An effective web design is one that achieves its purpose without mishaps. This is only possible when you have thoroughly tested the usability of your website and went through rigorous UX testing. If you have skipped that part and directly jumped to making your new website live, then you are not going to be happy with the outcome.
Often there are some UX issues that can break the usability of your website. This results in unhappy visitors, high bounce rate, high abandonment rate and other metrics that indicate poor user experience. This eventually leads to low sales and stagnant or poor growth.
Instead of identifying UX issues once they have dealt the damage, it is best to prevent them by avoiding these issues. For this, you must ensure that the website has passed the basic industry UX standards. You must also look at other websites in the industry to see what are the major UX mistakes they made and how you can learn from them.
Here are some major UX failures that are common in many websites, but unfortunately still very few websites learn from those failures.
Vague Icons
Using more and more icons and less text on a website has seemed to become a trend. However, some website takes it too far and start using vague icons that are not commonly known to users. As a result, users get confused and gets frustrated with trial and error to find out what the icon does.
Unexpected Occurrence
It is really frustrating for users when they perform an action on a website, but something unexpected happens. For example, when a user clicks on a button to submit a form, but nothing happens. These kinds of unexpected occurrence can lead to user bouncing back from the website thinking that it is broken.
Errors and Unclear Messages
One of the major UX failures is when users don’t have clear instructions when performing an action. For example, one of the common mistakes made my website is not showing password requirement when users are filling out a form. Once they have filled out the form and submit the button they are shown the password error. This gets even more frustrating when all the error shows unclear message and users are left wondering what they are doing wrong.
Performance
Load time is another frustrating part of websites with poor UX. It is a waste of time for users if they have to wait 10 seconds each time a page loads. This can also be avoided easily if a website works on optimizing the load time.