Rounded buttons make people click more!

The sorcery and psychology of circles

Does anybody remember how in 2019 Facebook and Google changed their designs to be far more round and soon enough, a huge portion of the Internet followed suit? Nowadays, most newer sites have a sort of rounder look, with round buttons, corners, photos, menus, etc. Apart from sites with a not quite thoroughly thought-out design and websites with a more specific, sharp aesthetic, a rounded design is a very popular thing around the web. Just a trend? Or more?

🔴 Rounded Design Everywhere

It would seem quite like a trend, except that this has spread everywhere. Watching videos on Youtube? The thumbnails, search bar, comments, likes and share buttons are all rounded. Every single button and rectangle to be found on Facebook is at least slightly rounded. Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok, Whatsapp and countless more websites and applications all use this rounded design.

In 2023, Chrome released an update that aimed to bring a more rounded feel to the whole user interface. You can see it even now, right in the browser where you are reading this - the search and url bar is rounded, hover over the tabs and they have round corners, hover over the x or back and reload buttons, and you have a circle there too.

These are all very big companies. Surely they know what they are doing better than anybody else? Is there any measurable benefit to this, and the even more important question - is there a way you can use this?

📝The Research & The Why

Well then, why is this type of design so popular? Because it’s actually effective at what it does - more circles and rounded corners actually increase the average amount of people clicking on a button. 

Circles typically tend to represent things such as:

• Unity
• Harmony
• Cohesiveness
• Growth
• Connection
• Infinity

They lean towards feelings of community - hence, ‘circle of friends’ and ‘social circle’. The Olympics logo even has five circles, each representing the unity of the participating five continents. However, that isn’t just a piece of cultural symbolism; studies show that curved lines and images reminiscent of a human smile actually elicit more positive feelings.

Our very brains are wired to prefer round shapes, which we associate with friendliness and connection, than shapes with sharper edges, which are associated with danger, however subconscious.

CTA buttons (buttons that are a Call To Action, such as ‘Buy’, ‘Send’ or ‘Subscribe’) generate measurably higher click rates than buttons with sharp edges (rectangular shapes with 90-degree corners). Several studies have been done on this topic; among them, researchers have found that:

• A landing page for an event planning tool had a 55.5% higher click rate when using rounded CTA buttons
• Customers put 25.7% more products into their baskets while buying smartphone accessories online
• During an experiment in which the participants’ gaze was tracked, people looked at the rounded button for 28.6% longer and their gaze returned to the button 61.8% more.
• Students participating in a lab study were 46% more likely to click a button to take an extra survey when it was rounded

However, if the button is for a negative action like ‘Click to unsubscribe’ or ‘Delete’, there is no significant difference on whether a person will click on the button or not even if it is rounder or just rectangular.

🔍 Circles in the Wild and in Studies

Bigger companies have used more circles and curved shapes in their designs for a while. Amongst them are well-known websites such as Google, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok, Netflix, and just about every social media and a huge portion of the websites on the Internet. This is not only used for websites but in other types of graphic design like advertisements, logos and product design as well. In fact, in 2007, Holiday Inn spent a small fortune, changing more than 11,000 physical signs around its hotels around the world with a more simplified version of its logo.

In 2006, Bar and Neta conducted two experiments, first with a chocolate product, second with water and bleach bottles.

They recorded participants’ likes and dislikes responses based on brief presentations of images of real world objects and meaningless patterns, some with rounded counters, some with straight as well as real world objects with mixed contours.

• A general preference was found for images and patterns with rounded contours
• In a study, participants were presented with bottles of water and bleach, all with a simple label labeling them as such but differing designs (eg. circle pattern vs diamond pattern on the label and bottle with rounder contours vs a more angular bottle design)
• Participants were asked to rate how likely they were to purchase each bottle with the roundest design being favored the most

🎨 Rounded Design for You

Rounded designs and call to action buttons with curved corners would best be utilized on your website and advertisements - not only will it help you receive more clicks, but it is also a type of design that generally looks quite good and modern.

Try to change more of the rectangular and square shapes that you use in your designs with ones with curved corners.

Although if your button is centered around NOT doing something or avoiding something (like opting out), there is no difference whether the button is rounded or rectangular. You may still want to keep it rounded to the same degree as the other though, for consistency throughout the design.