In today’s competitive business world, the user experience (UX) in a digital product is critical. With so many companies vying for their attention, visitors won’t stay engaged if anything about an experience rubs them the wrong way. They’ll simply cross your company off their list and move on to your competitor.
And, of course, people don’t tell you why they’re abandoning your product. They just leave, with each exit representing the loss of potential revenue.
Fortunately, while the reason someone didn’t become a customer will remain a mystery, there is ample data on why people give up on products in general. This article lists and explains 10 of the most common UX mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Insufficient Understanding of Pain Points
Having a high-level sense of what your customers want and need isn’t enough. You’ve got to dig deeper to understand the problems they face and how your product can address their pain points. People can determine within seconds whether a company truly “gets them” and will take their business elsewhere if it’s clear they don’t.
How To Avoid This Problem
Knowledge is power in UX design. Ensure you meet your customers’ requirements by interviewing users and observing how people interact with your product or website, etc. Gathering data, noting trends, and identifying areas for improvement are essential steps in UX design and fine-tuning.
2. Overly Complicated Interface
Simplicity is one of the keys to a positive user experience. People prefer interactions that maximize their benefits while minimizing their effort. If your product interface frustrates them, you’ll lose their confidence and likely their business.
How To Avoid This Problem
List your product’s features and rank them in order of importance to your users. Then, ensure that the most critical functions are easy to find and use, tucking others away in groups or menus that are still readily accessible.
3. Inadequate Feedback for Users
If you’ve ever used a product feature and not seen any indication that your action was successful (or unsuccessful), you know how irritating that can be. People may give up if they experience too many of those situations.
How To Avoid This Problem
Ensure your interface uses informative text and visual cues to indicate the results of actions. If the product displays error messages, they should be clear, specific to what occurred, and as detailed as necessary to help users understand what to do next.
4. Accessibility Issues
Products must be accessible to people with disabilities, such as visual impairments and limited motor skills. Failing to create positive experiences for people with these challenges alienates them and can create a negative perception of your company.
How To Avoid This Problem
Follow design best practices to ensure your product is accessible to a broad range of users. Those practices include providing alternative text for images, using sufficient color contrast, and many others. Use accessibility testing tools to ensure your product is easy to view and navigate.
5. Lack of Responsive Design
When using digital products, people expect a uniform UX across screens of all sizes—phones, tablets, and computers. Failing to meet that expectation can adversely affect product adoption and use.
How To Avoid This Problem
Ensure your product has a responsive design, and then test all of its features across various devices and platforms.
6. Aesthetic Inconsistencies
Unintended variations in fonts, color palettes, button styles, and other visual elements look unprofessional and can leave people with a negative impression of your product. While appearance may not be the most important aspect of your offering, it can tip the scales when other factors are equal.
How To Avoid This Problem
Before you dive into development, create a detailed design plan for your product. It should outline how to use fonts, colors, page layouts, and other elements consistently so that your product is visually appealing and easy to use.
7. Complex Language or Jargon
Your product’s menus, field labels, messages, and other text should reflect how your customers talk about it, not how your team does. Language that’s hard for users to understand can confuse or frustrate them, leading to a poor user experience.
How To Avoid This Problem
Read and reread all the text in your product, confirming that you’re using clear, concise, everyday language. It’s important to ask yourself, “Would a new user describe this feature this way to a friend?” If the answer is no, you need to revise the vocabulary.
8. A One-and-Done Approach
You shouldn’t assume that because your UX gets a passing grade from your team and your users, you never have to consider it again. User preferences evolve. Terminology evolves. Industry norms evolve. Your product needs to evolve, too.
How To Avoid This Problem
Collect metrics and solicit feedback on your product regularly, and make changes as needed to ensure a consistently positive user experience.
9. Chasing Design Fads
While updating your product as needed is critical, you shouldn’t make changes based solely on what’s “in” at any given time.
How To Avoid This Problem
Before making modifications to improve your product’s UX, it’s a good idea to track the trajectory of a design trend. Some develop and endure, so they’re worth considering. Others rise sharply and fall off just as quickly, so it’s best not to invest time and effort in them.
10. Poor or Nonexistent Onboarding
Many products with tremendous potential fail to achieve widespread adoption because they don’t guide new users in how to get the most from their features and functions. Having detailed help text, proper field labels, etc., is essential, but without a process for getting users up to speed, they may never see those things.
How To Avoid This Problem
Start by ensuring you understand how people interact with your product, including any confusion that arises as they try to find and use features. Then, create onboarding flows that explain the product’s most important functions, starting with definitions of any unique terminology and expanding from there.
Effective UX Development Requires Expertise and Experience
Creating digital products that deliver positive user experiences is a science and an art. Following UX design best practices is an excellent way to start. However, deep immersion in this discipline provides an intuitive understanding of what will work for a particular offering based on the product type, market, and other factors.
That combination of skill and a track record of success is what we bring to the table at The Creative Alliance. Our team has a well-earned reputation for truly understanding user needs and addressing them with designs that deliver outstanding experiences.
To learn more about our UX design capabilities, contact The Creative Alliance today.