A successful product is one that has awesome design, killer content, and powerful features. However, luck is also a factor. Many enterprises focus on how to maximize their product’s reach and how to get users to engage with it. Good design is a combination of multiple factors, including smart research, exposure to latest tools, out-of-the-box thinking, hard work, and collaboration among teams.
Designers usually focus on creating a great UX (user experience) to encourage more user engagement. This is important for both mobile and web design, but even a small mistake in UX can have a big negative impact. If users encounter problems with the UX, it can ruin the reputation of the product and cost it its place in the market. Even if you’re not a UX expert, this blog post can help you learn to identify and avoid common mistakes. This will be useful for your current and future development projects.
We should first understand what UX is before discussing the topic.
UX can help improve your brand positioning. It is often overlooked or given less importance, but it can have a big impact on how customers view your business. UX should be part of any project, as it can help determine the face of your brand.
How UX helps your brand?
- It helps you work on your goals
- It helps you identify your target audience
- It helps you in implementing your digital marketing strategies more effectively
- It helps you in achieving higher rate of user engagement
- It helps you in quality content creation
- It helps you save money and resources
- It helps you make money
- It helps you build your brand
Although it may be difficult to create a design that will please everyone, there are some common mistakes made by UX designers which can be avoided in order to maintain the integrity of the product. Let’s take a look at a few of these mistakes and how they negatively impact customers.
1. Not Understanding the True Meaning of UX
The true meaning of UX design is making it easy for users to interact with your product. This includes choosing the right colors, fonts, and images, as well as making sure the content is easy to understand and use. UX design has evolved over the years to encompass more than just a particular niche.
Due to the popularity of mobile devices and social media applications, user interaction and review has become easy. Therefore, companies cannot afford to have a sloppy product or an unfriendly UX. The competition is too high and market leaders are creating opportunities for themselves by offering a good experience. A successful company always puts user value at the top of their list when implementing every strategy.
2. No Communication
Having content that is concise, easy to understand and systematic is always a good idea for your design. If you put irrelevant content that is not much related to your product, no one is going to read it. It is easier for people to connect with visuals rather than text, and viewing something can help us comprehend better than just reading. Your UX should speak the message you want to share. Always try to combine your UX with images, text, content and if required videos. But try to communicate your ideas, vision, and products through your design.
Understand the difference between UI & UX
There is a distinction between user interface and user experience, which many people are not aware of. UX design is the process of identifying a particular need, prototyping a potential solution (which may not be the final product), and testing it. If the business model and value proposition are approved, the final product is then built.
User interface is mostly about the visual design and how a user interacts with it. A UX designer designs the user flows, while a UI designer makes it look nicer and more intuitive.
3. Unreadable Fonts
While it may be tempting to go for an design that heavily features innovative and novel typefaces, it’s important to make sure that the words themselves will still be readable. This is something that UX designers often overlook when working on such options. Make sure to pay attention to the number of words used and how easy they are to read. Typefaces with features such as extreme slants, tight and condensed letterforms, and overly decorated letters can be difficult to read and should be avoided. Instead, try looking for something from the Google Font Collections.
4. Inappropriate Images
Images that don’t align with the text can create a disconnect with the user and leave them feeling confused. This is just one of the ways that inappropriate images can ruin all the hard work put into UX.
- Common web images: Don’t use those common web images which you see in every alternative website. Please avoid such images and try to get unique & relevant images.
- Quality: Image quality is very important. Don’t use images with poor clarity, out of focus or with lesser resolution. It’s better to not use any image rather than using a poor quality image.
- Resolution: As I mentioned above, never use images with low resolution. If you’re still following old-school design rules, please update yourself. With the introduction of high-resolution screens, you have to revise your designing strategy.
- Connection: This is the most important factor. If your image is not speaking the topic or content, it is of no use. Users must get an overall idea about the topic just by looking at the image. Images should enhance content.
5. Ignoring Prototypes
This mistake defies the principle of being intuitive.
It’s likely that you’ve become familiar with certain prototypes.
The basic design is clear. Navigation will be at the top (with a call to action in a different color), one or two more calls to action near the top of the page (with one less noticeable than the other), a headline and a subheadline (with a value proposition), etc.
While many websites and mobile apps place their cart in the top, right-hand corner, other navigation options along the bottom of the screen are also common.
Adam believes that breaking away from “prototypes” is not necessarily a good idea.
According to Adam Fairhead, from Fairhead Creative:
” Sometimes designers feel like they messed up if their interface isn’t constantly exciting and different throughout the design, but it’s okay to value simplicity over being complicated and creative.
Standards provide clarity and users appreciate this.
Making prototypes of your site design helps to ensure a better user experience by basing the design off of familiar layouts that users are already comfortable with.
Heydon Pickering of The Paciello Group explains that complexity is the ultimate enemy of UX.
Heydon Pickering, The Paciello Group:
” Too much complexity makes it difficult to have a good user experience. It is also hard to fix once it is a problem.
To reduce complexity, you need to get rid of features, even if it means telling people that their work needs to be destroyed. It’s not an easy job, but good planning and being willing to say “no” early on can help.
If you are relying a lot on text to explain something, it is probably because you are not using an existing prototype.
6. Assuming the Rules Are the Same on Mobile
This mistake defies the principle of relevancy.
Mobile media consumption is continuing to grow rapidly and this trend is not slowing down.
There is no need for another article discussing how mobile traffic differs from desktop traffic, the negative aspects of long forms, or how small links/buttons can lead to a decrease in conversions.
However, there are a few things you should know about using your mobile phone.
- Cross device testing is a must. Make sure your site works properly and loads quickly on all devices. You might not have an Android, but I’m willing to bet one of your users does. Quality assurance is highly necessary.
- Test mobile and desktop separately. Your mobile UX and your desktop UX are completely different. Thus, they should be tested as such.
- The fewer taps, the better. Sometimes the best UI is no UI. The fewer taps you require from users, the better. Why take users through multiple screens (e.g. an onboarding flow) if you can condense it to one?
When designing for mobile devices, it is also important to consider legibility. The smaller size of mobile devices can make readability more of a challenge. In an article on the Yesterdayishere website, Bojan Janjanin explains why thin fonts may be hurting your mobile user experience.
Bojan Janjanin, Yesterdayishere:
If you want to know whether your users are happy with your website’s typography, invest in usability testing. This will help you test on all major devices, including mobile phones and tablets, under different conditions. For example, try testing your site on a mobile phone in daylight to simulate real-world conditions.
To sum up, the user experience on a mobile device is different than on a desktop computer. In fact, the experience on an iPhone might be different than on an Android phone. Don’t assume that research and test results can be applied in the same way to all devices.
The Fix
- Treat each device’s user experience separately. That means separate research, separate analysis, separate issues, separate prioritization, separate tests, etc.
- Focus on optimizing the UX for the specific device. Your goal is to deliver the most relevant experience for each device. That means the call to action might change, the checkout flow might change, etc.
- Quality assurance is key. Test your UX on all devices. Where’s the friction? Does the page load slowly? Does anything load improperly? Are images missing? Are images too big? Are links easy to click? Is the call to action relevant? For best results, don’t just test the most recent operating systems… not everyone is quick to upgrade.
7. Forgetting About Performance
This mistake defies the principle of conducting research.
One of the last things you probably think of when it comes to UX is site performance, but it’s actually a really important aspect to consider. As Brad Frost of Brad Frost Web explains, poor performance can have a big impact…
Brad Frost, Brad Frost Web:
” One of the most important aspects of a good user experience is performance, but it is often overlooked.
Too often, teams focus on creating a polished look for their product and neglect the user experience when it comes to how quickly the product loads and performs. We need to start making performance a priority to deliver a better experience for our users.
The speed of your website can have a big influence on how many people convert into customers. We have written about this before in a different article, so for more information, you can check that out.
It’s important to track errors on your site, as they are a direct measure of whether users are able to use your site in the way you want them too. Errors can be caused by server issues or poor UX design, so it’s important to identify the source of the errors and address them accordingly.
What you can’t see can have an impact on users even though you may not be able to tell by looking at it.
The Fix
- Check your analytics tool to identify the errors that your users are triggering. Start with the errors that are triggered most often. Why are they being triggered? What can you change to ensure they’re being triggered less? User testing and qualitative conversion research can answer these questions for you.
- Now check your analytics tool to identify pages with slow load times. Start with the pages furthest down the funnel. Why are they loading slowly? Are your images or videos too large? Are third-party apps slowing down your site overall?
Conclusion
A company with a good design can make its competitors obsolete. Top organizations have realized the importance of UX and are using it to create a community of followers and potential buyers. So take advantage of this.
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