Button labels

Buttons signal important calls to action (CTA) and help people quickly see what’s the most important action they need to take on a page. Treat buttons like important or primary content, and prioritize their placement on pages as you would essential information.

For simple navigation to lead people between pages, use links instead of buttons.

• Use sentence case for button labels (except for Button - Icon).
• Make button labels as short as possible.
• Use “action words” that people recognize and clearly signal what will happen when they click the button.
• Keep the character limit for button labels to 35 characters. Button labels should be as short as possible with “trigger words” that your users will recognize to clearly explain what will happen when the button is clicked (for example, “Back” or “Continue”).
• Make it an action.

Privacy guidance

Button text should avoid Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Protected Health Information (PHI) whenever possible.

• If button text must include PII/PHI, click events can’t be tracked for that button. This ensures the information isn’t tracked back in analytics or other logs through the button text.
• Teams will either need to consider other approaches to button text that don’t contain PII/PHI or find ways of getting site data other than the click events on those buttons.

Learn more on the Button component page

Learn more about PII/PHI on the VA Platform website

Related

• Button
• Button group
• Button icon