Thinking about how to come up with an outstanding online product? Be prepared that it is not only about being in trends of UX designing. It is much more than just great visual perception, brilliant concept, or popularity among buyers. Smart UX development will do the magic to make customers satisfied with your gadget. Each well-qualified developer is aware of key UX principles. Nevertheless, common mistakes in UX appear constantly.
There are experts who feel certain of having the best UX approach. However, time after time they ask themselves why it does not increase sales through their websites. The reason to such a situation could lie down in common mistakes in web designing which they make without even realizing it.
So if you are interested in boosting your sales, in particular, with the help of your UX styling, learning from major mistakes in UX will help you to optimize experience of your users and to develop responding websites and popular mobile apps.
Just think like your customer: you won’t really enjoy the product if you don’t like the way it is presented or in case it is too complicated to use.
You might not even realize how many people in the world have the same issues. To be able to avoid mistaking in UX on websites and to let your audience enjoy whatever they do online, you better learn key UX principles and means to come up with a great UX design. So, to begin with, let’s discuss what UX designing is in general.
What is UX and how to deal with it
Probably you are already familiar with what such abbreviation is used for, but just to clarify the point in case some new bees are reading our article, UX is decoded as User Experience. However, only knowing what given term stands for is not enough to understand what good UX is and its key principles to develop a competitive product.
Shortly, UX includes all components of a system, like, service, product, app, website, etc., and shows it in the way users experience it. We all want to reach a positive and desirable result with UX including interface, physical interactions, industrial design, etc.
It is clear to everyone that effective website design shall be human-oriented. One of the main principles of UX is to integrate people needs into technology possibilities taking into account business success requirements. Described approach will surely fix your UX and keep you away from common UX mistakes.
UX and UI are two different notions
Generally, to ensure the audience enjoys a gadget, developers shall optimize it in the best possible way. This is when User Experience plays a primary role. Speaking of developing UI - meaning, User Interface - it is considered more like something complimentary to customers’ perception, say, appearance and sensation, appliance interaction ability.
Customer visual interface must be designed to represent the sight and the shape of program interfacing. In most cases, such kind of engineering is about graphic resources. However, it can refer to others, like voice-controlled ones.
The described notion plays a quite important part when we talk about website’s UX, but there are also other critical players in today’s game. Developing a great design of UX is to consist of consecutive steps to develop a mobile application or site to attract newcomers. Your creation should be simple to understand and to utilize. Therefore, adequate UX design attitude will ensure client interface of the appropriate quality.
9 steps to obtain great UX design solution
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Defining business goals together with technical specifications
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Studying competitors
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Learning customers’ needs
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Considering data submission and sitemap
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Dealing with customisable workflows
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Creating interactive option
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Constructing interaction test specimens
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Conducting practicality verification
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Performing graphic engineering
Those stages ought to be applied before you reach up to the final step. Thereby, common mistakes in web designing stay far behind you.
Great UX design is not for decoration only
Aesthetics shall be pragmatical. Just being pretty does not focus on optimizing user experience. Sometimes it can actually cause readability problems or other minor mistakes in UX. Effective web and mobile design is about what users see on their devices, how they feel about it and how it all works. If you want design of your digital product to be practical and popular, you should find a way to provide outstanding user experience.
Actually, the visual effect of your website’s UX shall be a simple and nice addition to an already valuable gadget. A pleasant touch, so to say. However, ignoring relevance while chasing perfection in the look is definitely NOT a core principle of UX design. Being practical is an essential and effective approach of web design as it reflects if a particular appliance is simple to apply.
Thought through device utility is another way to optimize user experience. Such a tool shall provide functions people need. Convenience in use, in its turn, is a method to understand how simple and comfortable it is to use those functions.
UX design principles, both desktop and mobile, are to be followed not as a separate step in the whole development process. Their understanding and application shall run like a golden thread through a company’s everyday operations. Thinking and acting this way is the cost of effective and functional web design.
And now, when you have an understanding on what UX is, let’s move on to common UX mistakes and see how to fix them.
Mistake #1: When you design for yourself
It usually happens when designers decide not to conduct any researches to learn their target audience. Your goal shall be to design specially for those people who use your site, to meet their needs and expectations, to give them what they want, as well as attracting new users.
To explain his concept Jerry Cao from UXPin has his special term genius mentality stating that while working in such an area it is essential to keep two things separately: what you want and what your customers need. Just create your UX design and let your audience experience your app and use it to their best advantage.
It is not too difficult to avoid those pitfalls. Just remember to conduct a quantitative research to see what pages users visit the most and which ones they prefer to skip by coming to a previous page. It is not too hard, and those efforts are to fix your UX.
As it was already mentioned, one of popular desktop and mobile UX trends is a quantitative research to understand why people enjoy some online products and why they are so eager to quit others. Also, the good exercise would be to think of some points which better be tested (say, UX design testing) to make sure everything works as you expect. This approach will definitely help you to fix mentioned common UX mistake that might appear as soon as you launch your product.
Mistake #2: Having too much text
Of course, you want your site or mobile app to look great and to be up to date, but clarity shall not be the price of it. As we know, most users just take a quick pick on bullet points on the page rather than putting some efforts to read long paragraphs completely. So the concept is very simple – make it short and clear enough to pass the right message to users. Easy recipe to make your web design more effective.
When working on your creation, just keep it in mind that 90% of all information which is transmitted to the brain is visual and our brain processes it 60,000 times faster than texts.
Mistake #3: Do everything possible to break away from cliches
There is nothing wrong to follow some kind of a well-known sample to arrange your page. It is to help customers to get familiar with it in an easy and fast way. But don’t cross the line when you make it too simple and primitive. Keep in your mind main effective web design principles to deal with any UX mistakes, even complex ones. And still to create something completely new and innovative your idea should not necessarily be the best possible one or unique.
Adam Fairhead from Fairhead Creative emphasizes that it is wiser to develop your website or mobile app on simplicity and clarity basis rather than making it too complex and too creative. Chasing successful form design, developers can end up with poor readability. So, when it is simple and clear, users’ previous experience helps them to feel comfortable on your page, no matter if they use a computer or a smartphone.
To make sure your work will be happily accepted by users, try to apply Don Norman’s approach. Saying in few words, Don suggests observing how people use something. Then prototype it, test it and after that repeat it. Such a similar concept is applicable to your UX design as well.
It would be a bad idea to check out other sites which have more or less same audience to see if there are any interesting ideas to apply for yourself. It won’t help you to implement responsive design or to improve the conversion rate for your website. It is not about just copying from your competitors. To make your product popular and wanted, you have to understand what your target audience is accustomed to. Take something familiar to them and find the golden mean by adding your specialties, but don’t repeat any common web designs mistakes.
Mistake #4: Let’s say it is the same as on Mobile
There is no need for us to remind you about modern world tendency when all mankind utilizes cell phones. We all know from our own experience - traffic of our cell phones is completely different from traffic on computers. Thereby, it makes sense if your mobile UX would not be the same as your desktop UX.
So please look at few advice for you to feel more confident:
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Do your best to perform tests on different appliances separately to see if your page is uploaded as it is supposed to, meaning promptly to all gadgets.
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Better if you conduct testing of your cell phone and your desktop separately as each of them has a unique special UX design.
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Try to keep the user’s interface as simple as possible, as no need to torture your audience with numerous screens if you can create only one.
Above hints shall give you some ideas on how to handle particular mobile UX design inconveniences and fix them successfully.
Mistake #5: You are not responsive
Responsiveness is a tool for sites to adjust layouts depending on what audience browses from: cell phone, home computer, tablet, etc. So it shall be applied to transform desktop UX design into mobile app UX design, or vice versa. We need this tool to make sure our website looks outstanding from any devices.
What can happen if your website is not really responsive? Users might think there is something wrong with it. Maybe it is broken? So having bad user experience they most likely will leave it. And make sure your page has all the necessary elements, let’s say, visitors won’t be able to get to their cart page if there is no such option.
So to avoid such a big mistake in UX think of what to invent for your users to enjoy the website no matter what devices they use to do so.
Mistake #6: No breathing space
Putting too many elements in one single page is a quite common UX mistake on websites. Look what happens. When there are too many elements, they kind of compete with each other to attract users’ attention. And in the end, no one wins as visitors just feel lost in the pile of information. So, as a result, poor user experience is guaranteed.
How to avoid it:
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Choose what you want to focus on: product image, form or action to call button.
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Leave white space to show users the right direction to the most important parts.
Mistake #7: Where is a call to action button?
Working on your UX design keep in mind - you create it for a specific reason. What do you want your audience to do? Make sure they understand what you want from them: to sign up, to purchase, to call you, to request the quote.
Be creative and you will find the way to make your call to action button stand out from other elements on the page. Hence, you can help your audience to take an action you want from them.
To sum up
As you can see now, those common UX mistakes can ruin efforts you put when creating your website or mobile app. You better remember about them at any time. If you know what those mistakes are, you can easily fix them to optimize your product. Thus, you will definitely notice some positive changes regarding your sales.
If you would like to learn more on how to develop a website for you business to get income, some secrets of the catchy product page will help you to make it happen.
Knowledge is power, so we hope all the hints mentioned above can help you to understand what UX web design is and how to use it to succeed. In any case, you can contact us directly if you have any question. Our professional team could offer you our assistance if you need it.
