Button Gravity Caught in Eye Gaze

A learning from commercial usability work in the nineties still holds true. Button gravity describes the tendency for users to home to the bottom submit button on a form page.

One of our early designs for the new e-commerce transaction flow suffered from an unfortunate case of button gravity. Note: This is a phenomena that you can use to aid your site's efficiency, by making it work for you, not against you.

The image below shows a step in the checkout process where the user can select "same as billing" for ship-to, or enter an alternate ship-to address. The green numbered circles, and the blue "meta steps", show the ordering of user attention while working through a checkout.

The user first checks out the billing address, quite in detail, and should have determined that this was the desired outcome. He proceeds to check the price and order contents and is drawn into the last submit button on the page by sheer force of gravity! He realizes this is not the right option and eventually makes his way back to the correct button at the top of the screen.