More posts by this author
Head of Design Department at
Triare
This article is beneficial for both beginners and professionals in web design. If you are a business owner, we recommend checking your website for these examples.
The great UI UX design is an all-important part of the business. It can guide users smoothly through meaningful interactions, and significantly boost conversions.
Therefore, the cost of mistakes is also high. Your bounce rate will skyrocket if the users are disappointed with their experience. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things, which can slip into the work of the best designers.
We have distinguished the 7 most common mistakes to help you avoid them in the future.
How to tell good UX design from the bad? It must be immediately, intuitively clear how everything works. For example, users don’t need to think about what buttons are clickable, or how hovering works. Navigation is more about usability than creativity.
Remember the three-click rule: every user must make no more than three clicks to get to any page of a website (there are some exceptions, though).
And most importantly, respect users’ freedom of control. As a user yourself, you probably noticed how often you click on stuff just to see how it works. In any case, there should be a clear “emergency exit”.
The example below is an e-commerce website Tesco. It shows another UX mistake – using too much flyout and drop-down submenus. Not only they can be difficult for search engines to crawl – they have been repeatedly proven to irritate users. It works similar to excessive call-to-action buttons: people simply don’t click any of them. If you absolutely need such submenus, try to smooth this effect out.
Source: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/fresh-food/all
A mishmash of fonts, colors, elements is a common problem. Designers like to experiment with fonts and color schemes to stand out, but that usually ends up confusing the customer. Actually, people crave consistency. Pay attention to details like properly formatted text and uniform color schemes. Mobile ui design especially needs coherent, minimalistic solutions.
Overloading user’s cognition decreases user experience as well as sales. Aim to provide the content and features people need at the moment. Reduce clutter, and guide users smoothly through the process.
The Yale School of Art website is a famous example of an overloaded background, messy structure, and colors.
Source: https://www.art.yale.edu
Fonts and style consistency are the two features that distinguish a good UI design.
Typography actually constitutes 95% of web design. If you get it wrong, you’re excluding between 12%-20% of potential customers. By optimizing typography, you optimize readability, usability, accessibility (inclusiveness).
Between stylish or readable font, always choose the latter. Beware of thin, light fonts, despite their popularity. (Yes, they may be elegant, clean, and trendy. But they also may not render correctly on different types of display, and remain unreadable for many users).
Avoid low contrast text and elements. They are trendy, too, but share the same problems. Testing contrast is a must (you can use some tools like Colorable, Contrast, and Wave that help correct contrast according to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
Don’t forget to follow the basic rules of typography (line length 70–80 characters, font size minimum 16pt, etc.) and online copy (bullets, subheads, etc.)
The example below is a website with low-contrast, thin fonts that decrease readability (especially in search and navigation tabs).
Source: https://tremolo.com.au/
Your website can create a wow-effect, be visually compelling and consistent, boast a fresh concept… And still, irritate users and lower conversions. Because the devil is in details.
As in one of the most famous UX design quotes, “People ignore design that ignores people” (F. Chimero). You need to know your users, their goals, challenges, motivations, understand what they need, and always put it before the beauty of interfaces.
Go through this check-list to save yourself from cliché UI and UX design mistakes often made in pursuit of aesthetics:
Source: https://blog.prototypr.io/top-common-mistakes-ui-ux-designers-make-6e13bd891e84
Yes, 2021 is almost here, and this is still on the list. Too many websites seem to ignore it! Google lowers such websites in the rating, and 94% of people don’t trust websites without mobile versions. On the contrary, responsive websites have a 67% chance of a conversion.
It is essential for your website to look great and load fast across all screen sizes. Don’t forget to optimize for slow connections, and slow computers as well. There are many responsive testing tools to check your website, whether it’s published or still in development.
Responsive design is more efficient, cost-effective, and easier to manage compared to separate mobile and desktop versions (adaptive design). However, the latter is faster and can be more tailored to your specific needs. Either way, we recommend choosing trustworthy UX design firms that will help you pick the best option and produce professional web design across all devices.
Can you distinguish anything in the search bar of this website?
Source: https://mediatemple.net/services/domains
Great web design begins with content – the most important part of the website.
If the content is not figured out yet, there is no point in designing. Otherwise, when you finally replace Lorem ipsum, everything will look differently, out of place and empty.
Other common mistakes:
We recommend to:
Source: https://blog.prototypr.io/why-testing-with-real-content-is-better-than-lorem-ipsum-c7c79586ee72
This includes:
The example below is a University of Advanced Technology website before and after a lot of feedback on the Internet regarding its innovative, creative, but complicated navigation. Before, they used floating animations as a menu, which was a fresh concept, reflecting the vision of the institution. However, they understood the importance of UX and later added a large and comfortable navigation bar.
Before:
Source: https://www.apexmediafirm.com/post/manage-your-blog-from-your-live-site
After:
Source: https://www.uat.edu/
Check out some examples of attractive designs.
Make the best of UI UX Design
Best UX design is not about fancy parallax or cool animations. Make sure to remember about basic things: navigation, clarity, readability, responsiveness, easy access to relevant content. Creativity and beauty will come on top of that.
We recommend booking professional UI UX design services so that mistakes never slip onto your website. You can check our UX design portfolio here.
Baidy Vyshnyvetskogo 56 Cherkassy, Ukraine.