Without proper strategizing and planning in UI/UX design, you risk wasting time and money in the end. Poor usability always results in low conversion and customer retention rates. This means that your clients will come and go, leaving you at the starting point again and again.
Thus, as you can see, UX design mistakes can be quite costly for businesses. Read on to learn what missteps are the most common and how to avoid them at the early stages of your project development.
Top 10 UX Design Mistakes to Avoid
Here are the top ten dramatic flaws that businesses continue making in software development. Unfortunately, such errors are costly and far-reaching in their consequences. So, look at the list and find the ones you’re making to correct the situation.
#1 Starting Development without Prior Research
Some businesses, especially long-standing and experienced ones, hold a false belief that they know their customers inside out. In fact, people change, and the needs of small, specific target user groups may be surprisingly different from what you’ve imagined. As a result of creating products based on your gut feeling, not on market and target audience research, you can waste money and produce an app that nobody needs. Thus, an outcome of business-centered (not user-centered) software development often ends up in failure.
#2 Confusing Functional and Non-Functional Project Requirements
Another standard error among designers and software developers is to confuse functionality and design. In simple words, functionality relates to WHAT your system can do, and design stands for HOW WELL it does it. Functionality belongs to the functional requirements domain. Here you decide on the set of features that represent value for your customers. Design is about making those features accessible and attractive to users, which is specifically about UX.
#3 Choosing the Wrong Onboarding Techniques
Onboarding rocks and new users often adjust to the new apps quicker upon getting proper guidance. The major issue here is the choice of an onboarding technique that suits the primary user the best. Some businesses choose to know for sure and put in place several onboarding sequences in their welcome process. They send prompts via email, provide educational videos upon sign-up, and add a pile of textual guidelines.
The truth is that this approach rarely works well. A better path is to learn how users engage with those onboarding materials, which ones they find the most valuable, and stick to that technique. Otherwise, the risks of overwhelmed users deciding to abandon education altogether are high.
#4 Wrong Content Positioning
Wrong page layout is a widely spread problem of UX design. As a result of the non-intuitive positioning of critical elements, users find it hard to perform simple actions. For instance, if you place an “Order” tab in an unusual place, most users will end up closing the website and not ordering. Today’s users are busy and impatient. So, not finding the needed information quickly leads to inevitable churn. A wise solution to this problem is to position all elements on your page in line with the website heatmap rules. The heatmap will show where the focal points of user attention are. It gives you hints for easier interaction and achievement of the intended impact fast.
#5 Cumbersome Payment System
Research proves that clients often abandon an app or website because of their inability to pay. Sometimes the client’s credit card will fail, while in other cases, the system failure prevents the customer from completing the transaction. What are the chances that your customers will start over and over again in hopes of completing the purchase? Right, they are meager. A more realistic scenario is to make a couple of clicks and complete a purchase on a competitor’s website with a flawlessly working payment pipeline.
Your life lesson from this situation should be as follows: go the extra mile to ensure that payments work ideally. Don’t overburden the payment page with unnecessary personal details and lengthy forms. Make the payment process as quick and simple as possible, and your revenue is sure to grow.
#6 Poor Search Quality
Whenever new users come to a website or app, they need to find the information or feature they’ve come for. However, too many websites underestimate the usability of search and don’t invest time in its optimization, thinking, “seek and ya shall find.” Unfortunately, things don’t work like this, and users lose their motivation with every wasted second on the website without their search results.
Even worse, users may find the search function only to find that it works incorrectly and doesn’t display relevant results. That’s an absolute failure for any website, causing considerable churn among dissatisfied users. A quick fix for this problem is optimized internal linking, giving the users the right results based on their keyword search.
#7 Inconvenient Multimedia
One minor technical issue that often does a bad favor to a web resource is the autoplay for video and audio materials. There’s nothing more irritating and discomforting for users than watching or listening to materials they didn’t switch on. So, please stop doing this – people really don’t like it.
#8 Wrong Color Palette
Tons of materials are available on color psychology and the effects of various color combinations, but businesses continue making mistakes in this domain. A widespread reason for wrong color choices is the focus on the designer’s preferences or brand colors instead of listening to the voice of common sense. A better approach is to read about color psychology and strike a perfect balance between your favorite colors and the intended emotional, visual, and psychological effect.
#9 Too Simple or Too Complicated Design
Ideally, an app should be adjustable to the competency levels of different users, allowing newbies to perform the most effortless operations, while advanced users can complete more sophisticated interactions with the app as they learn. It’s called a user journey, with new users gradually exploring the app’s potential and learning to get the maximum from its functionality.
Still, few businesses manage to achieve that balance. Some prefer to sacrifice functionality for the sake of simplicity, which makes the user journey too short. Once people get acquainted with all features and see there’s nothing left to do anymore, they leave for new experiences. On the other hand, businesses that try to squeeze all their features and benefits into one introductory email may also push users back. Newcomers may feel that the app is too complicated and feature-rich for them, thus leaving them to look for simpler solutions.
#10 Skipping Usability Testing
No matter what you think and what your target users say, the UX design you’ve come up with may not work at all. It’s a common problem among software developers, as it’s hard to unify numerous stakeholders’ perspectives and achieve a proper, balanced, and universally suitable design.
The best way to know for sure is to conduct usability testing. UX testing may be done with a group of target users to see whether you’re on the right path. To do it, you need to ask people whether they like the colors, the logo, the way an app interacts with them. Testing results will give you proper directions for app refinement before launch.
How to Improve UX Before Launch?
With these costly flaws in mind, you should choose a different UX/UI design path for your products. The most important tip is to be focused on your target audience and brand image, seeking consistency between the two in design solutions. Business resources should speak about who you are and what value you can deliver to users. Thus, by achieving convenience and logic on your website, you have all chances to engage more satisfied clients upon launch.