User experience or UX is the overall experience a person feels when interacting with a product or brand. Digital user experience encompasses all the aspects of a person's interaction with your website, mobile application, or software. This can include actions, perception, and satisfaction. UX measures the quality of site interactions that lead to successful conversions.
As part of digital marketing, an increasing number of organizations are finding value in investing in UX where they put more emphasis on customer satisfaction. By monitoring and recording user behavior, businesses gain an in-depth understanding of how their customers interact with their web pages. They are able to view the products customers look at, which pages they frequent, and how they interact with each section of your website.
Understanding what users are doing on your website creates an opportunity to identify and make preemptive modifications and future developments to your website to guarantee optimal consumer satisfaction.
UX is directly tied to how consumers perceive your brand. So having broken links, poor navigations, rude customer service, non-clickable images, and non-user friendliness on your website or app impact a person's user experience and their opinion about your brand. While numerous factors influence the overall user experience, your role is to constantly review your sites and minimize possible obstacles. However, there are some common mistakes that you will make while trying to improve your UX.
Learn more about recognizing these five common UX mistakes, their adverse effects, as well as how to avoid them in future design processes.
Common UX Mistakes and How to Improve Them
1. Prioritizing Web Aesthetics Over Functionality
In recent years, there has been much emphasis on personalizing websites with creative graphics, authentic photos, and interactive design features. While a personalized website tends to attract more customers, creativity should not override functionality. Web aesthetics are essential for UX. But customers will also need to have a website that they navigate through with ease.
Subsequently, your website should not prioritize functionality over aesthetics. Human beings are visual creatures; hence the brain will automatically focus on optical output. If your website offers nothing else besides functionality, clients will get bored and move to your competitor. Moreover, pure functionality without a spark makes brands more forgettable among customers. The key is to strike a balance between aesthetics and functionality.
How to Fix?
Strike a balance between aesthetics and functionality where the two interact to allow consumers to easily navigate your product listings on your website or mobile app. An open mind and a positive attitude towards aesthetics while maintaining user-friendliness is the only way to stand out and achieve higher conversion rates.
2. Ignoring Content Creation
Over the decades, SEO content has grown in importance as users continue searching for credible, factual, and reliable information. In UX, some brands ignore the authoritative content since it tends to be capital and labor-intensive. However, the interplay between web design and content creates a lasting impact on the overall user experience. Authoritative content increases relevant traffic to your site, generates leads without advertising, and builds consumer trust and loyalty. Implement an SEO strategy beginning by optimizing your site pages around the target topic and keywords. You will need high-quality, authoritative content to maximize user experience.
The key mistake here is failing to harmonize design and content. Both are done separately without enough regard for the influence that one has over the other. The design affects content presentation, how the content is consumed, how easy it is remembered, and whether it can be shared with ease. To accomplish the benefits of content, use keywords, post new content regularly, revise old content to keep it updated, create landing pages to boost conversions, as well as guide users through the sales funnel.
How to Fix?
To make the best use of the content, ensure that web design and content creation are not done in isolation. Both teams should work in unison to create on-page, off-page, and technical SEO to create a website that leads to a superior user experience. Furthermore, design elements through About Us or Contact Us pages should be detailed enough to provide customers with valuable information.
3. Using the Wrong UX Designer
Another major mistake is handing over your web or app design project to anyone with a designer badge. The costs associated with web designing, content creation, and UX review are high such that many companies opt to have the works performed by their internal staff to save money. Internal employees may better understand your products. However, they may lack the expertise and knowledge required to understand consumer behavior and satisfaction levels. Inexperienced designers potentially destroy your reputation resulting in poor UX.
Furthermore, using the wrong UX design testers can give limited UX information. Ideal testers conform to habitual patterns of device usage over the period of time agreed to determine the true value of user experience from different devices.
How to Fix?
Hire a website design expert with industrial experience for you to maximize UX. Experts remain up to date with market trends. They will adapt to create a clean layout of your website, stunning visuals, and responsive designs that are applicable on any device. Design experts can also connect you with skilled content creators that will optimize and rank your content, thus personalizing your UX.
4. Overlooking Responsive Design
Responsive web design is a crucial GUI approach. It allows the creation of content and website designs that adjust smoothly to various screen sizes. Most brands overlook the concept of responsive designs in an age where smartphones and tablets are widely used over PCs. This means customers will not be able to navigate the website on their mobile phones, giving them a bad impression of a brand that does not meet the modern consumer's needs.
Long web forms on the web pages and pop-ups are some of the design elements that make up unresponsive web designs. Long web pages usually need an entire page. This means that users will have to leave their page to fill in the information on another page. The modern-day consumer searching for convenience will interact more with short web forms as they are less intrusive to users.
Google introduced penalties for websites that use pop-ups to capture personal consumer information. However, a majority of the brands continue to use pop-ups. The truth is that pop-ups are intrusive since they block content and collect personal data, which hurts users' experiences.
How to Fix?
Avoid using pop-ups unless required legally for cookie policy or age verification. Create web pages responsive to the device screen to make it easy to scroll and interact with the page. Redesign your website responsiveness for each device for optimal user experience.
5. Embracing Each Design Trend
Trends in web design, similar to the fashion industry, come and go. Every day, new trends around improved user experience will be introduced to encourage brands to re-strategize. As a website owner, the tendency is to adopt each trend. Just because the trend seems to be working for other brands does not mean it will build your user experience. Embracing each trend hurts your UX since some trends will not work with your target customers.
Many UX trends have roots in actual data and consumer metrics. But some are blindly suggested by bloggers seeking lead generation. Telling the difference between the two has a significant impact on UX. The truth is that people do not necessarily want to use your products. They want to have their needs fulfilled and spamming your website with ever other trends is an excellent way to make them leave your site and go to your competitor.
How to Fix?
Take time to view each trend before implementing it on your website. Only adopt those trends that have an impact on your business. Trends you can adopt include high-quality images and infographics, which have proven to support its effectiveness in UX.
Building Successful User Experience with Brightscout
UX deserves commitment and coordinating efforts to find a higher level of success. It does not matter how creatively your site or apps are designed or how you optimize your content if your target audience does not derive value during interactions.
Your website is the first impression of your brand. So optimizing it to meet your customer's need give you a short time to win clients. Delivering an easy-to-navigate and easy to interact website makes the difference between lead generation and conversion rates.
At Brightscout, we offer support to enhance and improve website designs through user experience review as an initiative to create momentum to drive clients forward and produce results. By providing a comprehensive UX review, businesses are able to determine how well their websites adhere to specific rules.
Contact us today and get a precise understanding of your website or app’s degree of usability and market readiness, recommendations of necessary fixes from industry professionals, and unlimited access to our team’s methodologies and expertise.
