A web-design trend that is becoming increasingly problematic is the Get Started button. This button is often the most prominent and enticing call-to-action on the homepage, and can appear to be the right path for nearly every activity a user is looking to complete — be it to sign up for a service or to simply look for details about the organization and services offered. But when this button lands naïve users into a complex flow instead of providing them with the basic information they expected, people lose trust and become annoyed with the site.

In our recent study of ecommerce websites, several users ran into problems when they clicked prominent Get Started calls-to-action. They expected details about the company, but instead were forced into surveys, onboarding flows, and sales funnels without receiving any information from the site in return. This trend is especially common among sites that revolve around memberships and services, where creating an account is an integral first step in the journey of accessing the company’s offerings. Regardless of the business model, however, Get Started buttons and other ambiguous calls-to-action can degrade the user experience and should be avoided.

In this article we discuss several reasons why Get Started buttons confuse and mislead users, and the impact that this design can have on your organization.

Don’t Assume: Design for New Visitors, Too

A critical mistake on many websites is designing only for those who already know about the company and the services it provides. With the assumption that everybody is familiar with their offerings, these websites attempt to get people to sign up without explaining what they do. Perhaps they place too much trust in awareness marketing campaigns, or they are driven by pure ego, but just because a company has been around for a few years and many people know about it, it doesn’t mean that every site visitor will have that same level of understanding. Don’t let ego dictate the design.

We’ve seen this problem before when we wrote about the illusion of completeness. In a prior study we asked 8 users to visit a meal-delivery website and find out what service that company offered. Six of those participants clicked on the Get Started button because it seemed to match their situation and because they did not realize they could scroll down the page. Each user was then frustrated to encounter a series of modals to sign up for the service without any information about what the service was.

In an eyetracking study, participants had to find information about the service provided by Splitwise.com. Several users looked only above the fold, where a prominent Get Started Now button was featured. Although details about the Splitwise service were listed below the fold, these users were not motivated to look down the page after seeing the Get Started button. A few users commented that they believed they would have to sign up or click Get Started Now to find out more information about the service.

New visitors often reach a website in need of introductory information. Perhaps they’ve heard about the company in passing or via an ad, and they’re there to learn the full story and get a clear understanding of its offerings, what makes it different, and why they should become customers. This is good! Great job, awareness campaigns! While it may be tempting to provide these prospective customers with a quick path to start using the service, you mustn’t get ahead of yourself.

For example, we asked users who had heard of the company JustFab but who didn’t know much about its services to visit the JustFab website and find out about its offerings. In this common collect-information situation, users navigated to the homepage and expected to find a way to learn about the company, its products, and its services.

“To find out what it is I would probably just click on Get Started. (After clicking) Take our short style quiz … okay so, I expected to see like a paragraph saying ‘this is how the website works’.”

“I probably have heard a little bit about it if I’m visiting it. So I would click Get Started to see kind of what it’s about.”

Due to the banner’s prominence at the top of the homepage and the lack of any visible About content, these users interpreted the Get Started call-to-action as the most reasonable path to start getting information about the site and the advertised VIP club. However, the design did not accommodate this need. Instead, it assumed that users already had a full understanding of the offerings and took them down a signup path they were not ready for.

Even within the style quiz, one user maintained the belief that she would get more information about the service as she answered questions: “So it takes me through a quiz that I would guess would help me pick things that are more geared a little bit toward me as I’m shopping. … I’m still waiting for more information as I’m going through the quiz.” She became increasingly frustrated as the quiz continued asking questions without providing any information in return. If you want to attract users, remember the reciprocity principle: Give people the information they need before asking them to answer multiple screens of questions and share personal information.

For new users trying to learn about the service, just a short tagline on the homepage is enough to quickly and effectively explain who you are and what you do. Once this groundwork has been laid, people might feel compelled to start the relationship with your site in earnest. However, without this initial context, Get Started links are no better than login walls, which trick users into starting to create an account before they’ve determined what the service is really about. Don’t ask for too much too soon, or you risk losing people’s trust.

Not Just New Users

Although Get Started commonly causes problems for first-time visitors looking to learn more about an organization, this is not the only scenario where it misleads and annoys users. People looking for specific information from a company they are already familiar with can also get trapped by this generic call-to-action.

We asked one study participant to find a cell-phone plan from a carrier different than his own. He immediately visited the T-Mobile website and remarked that he had friends and family using its service. He was looking specifically for a service plan that would allow him to keep his current device. When he landed on the homepage, he immediately navigated to the Plans section. The Plans page featured a large banner with a call-to-action to Start Shopping. He clicked that, which sent him to another page featuring another large banner asking him to Get Started. Clicking Get Started launched a switching quiz, which, after several screens of questions, dead-ended at an instruction to call a representative.

At this point the participant didn’t even know what the plan had to offer and how much it cost per month: “This is another hurdle to jump over and it’s more likely I will probably leave this website. All I want is the price and if I like the price, then I’d call it.” The problem with this interaction was the enticing and generic call-to-action Get Started, combined with a page layout that made the relevant information difficult to find.

The phrase Get Started is ambiguous and can apply to almost any goal that a user might have. It implies that it is the logical path to follow and acts like a magnet, often causing users to ignore other more appropriate content.

On the T-Mobile website, the information the user was really looking for was hidden in plain sight, just above the Start Shopping call-to-action, in small, thin text (With T-Mobile ONE™, get 4 lines of unlimited talk, text, and LTE data on your smartphone for $40 each with AutoPay. Plus, with taxes and fees included, the price you see is the price you’ll pay). This information was relevant but completely overlooked. Also, more detailed information about plan and pricing existed just below the fold on both the plans page and the shopping page with the Get Started banner. The large, full-screen banners on both pages created an illusion of completeness: the content on the page looked complete and there were no visual cues to indicate that additional content could be found below the fold. The hidden plan details combined with the Get Started CTA were a recipe for failure for this user looking to find information about plans before actually switching service.

Misled Users are Missed Opportunities

From the organization’s perspective, both the JustFab and the T-Mobile flows would likely be interpreted as successful. Analytics would show that these Get Started buttons were very effective at getting the user into the sales funnel. But getting users where we want them to go doesn’t mean we’ve won. If we send people down a wrong path at the expense of what they’re truly looking for, we’ve actually failed.

All our users were unable to find the information they were looking for. On the T-Mobile site, the participant was frustrated that he had provided personal information about himself and was given nothing in return. He expected details about plan pricing but received what felt like a gimmicky sales tactic requiring him to get on the phone. He was right where T-Mobile wanted him to be, but he was disillusioned by the experience and left. He thought it wasn’t possible to get pricing on the site, so he opened up a new tab and visited the AT&T website where he found what he needed.

On JustFab, one user completed all the questions in the style quiz, reaching the final screen which asked her to input her email and a password. At this point she declared defeat: “Now I still have to sign up. So at this point, I’d be like ‘I’m out’ because I don’t really know what I’m getting myself into, and I don’t really want to sign up for something until I know what it is. So… I would probably just exit out and say that it’s not really interesting.”

A different user created a JustFab account after finishing the style quiz, but was upset when she later happened across the How JustFab Works page in the footer and realized that the company charged a monthly membership fee. “Did I just miss that on the front page? Now I’m mad. I had to dig down in here to find this. That's something that to me should be on the very front. You're charging people a fee every month. That seems pretty slick to hide that in a link at the bottom.”

In each of these instances, the Get Started link text led customers astray and kept them from finding the information they were looking for on the site. The generic label gives strong information scent for almost any customer activity, leading unsuspecting users down the wrong path. In each scenario users ended up lost, uninformed, and frustrated to the point where they were no longer interested in the service, gave up, or moved onto a competitor. Although they followed the yellow-brick road into a conversion funnel, this path actually resulted in missed opportunities for these organizations.

Conclusion

Like its relative Learn More, the link text Get Started is too generic to stand on its own and can be interpreted in many ways. If you want to provide an entry point into a process, whether it’s a style quiz or sales funnel, avoid a generic call-to-action and increase the information scent by stating precisely what users should expect. Replacing the Get Started button on the JustFab site with Take Our Style Quiz or changing the T-Mobile banner to use Take our switching quiz and talk to an expert as the main link would have saved a lot of heartache.

Tricking people by using a Get Started link may indeed get more clicks on the CTA, but a link is a promise, and if you set the wrong expectation, you may reach superficial conversion goals but you won’t keep customers happy or loyal in the end. It’s better to be forthcoming and let users engage and commit when they’re ready for it.