Common UX Design Mistakes That Are Costing You Customers

Source: Freepik

User experience (UX) is a perception or response a person forms from using a specific product, system, or service. In web development, it stands for the experience visitors get from using your website. When this perception is bad, a person is more likely to bounce from a page and never come back. For business, this could mean losing potential customers and damaging its reputation.

Of course, neither designers nor businesses have full control over a person’s perception of their site. Nevertheless, they do have control over how their website works and can influence UX through improving navigation, readability, and other experience elements.

In this article, we’ll talk about the most prominent UX mistakes that might be costing you customers and give practical tips on how to detect and fix them.

What Is User Experience Design?

UX design is a continuous process in which a designer ideates, plans, and optimizes all parts of the website that affect UX.

It typically involves studying visitors’ needs and behaviors. Next, these insights are applied to every point of user-website interaction, focusing on user experience basics like:

• Ease of use
• Accessibility
• Navigation
• Functionality
• Visual appealingness
• Emotional impact

Why Should Businesses Care About UX Design?

Many think about UX design merely from an aesthetic position. But it’s deeper than that. It’s about giving meaningful experiences that your prospects will love. And it has a massive impact on business success.

In particular, good UX design can help you:

• Establish consistent branding.
• Stand out from the competition.
• Create customer satisfaction and support brand image.
• Boost revenue through satisfying user needs.
• Ensure customer loyalty.

Shortly, user experience design is a strategic business asset. It helps brands interact with their audience effectively. It helps improve your reputation and credibility. It also has the potential to reinforce your marketing efforts. For example, conversion rates can be optimized through a more strategic placement of buttons. And SEO and organic visibility can be improved through overall UX optimization because its elements (for example, site speed and navigation) directly affect rankings.

One way or another, quality UX can help you prevent losing customers and ensure you thrive in the long run. Further in this guide, we’ll tell you about the top 8 UX design problems that might be holding you back from success.

1. Complicated Navigation

In order to capture potential customers and make sure you don’t lose them, you need to create a seamless experience that makes them want to stay on your site for a longer time. Logical pathways between your pages help achieve this goal. They enable users to explore different pages and content pieces in a natural and convenient way, which is why poorly thought-through navigation is one of the biggest UX design fails.

The most common errors navigation-wise include:

• Hidden options
• Overcomplicated menus
• Unclear labels or categories
• Lack of an on-site search feature
• Lack of breadcrumb trails, etc.

In order to overcome the issue, you need to make your navigation simpler and more predictable. That’s when visitors will stay.

2. Poor Mobile Optimization

The latest report on the state of website traffic reveals—96.3% of people browse the web from a mobile phone. Needless to say, their experience will be ruined when they land on your site and find it absolutely unsuitable for mobile use.

Given the huge share of mobile users, not optimizing your pages for mobile is one of the biggest UX design mistakes that can cause a loss of many potential customers. The result? Too many bouncing users and reduced conversions. To overcome the problem, it’s important to test your pages’ friendliness and implement a responsive design. The key elements include a friendly layout that adjusts to the user’s screen and touch-friendly navigation.

3. Usage of Hard-to-Read Fonts

The typography on your pages serves more than just an aesthetic purpose. When you choose incorrect fonts, it can negatively affect the readability of your content. As a result, a user doesn’t get what they came to your website for—to find answers to their questions. And they leave.

Poor typography can result in a number of engagement issues, such as poor page views, low dwell time, and increased bounce rate. Affecting these engagement metrics, poor typography can eventually hinder your SEO and rankings.

Beyond this, poorly-chosen fonts can also affect the technical performance of your site, for example, lowering your mobile-friendliness score or leading to slower loading times. So, all in all, choosing neat and clear fonts is crucial for UX. Some good options to consider include:

• Arial
• Open Sans
• Lato
• Verdana
• Helvetica
• Roboto, etc.

4. Neglecting Page Speed and Performance

Slow loading speed and poor technical performance are among those UX mistakes that affect your business in many ways. First of all, this overwhelms and confuses visitors who land on your pages, making them leave.

Secondly, poor technical performance hinders users’ trust because now, there is a clear link between how your site performs and how professional your business looks to people. Respectively, when your pages load slowly and occasionally glitch, this impacts people’s trust and the overall impression of your brand. On top of that, poor performance negatively affects your SEO, making it harder to explore you organically.

Many factors can impact loading speed and technical performance. The most common ones are:

• Unreliable hosting providers
• Overloaded scripts
• Heavy media files
• Lack of cashing, etc.

Detecting existing mistakes and optimizing your website for better performance can help overcome this issue.

5. Ignoring SEO-Driven UX

Although SEO and UX are two very different areas, they intersect a lot. In this article, we’ve talked about how common mistakes in user experience also affect your rankings in search engines. That’s why ignoring SEO, in a way, is also a UX issue. Simply because they impact each other a lot.

What does this mean? SEO is a tool for ensuring organic discoverability of your site in search engines. It drives people to your website, and UX ultimately makes them stay there. In simple words, in order to deliver positive experiences to people, you need to attract them to your pages first. And that’s where overlooking SEO can play a bad joke.

Ignoring keywords, metadata, site structure, and other SEO elements could make you lose potential customers. That’s why it’s important to leverage AI SEO tools and combine your UX efforts with effective optimization.

6. Allowing for Too Much Clutter

Clutter creates cognitive overload. It distracts them from actually important things like your content and CTAs. Eventually, users can simply leave without exploring your site or taking action.

Among the most common clutter issues are too many CTAs, overuse of pop-ups, heavy animated banners, and crowded layouts. Instead, businesses should embrace minimalist design, use clear visual hierarchy, and leave sufficient whitespace.

Source: Freepik

7. Conflicting Branding and Design Elements

The website is the face of your business on the web. It has to reflect your brand’s identity and emphasize its unique image. That’s why branding and web design should go hand in hand.

Nevertheless, ignoring branding remains one of the most common UX design mistakes companies make. The use of mismatched fonts, styles, and colors on different pages, a lack of branded elements like your company logo, or inconsistent voice—all these issues can break your identity and result in poor brand recognition. To avoid damage to recognition and trust, you need to create a consistent branded design across all your pages.

8. Overlooking Accessibility

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that an estimated 1.3 billion people are living with a significant disability, which is 1 in 6 people globally. These numbers indicate a big need for accessibility in our world. And it should go beyond offline accessibility.

Ignoring the need for accessibility may not be one of the most obvious UX design problems. But it’s a major issue. When you don’t use the right colors, fonts, site navigation, and other accessibility elements, you hold some users with disabilities from accessing and interacting with your site. Respectively, you are losing potential customers.

Conclusion

As you can see, user experience design is essential for making your business thrive. It affects recognition, trust, conversions, and loyalty. So when you make mistakes in it, it can actually cost you customers.

Luckily, now you know about the most common mistakes you should avoid in UX. In order to see if your website has any of them, you need to conduct in-depth navigation, mobile-friendliness, accessibility, and technical audits. In-depth audits should help you detect existing friction points and fix them. Do this now to improve your UX for business success, and continuously iterate it to match changing user needs.