5 Common UX Mistakes to Avoid

Today, we’re discussing some of the most common UX mistakes present in digital products we use daily.

Let’s be clear: the purpose of the UX design is to meet users’ needs as soon as possible when interacting with products such as websites, web apps, or mobile apps.
Many factors influence the overall user experience, but as a UX designer, your mission is to minimize all possible obstacles. But sometimes, no one creates these obstacles other than the UX designers themselves! 

This article will help you recognize some common mistakes in UX, their adverse effects, and how to avoid them during your future design processes. 

Prioritizing the looks of a website over functionality is one of the most common UX mistakes. It’s 2021, a moment in time when we apply our favorite aesthetics to many areas of our lives. This pursuit of aesthetics exists in product design, too. A website that looks like a scammy site built during the 2010s isn’t something anyone wants to see nor use these days.

We are visual creatures, and our brains naturally focus on visual output. 

That’s why aesthetics play a significant role in the usability of a design. 

It’s a fact – if you have a dull-designed product, your users will probably experience only negative emotions and leave your product for a competitor’s, especially if their product looks better. 

Original photography, graphics, and interactive design items distinguish you from your competition and keep users hooked on your product.

So, yes, a beautiful design will ensure an excellent first impression and instill trust in users. Good first impressions are critical, but a good user experience is what keeps users coming back for more. 

You shouldn’t add items to your product during the design process because it looks good; add them to enrich the user experience. 

For example, animations and videos can enhance the looks of your product. But, if they slow down the process of a user achieving a goal, avoid them. 

Your product should not only enable your users to achieve their objectives. It should help them, guide them, and make it easy to reach their goal. Then you know you have a functional product.  

Instead of solely chasing an aesthetic outlook of the website, you should find the right balance between looks and functionalities.

Empathy is a skill to understand and be aware of other people’s feelings. 

One of the common UX mistakes is forgetting to empathize with your users.   

As a UX designer, you need to familiarize yourself with problems your user’s experience and provide a solution. Your product needs to be of a high value for their needs, solve their problems and do it better than your competition. If your product lacks empathy in Design, your users will leave disappointed after interacting with your product and turn to competition instead. Your users’ needs, judgments, and previous experience need to be determined during the planning and development of your product or a website. 

When users land on your website, they want to get as much information as possible about your service, aka the solution to their problems. If your website design doesn’t allow them to do so, they will leave rather than continue exploring. 

When building a product that empathizes with its users, you also have to speak their language. Leave the jargon out of it unless it’s a very niche audience. 

Also, avoid acronyms, brand-specific terms, maxims, or professional terminology that your users might not understand. Complicated or hip phrases will more often lead to an adverse user experience than not. 

Also, contrary to popular belief, CTAs with jargon won’t inspire your users to action – they’ll create confusion instead.

Concise communication grants clarity and dissolves confusion.

You might like some solutions your competition has to offer, but what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. Too much imitation and blindly copying is another common mistake. This happens due to constant pressure and new trends arising almost every week. Also, some businesses set getting similar traction as their competitors as the primary goal instead of satisfying their audience’s needs.

Sometimes, newbie UX designers stick to the safest options and copy what they know will work. Instead of mimicking your competition, see what you can learn from them. Do research on both your competition’s processes and current innovations. Merge your learnings with innovation and ensure competitiveness. 

When copying the design of your competition, you aren’t doing anything new for the users. They won’t learn anything new, so they’ll be more likely to stay loyal to the competition.
You can indeed hone your eye for visual design by copying the work of your design heroes, but it’s necessary to test if these approaches apply to your product. 

The same goes for current trends. Trends might work for other businesses, but your product may end up feeling outdated or lacking originality. Analyze trends in-depth, see what is working, and what could help your product shine. Don’t forget to include users’ needs in this analysis to ensure a pleasant user experience. Only with such insights, you’ll be ready to use the most out of current trends and reap benefits.

2022. is around the corner, and these common UX mistakes are still an omnipresent issue. 😬 

Most users search the Internet via mobile phones. Therefore, having a website without an adequately adjusted mobile version is a mistake that should stop existing. There, we said it!

The numbers don’t lie: around 94% of users don’t trust brands with non-responsive designs, whereas websites with responsive Design get 67% more conversions. 

As a UX designer, you should make sure your website works flawlessly, no matter screen size or connection speed. A responsive, mobile-friendly website will function on all sorts of mobile screens and allow the users to achieve their goals within a few moments.

By adjusting your website’s interface and content compatibility with mobile phone devices, not only will it assist browsing and make the working more digestible, but it’ll also improve your website or web app for screens by fixing touch elements. Additionally, your website’s download rate will be drastically improved. 

Also, did you know that Google prefers responsive Design?

Opting for responsiveness is beneficial for several reasons. For beginner users, it means a seamless user experience. Visitors visit only one URL, and the web app instantly adjusts to fit the screen they are using. 

Moreover, this is practical for Google since it doesn’t have to crawl multiple sites to set precisely index properties. 

Our final choice of common UX mistakes is ignoring Design Thinking during the design process. Even though Design Thinking is a practice that gained more popularity during the last decade, it certainly isn’t new. It appeared in the 60s of the previous century, and since then, it has helped reshape numerous innovations & design processes. 

The five stages of Design Thinking are defining, empathizing, ideating, prototyping, and testing during all involved design levels. These levels are not necessarily chronological and can work in iterative cycles. 

Once again, the numbers speak for themselves: around 46% of companies that included design thinking in their UX design processes expressed to share an emotional connection with their users.

Design Thinking will help you gather fresh perspectives and break out from the boxes that might trap you.

Also, you’ll learn how to wear your customers’ shoes and get to know their requirements for the product.

So, if you miss including design thinking in your UX design, chances are you will end up with a poor UX design. When you exclude the Design Thinking stages, you miss out on understanding your product’s audience.

There are many more common UX mistakes, such as wrong color palette, poor fonts, inconsistency, confusing categories, redundancy, and inadequate content.

As a UX designer, you must learn as much as possible about your future audience, their needs, and the obstacles they are trying to overcome. By thorough research of your users, competition, trends, and innovations, you’ll be able to develop a solution that will help reach your users’ objectives and ensure a great user experience.

If you want to become a top-notch product designer who never misses satisfying your users, check out our free e-book 10 Commandments for Product Designers.

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Happy designing,

Your Supercharge Design team.