Button variants multiplied to 40 and nobody could pick one

At my last job we had 3 buttons on day one, then someone added a ghost with a thicker border, then a dark mode version, and before I left we had 40. The worst part was a new dev asked me which one to use for a checkout form and I literally opened 4 tabs side by side. After 6 months of this mess, we ran a quick audit and found 12 of those 40 were used in exactly zero places. We cut it down to 6 variants and tagged every one with a use case in our Figma file, but the damage was done. Now I ask any team I join how they handle button proliferation before I commit to their system. Has anyone else had to explain to management that extra options actually slow down the whole team?

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river_wright1d ago

I read somewhere that choice paralysis hits way harder when the options look almost the same, and that's exactly what happened with your ghost border vs dark mode thing. We had a similar mess where someone made a "danger" button in three different reds, and nobody could agree which one was the real one. Ended up printing out a one page cheat sheet and taping it to the monitor, but even that didn't stop people from saying "oh I thought the lighter one was for warnings". Also, your 12 unused variants thing is spot on, I've seen teams keep buttons alive just because one senior dev vouched for them once in a meeting three years ago.