What is the definition of a successful product? It is a combination of awesome design, killer content and powerful features. And yes, you need an extra bit of luck also. When we talk about user experience, many enterprises spend most of their time in fixing out the question, how they can maximize their product reach and optimize a high rate of user engagement. A good design is a combination of multiple factors. We can say smart research, exposure to latest tools, out-of-the-box thinking, hard work and collaboration among teams are the most desired ingredients to develop best designs.
Usually, all the designers strive at providing an excellent user experience in order to achieve more user engagement. Whether you are designing for mobile or for the web, UX is a very important factor. But, often one small UX mistake can make a lot of difference. An entire product can be wiped out from the market if users find UX shortfalls. Even if you’re not a UX person, this blog post will help you identify common UX mistakes to avoid and it will help you in your current and future application development assignments.
Before discussing the topic, let’s first understand what UX is;
Are you someone who is extremely brand conscious? Well, in that case, UX is the only thing which can give a new direction to your brand positioning efforts. UX is one of the most valuable aspects of any project, but often ignored or given lesser importance. UX steals most of the show and understandably the face of your brand. This is something that people see and this directly influences how customers think of your business. Always remember you can’t have a visual design without a strategy. This is where UX plays its part.
How UX helps your brand?
- It helps you work on your goals
- It helps you identify your target audience
- It helps you in implementing your digital marketing strategies more effectively
- It helps you in achieving higher rate of user engagement
- It helps you in quality content creation
- It helps you save money and resources
- It helps you make money
- It helps you build your brand
It is hard to believe that a design can satisfy everyone, but still, we can try to avoid few common mistakes which can kill the actual idea behind the product. Let’s see few common mistakes by UX designers which put a negative impact on the customers.
Not understanding the true meaning of UX
UX design is not about choosing the right set of color patterns or selecting the most appropriate fonts. It is not also about putting good images or making your product rich with awesome content. The true meaning of UX is to determine how a user can operate easily within your application. You can say, your application is little tricky to handle because you are only targeting a particular niche. But the time has changed over the years.
The ever increasing popularity of mobile devices and applications with the evolution of social media has made user interaction and review easy. So, you can’t afford a sloppy product or an unfriendly UX. The competition is too high out there, and market leaders are creating opportunities for themselves where other companies are dropping their credibility by offering a poor experience. A successful company always put user value at the top of their list to implement every strategy.
No Communication
Having good content in your design is always a good idea. Your design content must be concise, easy to understand and systematic. If you put irrelevant content, which is not much related to your product, no one is going to read that. We all know anyone can connect with a visual more than a text. Viewing something can help us comprehend better than just reading. Your UX must speak the message you want to share. Always try to combine your UX with images, text, content and if required videos. But try to communicate your ideas, vision, and products through your design.
Understand the difference between UI & UX
There is a thin line between user interface and user experience. Sadly, a good number of people are not aware of this fact. UX design is the process by which a particular need is identified. After that, a rough prototype which may not be the final product is drawn and later verified through testing. When both the business model and the value proposition have been approved, the final product is built.
UI is basically the combination of visual design & interaction design. A UX designer will design the user flows, user directions and application outlines, on the other hand, a UI designer will sharpen those interactions by adding appropriate color and providing users the steps they need to follow in order to navigate the application successfully.
ALSO READ : “Why Good Design Matters to Your Business”
Unreadable Fonts
There is no harm in producing designs packed with innovative typefaces. This may be an issue if the words are not readable. While working on novelty options, UX designers usually ignore how letters look with the words they are using. There are certain combinations which will look good in a typeface than others. Do pay notice to the number of words used, especially with a novelty typeface. How a user find it hard to read? Typefaces with extreme slants, tight and condensed letterforms, overly decorated swashes, tails or ligatures, or letterforms which seem to run together or have irregular shapes. You can always try something from Google Font Collections.
Inappropriate Images
Unsuitable images are the biggest enemy of content. These can create a disconnected visual link with text or leave user confused. There are various ways where inappropriate images can destroy all the hard work involved in UX. Let’s discuss few of them;
- Common web images: Don’t use those common web images which you see in every alternative website. Please avoid such images and try to get unique & relevant images.
- Quality: Image quality is very important. Don’t use images with poor clarity, out of focus or with lesser resolution. It’s better to not use any image rather than using a poor quality image.
- Resolution: As I mentioned above, never use images with low resolution. If you’re still following old-school design rules, please update yourself. With the introduction of high-resolution screens, you have to revise your designing strategy.
- Connection: This is the most important factor. If your image is not speaking the topic or content, it is of no use. Users must get an overall idea about the topic just by looking at the image. Images should enhance content.
Forceful registration or subscription
If you use the internet a lot, you must have noticed as soon as you open a website, the pop-up window will appear which tells you to register or subscribe to their newsletter, and even if you press Esc, it won’t go. Well, this is one of those bad practices which will take more number of users away from your web page or application. These forms act as an obstruction in the path of the user which force them to change the tab and look for some other website.
A good UX is frictionless and takes lesser time and information from the users.
Slow Loading Time
Fast page loading time is no more an option, it is a must. Most of the users like to access sites or apps which takes less time to load. Slow page loading time is one of those pain areas for users which make them frustrated. According to a report in Kissmetrics; 47% of the users expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40% users expect a web page to load within 3 seconds. No one is willing to wait more than 6 seconds. After that, they prefer to switch to some other website. Even Google ranks websites and applications higher having less loading time and consider them as websites or applications having good UX.
While designing, designers should focus more on optimizing their web pages or apps to get a better response from their users and increase the number of visitors. Performance may get affected due to a larger number of elements and images on the site or app. This might increase operational complexity and loading time.
Missing Mobile Details
It is very common that websites should be designed on responsive frameworks. Responsive design is not the only solution, as a designer, you have to adjust it according to various screen sizes. Many designers ignore this factor. When a user accesses a website in mobile but found font sizes very small or image sizes are not appropriate, it might annoy them.
You can spend little more time in mobile design. Do check text sizes, images, load time, navigation, forms etc. to offer a seamless user experience.
Interactive design
Interactive design is very important to achieve more user engagement and conversion. If you have an amazing landing page, but there is no information for users what to do next. They get confused whether to scroll, click, where to find more content, is there any link, etc. A good design always carries a set of action, movement, and user interaction. The goal should be to connect more and more users. Users should know what they need to do. The design should include excellent user interface elements to encourage more user actions>.
Conclusion
As the number of internet users is skyrocketing, with that it has become very important to build websites and mobile applications which can offer a great experience and easy to use. Always remember, you are designing it for the users, who may not think in a similar way. Using a bit of research and strategy while designing helps UX and makes it a lot easier to understand the target audience. Every designer makes a mistake, but what matters is to identify them and fix it as soon as you can. So, all the designers should avoid common mistakes mentioned above in order to keep a high rate of user engagement.
Good design always has its own benchmark. A company with a good set of designs sometimes can obsolete its competitors. Top organizations have realized the importance of UX and they are embedding UX into innovative business practices in order to create a community of followers and potential buyers. So seize the advantage. To find out how you can utilize best UX to produce actual business results, Apogaeis is the right destination. Our amazing designers will provide you all the necessary ideas to build a standout brand. Contact us today to avail a FREE CONSULTATION.
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