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The story of the $300M button
The story of the $300M button made a big splash over a decade ago when it was covered in a book called Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. The story was originally written by Jared Spool and sent to Brad Frost when he was writing the book. I recently stumbled upon it and was immediately captivated.
It’s a great example of how designs can impact a business, in this case to the tune of $300M. It’s also a reminder of how defaults matter, shape user behavior, and even influence power dynamics.
A simple button change
There were only two buttons: Login and Register. What could go wrong? In isolation, the buttons were innocent enough. But the first red flag was they showed up right after a user clicked “Checkout”.
The company, rumored to be Best Buy, hired a usability researcher. In the tests, users happily added stuff to their cart, made their way into checkout… and then froze.
The first-time users were annoyed they had to register to complete their purchase: “I’m not here to be in a relationship. I just want to buy something.” The repeat users were also annoyed. Most of them couldn’t remember their login and password.
The improvement they tested was simple. They replaced the “Register” button with “Continue as Guest”, and included some reassuring copy on what would happen next:
The results were eye-popping: the # of customers shot up by 45%, resulting in an extra $300M that first year. Even better, 90% of the customers ended up creating an account as part of the checkout completion process.
Hidden lessons
This isn’t just an ode to the invention of guest checkout. While that was the solution in this specific instance, there are more universal lessons:
- Understand customer expectations — asking someone to “register” after they just spent energy creating an order is poor timing and poor framing. The best time to make a big ask is when you tie it to something very…
