True or False? Right-Aligned Buttons Are More Efficient

Let’s take a look at those ubiquitous buttons at the bottom of the form: cancel and submit. We thought it would be more efficient for right-handed people to click buttons that are on the right side of their screen because that’s the hand that controls the mouse or touches the screen. Given you’re designing with a left-to-right written language and more people are right-handed than left-handed, you should default to placing action-oriented buttons on the right side of the screen.

This belief was widespread on our team. One of us swore they saw it presented by a famous UX person at a conference a long time ago (they couldn’t find their presentation notes), and another thought that Material Design makes you right-align buttons because it’s more usable (reading through their current documentation, it does seem like they have a tendency to right align, but it doesn’t seem like a hard rule). It was time for a usability test.