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I was reading this excellent site http://www.goodui.org/ when one of the points made me think

Repeating your call to action is a strategy that is more applicable to longer pages, or repeating across numerous pages. Surely you don't want to have your offer displayed 10 times all on the same screen and frustrate people. However, long pages are becoming the norm and the idea of squeezing everything "above the fold" is fading. It doesn't hurt to have one soft actionable item at the top, and another prominent one at the bottom. When people reach the bottom, they pause and think what to do next - a potential solid place to make an offer or close a deal.

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While I think this is a good solution in which you have a reasonably sized page where you can reach the top or bottom in three-four scrolls, what if you have a really long page. Do we really know if users will scroll all the way to the bottom and then make a decision ? In that case wont it be better to have a floating call to action button which allows them to do an action at any point of time ?

Please do note I am not suggesting this button should hide any text or content but it would float at the side where it is visible but not in the way.

Please note I did see these questions and go through the answers in detail

Fixed/floating button on mobile app

Should I add a floating, fixed feedback button on the pages of my website?

However they don't apply to my question specifically.

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  • Have you seen this article: blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth Interesting read.
    – Chairman Meow
    Mar 13, 2014 at 18:29
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    Personally, I hate floating anythings. That said, a floating call-to-action button could be perceived as an even more annoying in-your-face obnoxion (pretty sure that isn't a word, but it sounds good here). Sort of like a foot-in-the-door door-to-door salesman.
    – Marjan Venema
    Mar 13, 2014 at 19:21
  • A CTA that's too prominent and "follows me around" is really irritating. Be careful not to make it too overbearing.
    – obelia
    Mar 11, 2015 at 21:08

2 Answers 2

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Most definitely yes. Web apps keep getting more complex, longer and require more cognitive load than ever before. It's quite common to use the OK Cancel both at the top and at the bottom of the page. It's redundant, alright, but it makes it easier for the user. An even better solution your suggesting is the floating buttons. They are accessible at the same place everywhere on the page. I'd love to see Microsoft implement this floating call to action button in their next SharePoint release!

One got to be careful implementing it and not hide too much of the content. It's inevitable to hide some while floating, or at least make the content area smaller, especially on smaller screens. But done right - this can set a new convention on the UX scene.

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There are a few principles to consider: - equal content value. is the CTA covering more valuable information? It's easy to say "this is useful, it should float" - but a thorough design analysis would require comparing the value of the floating item to every element that might be hidden on different screen sizes and orientations. - how it appears on mobile - the content hiding problem is even more pronounced when you test on a 4" iPhone

We've removed otherwise excellent floating CTAs from production because we found that at key moments (like first page render) the floating element could hide extremely important information (like price.)

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