Top 6 common mistakes that will ruin your website’s UX

It’s no secret that some websites simply feel better to use than others. They’re more fun to scroll through, make it easy to find relevant information, and smooth to accomplish various tasks. They feel like they were designed specially for you.

That's what we call good UX.

It’s accomplished in many nuanced ways, but a good place to start is always to make sure you’ve avoided some major mistakes that often destroy the users’ experience. Here are the most common of them.

Not having a purpose

You can shoot yourself in the foot in many different ways when it comes to UX, but probably the most egregious mistake you can make is not designing with a clear purpose and goal in mind.

Here’s what I mean by this. In 2021, every company needs a proper website - it’s really a no-brainer. So, many companies build their websites with the goal of -- well, having a website, simply because they’re supposed to have one. They don’t really consider what the website is actually supposed to accomplish. Educate? Collect leads? Sell products? Book demo presentations? When you don’t consider this and don’t pick one or two at an early stage of the project, you’ll end up with a (literally) pointless UX, one that won’t lead the users in any real direcion.

Carousels

As an abstract idea, carousels seem like a really great addition to most websites. They can elegantly solve the problem of having to choose between several pieces of content, they can be good looking, fit neatly into empty spaces, and even provide the wow effect with sleek animations. But that’s just the theory.

In real world applications, they don’t work. Users simply don’t click them. This is caused not only by the visitors simply not caring enough about the content to go through the hassle of scrolling the carousels; they also tend to look a lot like ads, which means they’re automatically skipped. You can expand the list with accessibility problems that often plague them because of hard to find navigation, bad mobile performance, and lots of unnecessary code that can break, and as a result you get a really nasty case of bad UX. Avoid them whenever possible.

Taking control away from the user

Taking control away is especially relevant when it comes to scrolling. From time to time, websites try to get way too fancy for their own good, limiting the scrolling speed to force the user to get the full “experience” designed for them. Sometimes they’ll even go as far as lock scrolling completely to show you the contents at their own pace.

This is awful. It’s a cool experience only for a very small minority of visitors with a lot of time on their hands. Everyone else just gets frustrated, not being able to reach the content they come for at their own pace. If you aren’t Apple, you really have no business in coding such a feature on your website.

Unnecessary sticky elements

We all know the temptation of making your main navigation bar sticky. It sounds good on paper - why wouldn’t you want to give the user easy navigation, regardless of how far down the page he is?

But is it really necessary? In most cases, it’s not. The big problem with a sticky header is that it takes up valuable space on the screen - space that most users would rather use to display relevant content. It obscures a part of the page (a much bigger issue on mobile than it is on desktop!), it’s easy to code badly, so that it makes the scrolling experience feel awkward. And the benefits of such a header are fairly underwhelming - it’s really not that big of a deal to scroll back to the top of a page and navigate from there. That’s how it’s always been done and it comes to us naturally.

Designing & testing for the perfect user

Say you’re building a web service aimed at tech savvy millennials who collect vinyl records. Naturally, you think primarily of them at the design and development stage, then recruit some people who fit the criteria to test your product. They see no issues, the service is good to go -- no, it’s not!

The perfect user should only be a part of the test group. Assuming that only a precisely narrowed group will interact with your product is rather naive. In the real world, all sorts of users will stumble upon it and want to try it out. In our example, it could be people with extensive knowledge of vinyl, but limited tech skills, or people just getting into the hobby, looking for some beginner resources. All of those are valuable users that you really can’t afford to ignore if you want your product to be profitable.

Forgetting the humans

With how important good SEO is these days, it’s easy to get caught in a kind of obsession with writing and designing only for the robots. Creating awkward sections crammed with keywords, dodgy links, repeating the same thing over and over again, posting patchwork blog articles with paragraphs copy-pasted from various previous posts, and more. We’ve all seen such websites.

But where’s the user in all of this, an actual person that you’ll task with going through all this gibberish while visiting your website? She’s probably on some strange subpage built only for SEO purposes, confused, frustrated, and wanting to leave. Great SEO that results from poor UX is, in the long run, useless. There’s no point in herding traffic to your website if the website itself fails to resonate with your visitors and, by extension, fulfill its purpose - be it selling, otherwise converting, or educating. You’ll simply lose money supporting all the useless traffic.