, I decided to create a slightly higher level button-group element. It is optimized for the use-case of providing one or more buttons and nothing else. It's responsive, with way more options at various screen sizes than all the other elements. I'm curious how it will live up to the usability expectations.

For a start, I replaced the most prominent buttons on the Boomla home page and it worked like a charm. It was definitely a much better (faster) experience than writing custom code.

You should give it a try too - and please tell me how it worked!