Poor UX Design: 9 Tips for Preventing the Same Mistakes
UX design may seem much easier than people think. However, this isn’t always the truth. There are many things you need to learn about UX design and some mistakes that we make we might never realize.
Learning from your UX design mistakes will help you better understand what you do and make the app or website you create much more effective. Poor UX design is when you pay more attention to what you prefer than your target users. This is never a good practice, so it’s important to always focus on your users and not only on what you think is good.
However, there are plenty of factors that affect a UX design. Also, there are many mistakes you might be making but aren’t aware of. Let’s dive deeper into this article to find out which mistakes those might be.
How does UX design help your brand?
For any fact, we all know that you can only satisfy someone partially with your designs, but there are still many things you can avoid during the process. Before we dive deeper into this article, let’s identify a few advantages of how UX helps grow your brand:
- It enables you to save resources and money
- It helps you build up your brand
- It allows you to increase your engagement rates
- Clarifies who your target audience is
- It helps you achieve your goals
To make things easier, you can also consider using UX design tools. Here are a few UX tools we recommend you use this year
- Maze
- Sketch
- Adobe XD
- Figma
- Marvel
- InVision
- Proto.io
You can use plenty of tools, but these are the ones we think will best fit your daily interactions.
9 UX mistakes you should stop making
- Not paying too much attention to the user experience
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- There are many UX designers who don’t pay too much attention to the user experience but focus more on the visuals. While it may seem the right way to do things, it isn’t. This is where you can distinguish what makes an excellent UX designer and what makes an average one; it is where they shift their focus.
- Visuals are not something you should ignore, but it’s not as important as ensuring the user experience is at the right level. For instance, users will leave right away when they see that the navigation system is confusing and thus, will increase your bounce rate.
- In other words, if you put the user experience as your priority, you’ll always have a better reason why users will want to stick around your website. Look at it this way, your users aren’t interested in looking at your content’s graphics but rather at what matters the most in your content and how easy it is to navigate through.
- Have no clue what your users want and need
- Another major issue with UX design is needing to be able to understand your users well enough. Not knowing what your users want or need is the same as if you are going somewhere without a plan. Your final destination won’t be anywhere except down a road of failure.
- So, what can you do to ensure you are addressing the needs and wants of your audience? You can start out by conducting user research and create a need statement. A need statement defines what your users need.
- You can develop a need statement in many ways, but everything needs to begin with user research. First, it will present you with data you can use to make conclusions. Then, once you gather the required amount of insights, you need to start brainstorming enough with your team members to find out what you can do with that data.
- Once you come up with the right ideas, you can all group together and develop the required solution to put into your need statement. After, you can identify what the real reality with your users is.
- Videos that autoplay
- Autoplay videos are something few website visitors look forward to. It can get quite annoying and might not promote something interesting to the users. More importantly, if you are a UX designer, you need to think about your user first and see how they would perceive something.
- Even if it was you, how interesting would it be to you if someone showed you videos that you aren’t interested in? It’s all about showing people what they like and want to see. The moment you don’t have an interest, you’ll get annoyed and leave the website. Therefore, as a UX designer, you must always pay special attention to this.
- Lack of communication
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- Your UX content is good when it is easy to understand. If you add content that isn’t related to your product and service, don’t expect anyone to pay attention to it. It’s pretty obvious that you can connect with visuals much easier than text, but your UX design will communicate the message.
- Some of the biggest issues are that UX is that designers will focus on one element more than the other. Still, the most important thing is to have the necessary communication between your content, text, image, and the videos you include.
- Not paying enough attention to usability testing
- Usability testing helps you understand what your customers are looking for and what they aren’t. But, unfortunately, you can’t find out what your customers need or want until you actually put your product to the test.
- Many large brands have also changed their UX design to meet user expectations and requirements. It’s all part of the UX design process. In order for you to create a better experience for your users, you need to listen closely to their feedback and needs.
- Furthermore, if you want to succeed in your usability testing, you must do so with at least eight participants. Keep in mind that it’s never a good idea to keep too many participants for your usability testing because the results may not be the best. However, eight is an ideal number you can use.
- Poor app copy
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- If you want the best UX design, you must have a good copywriter. The smoothness of copy is having the right language when a user reads your copy on your website. For example, here is an excellent example below.
- Several pop-ups
- We can’t deny that popups are some of the best options for driving traffic to your site. However, keep in mind that there is also a downside to this as well. Pop-ups can become annoying to users and you may never know it. It can seriously affect your monthly traffic and impact your site’s search engine rankings.
- For instance, Google has undertaken actions for websites that hide their content with pop-ups. They are trying to enhance the mobile user experience and eliminate annoying pop-ups as much as possible. When users start using the website, they’ll run into better experiences and not get annoyed by pop-ups.
- Fonts that aren’t readable
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- It can be a huge issue if you are creating a website that doesn’t have readable text. Unfortunately, many UX designers don’t actually pay much attention to this. However, this is a huge problem when it comes to users. Several combinations will make your typeface look better.
- Don’t forget to pay special attention to the number of words you use. How does a user find it difficult to read? Typefaces that may have confusing fonts, incredibly decorated fonts, or irregular shapes will be hard to navigate through. If you want to find simple and easy-to-use fonts, you can choose some from Google Font Collections.
- Designing only what you care about and not the users
- When you are in the UX design field, you have plenty of opinions on what you think might be the right fit. As a UX designer, you should know that you are one designer out of many worldwide. Therefore, testing and seeing what works best for your audience is important.
- This way, you can create effective UX designs that address your audience and meet their needs. When you do so, you can consider the following:
- Conduct usability testing that helps you determine buttons, colors, text, and more preferences.
- Identify what complicates the UI and try to make it in favor of your user journey to map out how your users will interact with your website.
- To clarify this, you can consider setting up a user persona. A user persona will describe your target audience and allow you to learn more about your audience’s preferences and weak points. That way, you know what kind of adjustments to make and how you can improve your UX design based on their preferences.
What did we learn?
There are many UX designers worldwide, but of course, not all have the same mindset and skills. A good UX designer is someone who listens to their audience and makes the necessary adjustments based on their preferences.
UX designers who only think about what looks good to them won’t be successful in keeping users interested. That’s why users are what drive you and make the best out of you. Therefore, conduct user research and make sure you are avoiding the most common mistakes other UX designers make.
About the author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.