5 UX/UI Pet Peeves to Avoid
Nothing will keep customers from visiting your website like a tacky user interface. If you are responsible for the user experience design for a tech company, know this: there will be other web professionals critiquing your work. No one wants to be called out for ugly UX/UI design. When asked to share their biggest UX/UI design fails, the web designers and developers here at Formstack were pretty vocal. Here are some big ones to avoid, straight from the Formstackers themselves:
- “I’m annoyed when websites don’t have a clear call to action. Every site has a purpose and therefore should have a call to action. It could be as meaningful as signing up for a paid service or as simple as watching a video clip. It’s the one thing that you most desire out of your website visitors. The call to action should be stated clearly on the homepage front and center, and uncluttered by welcome messages, secondary call to actions, or other distractions. Scattered call to actions will result in scattered conversions.” – Jeff Blettner, Web Designer
Are you intimidated by this cluttered website? Yeah, us too.
- “Use drop shadows sparingly and make sure they look natural. Don’t go throwing them on everything just because you can. Use shadows to give your elements a little lift from the page rather than feeling like you’re in a lunar eclipse.” – Lance Padgett, SEO
- “Don’t leave the user hanging at the end of a process/wizard. Tell them what they’ve done and offer a suggestion on what they could do next.” – Noah Coffey, UX Developer
If this represents the images on your website, you probably need to update your photos.
- My biggest pet peeve is scrimping on photography. If you’re going to invest the time and money into a new website, don’t pull out tiny jpeg pictures that were taken 10 years ago. Trust me, your design will look much better with some professionally taken photos.” – Jenni Mettert, Email Marketing
- More options do not equal more opportunities. The more navigation options you have, the more tedious and difficult finding what you need can be, which will result in abandonment. Keeping nav elements to its basic components with minimum sub levels will make sure your visitors find where they should go QUICKLY and efficiently. If more sublevels are needed, creating sub navigation on that particular page and OUT OF the main site navigation.” – Jeff Blettner, Web Designer
Do you agree with these design blunders? Do you have any to add to the list?
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About the Author
Eva (@evachristine09) is a public relations intern at Formstack. She is a senior at Anderson University, studying communication arts with a focus in public relations. When Eva's not working for Fifth Street Communications, AU's student-staffed PR firm, you can find her hanging out with her friends or taking too many pictures of her cat. Probably the latter.
Great point on #5, Jeff – I think too many options equals confusion.