Every day, you come across apps and websites that make you want to pull the hair off your hair out. Sometimes, they really make you wonder whether or not we are as fast-paced in technology and the web as we might claim to be. Come to think of it, it is 2017, the world is brimming with new ideas in science and tech, and you’re sitting here waiting for this web page to load with the unnecessary bells and whistles on it. Ticks you off, doesn’t it?
Slowly and steadily, web designers all over the world are tapping into the problems in UI/UX design. But some UX mistakes have become so integrated in web designs that designers have stopped recognizing them as mistakes.
Social media company Dubai has started gathering and working on user feedback, besides providing social media services. This has proved to be a great boon for their UX designs and, consequently, conversion rates. They found out the following to be the worst UX design practices carried out by UI/UX designers.
1. Unexpectedness
People feel highly agitated when something happens unexpectedly on a website. For instance, when they click a button and it doesn’t result in the expected action. The agitation is furthered because the users don’t know what to do in order to achieve the expected result, and they end up leaving the web page for good.
Web page elements, such as navigation and CTAs that do not serve their purpose, are known as mystery meat navigation, a term first coined by Vincent Flanders, the founder of the satirical website ‘Webpages That Suck’. One such web page featured an area of buttons posing to be CTA buttons, calling visitors to ‘Register’. A click tracking study carried out on this webpage found that people clicked on these buttons a lot, but they did not yield the expected result. That made people leave the web page because they thought it was broken. Replacing these impersonator buttons with clickable ones shot up the website’s conversion rate by 122%.
This goes to say how vital it is that every element on the website serves a purpose. Be clear and communicative in your UX designs.
2. Immobile Pages
Many times when you follow a link on your mobile phone, you are asked very politely to ‘download a dedicated app’ to access the content. What UX designers are failing to acknowledge or confront is that it is the end of it. Rarely do users ever download the suggested app.
There is a certain dishonesty in suggesting that your users download an app on your mobile web page, which is communicated immediately. And dishonesty is the last thing you want your users to remember about your user experience design.
3. Poor Performance
Performance, more often than not, is the aspect that single-handedly decides whether a user stays or abandons your web page. To see such an important aspect so commonly neglected pains user experience goals. In the end, it all comes down to how fast the website performs and carries out actions.
Performance is neglected because it’s not a physical aspect. Web designers spend time gleaming up the aesthetics of the website and trying out state-of-the-art development tools. They are essential for user experience, but certainly second to page load speed.
Responsiveness is a fundamental user experience requirement. Do not overlook performance over aesthetics, as high page loading time is the first thing people notice and the last thing they remember about a website’s user experience design.
4. Carousels
You may have heard praises upon praises for carousels, but come to think of it, who would want to wait for the entire web page to be refreshed and reloaded to see every item on a list? To be honest, carousels exist to score more clicks and page views.
This was an acceptable exploitation of the user back when clicks and page views used to matter. They are doing no good to your SEO or user experience with the change in Google’s algorithm and users’ priorities.
Cut down image sliders, carousels, and clickbait pagination. Win over users with quality content and a smooth web experience.
5. Complicated Design
Complexity is the archenemy of good user experience design. And it is the hardest thing to fix because it involves removing elements and features from the website and telling designers their work has to be axed.
Designers fail to see how overcrowded their website is with elements. Once they do come face to face with the realization, it involves destroying features, sometimes core elements, which crumbles the whole experience. This is why it is imperative to cater to complex design before it’s too late.
No denying, a simple design is hard to create, but it’s the ultimate need of the hour. Remain focused on your initial sketches of the website, and the eventual results will automatically be minimalistic, clean, and pleasing to the eye.
The UX design mistakes discussed above are so widely prevalent that they have almost become ‘errors’. Know that mistakes are ignorable, errors are not. Always remember to work on these user experience issues while the project is still in its fundamental stages.
