You might think that it should be simple to create a website or an app that looks and feels easy to use, right?
Turns out that the art of making things intuitive and simple is more challenging than creating a complex application. This is where user experience and user interface skills come in.
User experience design is the art of creating a product, website, or app that’s easy to use. User experience and user interface (UX/UI) design involve research, wireframing, prototyping, and quality assurance testing.
If you’re looking for that extra ‘ingredient’ to make your project look professional, then you need to work with these skills.
However, even UX/UI experts can go off track and make design mistakes. It’s not enough to learn about the principles of design by reading about it or doing an online course.
You also need to avoid overusing them and applying principles in a general way.
In this post, we’ll cover the main UX/UI mistakes you want to avoid in 2022. Let’s take a look.
Table of Contents
Not creating content first
The biggest mistake any designer can make is not to have an application’s content finalized.
In fact, one of the most difficult jobs you can have as a UX/UI designer is convincing people that their website’s design comes last.
Very often clients and even developers focus on colors, themes, logos, and layouts without realizing what content goes where.
As a result, once a prototype is built, customers come back with requests for changes which up-end all the work done so far.
Your golden rule should be to always finalize your website’s and app’s content first. Once that’s been signed off on, you can move on to the actual design of the site.
Not documenting every step of your design process
In programming, we know that proper documentation and comments are critical to making sense of code written long ago.
Similarly, UX/UI designers must document all the steps being taken right from ideation to the final design of the end product.
How can you do this documentation?
One way is by sending emails to your client, boss, or other stakeholders with all the details added to the content. This should include any agreements made during meetings as well as finalized wireframes, color pallets, etc. And only move forward when all the relevant parties have signed off on your recommendations.
Making documentation a practice can save you from unpaid rework and conflict between you, your team, and your client. People often forget what they agreed upon. Or they change their minds. When you have written proof that you’ve delivered on what people ask, you protect your business and create solid expectations.
Not getting feedback
You may have years of experience as a designer and even studied the principles of UX/UI design from the best sources. But you should never make blanket design decisions even with all that knowledge. This is something that the best designers know.
As you create content, set up wireframes, and move forward in any way, keep asking for feedback. And you don’t just want feedback from your peers or even your client. You need feedback from your client’s clients, that is, the final consumers of your work.
Most professionals and business owners create websites with the intention that their customers use these websites to get information or buy something. It’s the same with apps and products.
So, it makes sense to get feedback from the end-user directly.
Invite existing customers to try out a beta version of the product. Or work with a user-testing platform to get feedback on your site’s navigation.
Another powerful strategy is to use A/B testing to understand the effectiveness of your design. In email marketing, split testing increases conversions by 49%. Similarly, carrying out tests with your audience will create better outcomes from your app or website.
You can also launch the product to a test group in your customer base and ask them to fill a survey form at the end of a trial period.
You’ll get insights that are eye-opening and will help you create high-converting websites and applications.
A lack of structure
I’ve already mentioned how it’s important to define the final content that will appear on the site or application.
This means that the use of filler text like Lorem Ipsum or hastily drafted headlines will not do. Your client or content team needs to know what they want to see and flesh it out with as much detail as possible.
However, this doesn’t mean that you will highlight all the content you get equally. Presenting too much content to your user overwhelms them. They’ll experience mental labor looking for the right action to take and will likely stop using your product and leave.
UX/UI designers need to prioritize some content over others. And of course, you need to do this by balancing the best design principles as well as the factors that are unique to a business.
For example, I came across a situation where a company offered complex services to its clients. In this case, the best information to present on their home page was not a headline or sales copy – but an FAQ page.
Most people look for FAQs further along the purchasing cycle and so, you don’t often find FAQs right on the home page. But in this case, the customers’ primary need was to get information and it made a powerful impact to add FAQs and resources as home page material.
You can also showcase content that’s more important than others by using color, font, and by manipulating the sizes of images and objects.
For example, in a page consisting of multiple types of content, you can make the most important one with the largest font size. And the rest with gradations of font sizes. Such a tactic establishes visual hierarchy and gives users a place to focus.
Back to you
The process of designing a good website, product, or application is a dynamic one. You need to rely on both sound design principles as well as data that is unique to the business you’re working for.
As a UX/UI designer or student, you need to be aware of best practices but more importantly, you need to avoid critical mistakes that affect the success of your project.
In this post, I’ve laid some of the key mistakes that affect how well your application functions and appears.
By avoiding these problems, you can make a clean and functional interface that achieves a business’s goals, whether it’s to convert leads to customers, entertain users, or solve problems.
