Basic Knowledge, Design, Advice

UX: The Most Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Although the concept of User Experience (UX) itself was created in the 90s, thinking about user experiences has become popular especially in the last decade. However, many people still make basic mistakes when creating their products, applications or websites, which drastically reduce their quality. Today you will read about what moves to avoid during design.

1. Designing for Yourself

The first assumption that often leads people creating websites astray is designing for yourself. We can see this especially since creating a website has ceased to be the domain of professionals, and the huge number of easily accessible tools allow you to set up a website without any technical knowledge.


Let's remember: our target group is not necessarily us, our mother or our neighbor. When creating a website, think about the expectations of the people visiting it. If you do not have the possibility to conduct research on market trends or the target group, start with simpler methods such as analyzing the competition (how do they do it?) or creating proto-personas (simplified personas, built on the basis of a subjective idea about them).


It is also worth remembering to test the prototype with real users who match at least the basic assumptions of the people who will be the end users. So we should not necessarily ask our mother or a colleague for their opinion 🙂

Instead, let's try to test usability with someone who resembles our persona, even if it's just one person we can ask for a favor. A single-user test is infinitely better than no testing at all.

2. Designing for Search Engines

The previous example is not the only situation in which we do not think about who will use our website when designing it. Another such example is designing for a search engine, i.e. creating a website in such a way that it will be best positioned in Google. 

To be clear, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t care about SEO. Generally speaking, Google’s algorithms are designed to promote sites that offer the most relevant content to search results, in the highest possible quality – so you could say that caring about SEO will always involve caring about quality.

Unfortunately, it is often different. Google's algorithm is not perfect (which is why it changes regularly) and can often be used to improve positioning. Unfortunately, these methods do not always go hand in hand with taking care of UX.

A perfect example of this type of action is using the Alt attribute on images, for purely SEO purposes. While this attribute helps Google crawlers, its primary purpose is to work towards accessibility and help visually impaired people who use screen readers. 

So let's consider whether, for example, while reading our recipe, a screen reader for a visually impaired person describes a photo in the article as "pancakes pancake cake hot rolls hot cake breakfast food best breakfast top breakfasts breakfast recipes pancakes recipe", did we offer them good UX? Did they learn what is actually in the photo?

 

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3. Putting appearance before UX

For many people, having "pompous" pages full of animations, transitions and unusual fonts is a source of pride and joy. Unfortunately, from the users' point of view, it is also often a reason for anguish and leaving the page.
 
Although users certainly appreciate the creativity and aesthetics of the site, the most important thing is the ease of use. Unfortunately, sites that are too original often cease to fulfill this role. Although they are nice as a picture, too many unusual solutions, distracting animations and graphics make them completely unintuitive to use.

4. Slow action

This is probably the most obvious and yet still a common UX problem. No matter how beautiful or functional your website or app is, if it runs so slowly that users go make themselves a cup of tea while it loads, something is wrong. Apart from the experience itself, a significant portion of users will simply leave (according to Kissmetrics 40% users leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load).
You will find a lot of advice on the Internet on how to speed up your website, and you can measure the loading speed, for example, on https://gtmetrix.com/

5. Too much text

Another very common mistake is too much text on the page, without a clear hierarchy of information. The reason why this situation is problematic is obvious – only very determined users will want to take the time to go through a wall of information to understand what our product or service is all about.
 
But what to do when what we want to convey is so complicated that it actually requires a fairly extensive description? In such situations, the right hierarchy is helpful. Research leaves no doubt on this issue. Users first “they are browsing” page quickly with their eyes, picking out the most important elements. Then, if they are interested in one, they will look at it more closely, picking out other important elements, and only then read the text from cover to cover.
 
When creating effective text for a website, we should adapt to how our recipients read the content. Let's create such headings, titles and slogans that will allow us to understand what we want to convey at a basic level, even with a quick glance at the page. Further, more detailed information, such as a list of features, should be visible secondarily, and only then should we offer detailed explanations to people who want to know the details.


błędy w projektowaniu ux
An example of proper text arrangement. Clear headings allow us to tell very quickly what products a given page offers. If one interests us, we can read a more detailed description below the heading.

6. Low contrast

For many people this point will not be clear at first. Why is low contrast on the page an element of bad UX?
The answer is simple: because even 12-20% of us have difficulty seeing. We are talking about visually impaired people, people with low vision, color blind people and all other people with a perception disorder.
How to offer them a good experience when using our website? The best way is to simply follow the WCAG guidelines, including those regarding contrasts, but also functionality and comprehensibility. You can find more on this topic at https://www.gov.pl/web/dostepnosc-cyfrowa/wcag-21-w-skrocie.

7. Custom UI Elements

Although creativity in design is certainly a welcome element, it is not always worth reinventing the wheel. When building an interface, it is worth sticking to certain established patterns that we are used to. An example of such patterns are icons - we all know that the gear icon means options, the magnifying glass is a search engine, and the triangle means "play". Using such widely recognizable elements will be very helpful in making your site easy to use, and I do not recommend straining yourself with unnecessary innovations in such matters.

8. Non-responsive design

Finally, something we really shouldn't have to talk about anymore, but we still encounter websites that don't adapt to work on different sized screens.
 
I won't even explain why your site should be responsive. It's 2021, so if you haven't adapted to both desktop and mobile devices yet, don't tell anyone. Just fix it.



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