As Enders explains, forms are all about taking action to complete a task. McGovern would argue that most web pages are about task completion, but forms differ from content pages in that the effort is highly focused with an expected instant outcome, rather than a general process of exploration and discovery with possibly no immediate end point.
It's therefore important that the visual design of a form makes it clear to the user that they are dealing with a form and that there's a specific task they need to complete now.
Gradients can improve the affordance ("clues to the operation of things") of form buttons and mark them as not just links or boxes, but strong calls to action.
The new Bootstrap form button UI might be visually "simpler and cleaner", but it's arguably less effective than its predecessor.
The problem is that in the push for simplicity, flat UIs may have gone too far. With content, things like drop shadows, gradients, and borders may well be no more than useless "embellishments." [...] With forms, however, distinguishing between a button and a link matters far more. Jessica EndersBack to the top