UX Mistakes To Look Out For
Posted June 3, 2021
Making a good looking website is hard, but making one that looks good and works to create a positive user experience (UX) can feel like a tightrope act in and of itself. Just because you hired the best designer in the world who makes you the prettiest site ever, doesn’t mean it’ll feel good to navigate. A website is a lot like a sports car; just because it gives a great first impression with how pretty it looks, doesn’t mean you’ll have the same feeling once you sit inside and start to drive it. Here are a few mistakes I’ve caught over the years that I’ve seen countless sites make.
Not having social media links immediately within view
Not every business needs to have social media pages; figuring out if you need one and which ones work toward the type of audience you’re trying to reach is part of the process when starting out. But what I see time and time again are sites that have social pages but for some reason either hide them somewhere on the page or exclude them completely. Lots of people nowadays are simply following their favorite businesses on social media to stay up to date on the latest products, so if a potential future customer comes across your site, you want them to be able to see (and follow) your social pages almost immediately. Keeping them at the bottom of a site is the usual standard, but having them at the top right corner of your site and at the bottom can be a smart (if somewhat aggressive) way to make sure your social links are always within view of anyone browsing your site.
Having a confusing site layout
There’s nothing worse than going to a website and after a few minutes of exploring it you realize you’re completely lost and don’t know how to get back to certain pages. So many sites overwhelm users with labyrinthian navigation layouts that make it hard to have a general sense of the overall “map” of a site.
I like to use the analogy of shopping in a clothing store to illustrate this. Have you ever seen those racks that are so jam packed with clothes that you just get frustrated because you’re working harder than needed just to find a shirt you’d like that *might* be there? Same applies here. If a person visits your site and starts getting lost, then they’re eventually going to just give up and leave your site.
A good way to combat this is to simply build out a visual web of your site. The team here at Brightly Creative have experience in creating easy to understand webs of your sitemap that illustrate what aspects of your site might be hindering your business, and what we can do together to help fix it.
Burying your contact page
Sometimes you want to get in contact with a business’ support, be it a small problem or large. Your contact page, like your socials, should always be in easy view, and regardless of the type of contact form you have, that should be immediate upon clicking the page. If you rely on email, make that the first thing you see, same thing if it’s a chat interface or phone number. Make whatever form of contact it is immediately in view when opening the contact page.
Think of it like this, if your customer is already thinking of contacting you it’s likely because they’re frustrated with something, and the last thing you want to do is add to that. If someone has to spend time digging through drop-down menus, FAQ pages or chat-bots to get to a human to talk to, they’re not going to start that conversation on the most positive tone, and their opinion of your business is going to take a hit because it’ll appear that you’re purposely trying to hide the support line.
The team at Brightly Creative has helped clients find and solve these types of issues and can do the same for your business. Simply reach out to see what we can do to help improve your customer experience.
Tags: Brightly Creative, social media, thought leadership, UX, website tips
CATEGORY: Brightly Creative
