10 Common UX Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

Quick Summary: Are you struggling to keep up with your website performance? Or are you planning to build a new website or mobile app for your business? It must be the UX design that should be given priority. UX mistakes are inevitable when designing a digital product. But, they are avoidable, and you can reduce the number of mistakes or errors in design and ensure your digital product is engaging to users.

If you are creating a new design from scratch or redesigning your existing digital product, exceptional user experience (UX) is the first thing you need to consider. Forget about the first attempt; mistakes are bound to happen. However, following the iterative process, you can update the errors and design UX that actually works. For all those things to happen, you need to understand the possible UX mistakes and how to avoid them in the first place. Let’s explore the top ones.

Ignoring User Research

UX is all about research that most businesses avoid, considering the time it takes. But they are an important first step toward better design. Many design agencies begin designing products without research just to save some upfront costs for their clients. This leads to ending up designing the product with unnecessary and irrelevant features that keep your users away from your product. For want of UX research, you never know what your users want, their preferences, and your target market.

How to Avoid: Conducting thorough market and user research is the first thing you need to do. Gather data, know your competitors and users, their preferences, and pain points, and think of the solution and features that would solve them. You can also consider using interviews, analyzing surveys, and initiating usability testing. These are perfect solutions as they will help you understand your users and market better.

Poor Navigation

Poor and bad navigation increases design complexity, which can distract your users. Your users may find where to go and how to use any feature. If your users do not find things that they are on your product for, they may easily get confused.

How to Avoid Poor Navigation: Ensure your UX team understands how to maintain UX consistency. You may also suggest keeping the navigation simple and easy to use. The easy-to-understand menu, CTA, and checkout process will make users confident. One other way to design better navigation is to follow familiar navigation structures.

Overloading with Information

Users love information, but it has to be presented in a timely manner. For example, if you bombard your users with a lot of information on a single screen, it can be overwhelming for them. This will impact their cognitive overload.

How to Display Information: Keep information complete but not overloaded. It has to be based on visual hierarchy, which means you need to prioritize key information first and then break up content into variations so users can get what they need and when they need it. Avoid providing unnecessary information to users.

Not Optimizing for Mobile

We have witnessed this with 90% of the redesign projects that we work on for our clients. None of them were completely optimized for mobile devices. Some designers ignore optimizing UX design for mobile devices, and that has consequences. The smartphone penetration rate is incredibly growing, with an estimated 67% in 2023. Hence, not optimizing your digital product for multiple devices or considering responsive design is a mistake.

Solution: Make sure your designers have UX best practices and optimized the features for mobile and other digital devices. With a greater and more responsive design, you can reduce the bounce rate significantly.

Inconsistent Design

Design inconsistency gives your users an odd feeling about your digital product. It will keep your users confused. Inconsistent design refers to when your product has different fonts, colors, CTA buttons (poorly designed), and others. They are confusing as they will give users cognitive issues.

How to Avoid Design Inconsistency: You know the mistake, you know the solution. For example, maintain color schemes, fonts, typography, and elements across the design.

Ignoring Accessibility

Accessibility in UX design is allowing your digital product to be usable to every user, from people with disabilities to users with limited digital skills. Ignoring accessibility can be a mistake, and your designers may ignore it if you are not aware of it.

Solution: The solution to this UX mistake is to put things in place. Make your digital product accessible to all users. You simply have to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Implement UX accessibility best practices by using alt text for images, implementing a navigable keyboard, and contrast for readability.

Slow Loading Speed

Speed matters as a website taking more than 2-3 seconds to load will cost you 80% of your users. But it is happening with most digital products. They fail to grab users' attention just because it takes a lot of time to load. It creates user frustration and increases kart abandon rates.

Solution: You need to figure out and identify the elements, things, and others that are causing the sluggish performance of your digital products. It can be images, animation, videos, buggy codes, and others. You need to optimize them all to reduce the resolution and the number of scripts. Ensure your products get loaded in 2 to 3 seconds.

Unclear Call-to-Action (CTA)

CTA helps users complete tasks, accomplish their goals, and fill out the form. What if they don’t get anything clear and precise? They won’t do it. Most websites make this UX mistake by wrongly placing the CTA and even keeping users guessing.

Solution: You may begin by making CTAs stand out. Let users know it by highlighting it. You can also use contrasting colors, clear language, and a prominent position to differentiate the essential parts of your website.

Too Many Popups

Picture this: you have visitors on a website, and they are welcomed with too many popups altogether or frequently. It will prompt your users to leave your website immediately. When your users spend more time on your website, the bounce rate will increase.

Solution: Consider designing only the most necessary popups. Your users should not encounter this right after logging in to the website. Even if they get any popup, it should be meaningful and on purpose. You may also consider inline prompts so it can let users feel less intrusive.

Poor Use of White Space

White space distracts users. You need to be serious about this element, as ignoring it can leave your website design crowded. the most traditional website has this problem. It draws the focus of users away, and your users may feel overwhelmed.

Solution: Consider implementing white space strategically. Take a reference to some of your competitors' websites and suggest your designers; a good design agency always follows your Express practices, and white space is one of the parts. White space separates one element from others and enables your users with a clean screen that keeps your users engaged.

Final Thoughts

In this article, we have learned about common UX mistakes that you should avoid while creating and designing your new digital product. With this, you know the top mistakes that are bound to happen while creating UX for your website. Go through it again and consider implementing the suggestions we have given here. More than that, hide the right UX design company with excellent expected industry experience to help you design better products.