Overlooking even the smallest detail can play a crucial role in customer retention and satisfaction, potentially generating a negative experience and frustrating users, leading them to cancel their subscriptions and/or stop using your product.
At Make it Clear, we are experts in leveraging the power of UI Design to leave a long-lasting positive impression, attracting new users, retaining existing ones, and creating delight. That’s why we have compiled a concise list of the most common mistakes designers make when building websites and interfaces.
Mistake one: poor navigation
A poorly designed navigation system will prevent your users from having an optimal experience while interacting with your website. Factors such as insufficient feedback, complex menu structures, absence of a clear visual hierarchy, or search functionality (to name a few) will impact the overall perception and usability of your product and contribute to determining its success.
Solution: Some of the things you can do to design a better navigation experience for your digital product include performing usability testing, ensuring your website is responsive and works well across most common screen sizes and devices, and avoiding overloading the real estate at your disposal with too many options or complex elements. You want to provide your user with the tools they need to find what they’re looking for in the easiest and quickest way possible. Your website should be intuitive, easy to use, simple, and clear.
Mistake two: overcomplicated UI elements
Overloading your digital product with too much information will lead to a series of issues, such as increased cognitive load, scanning difficulties, impaired accessibility, lack of white space, and creating the perception that your website is confusing and unprofessional. These issues will cause frustration for users trying to navigate through your product, drastically decreasing its usability and increasing the chances for them to give up before they can find the information they’re looking for, eventually leading to a poor user experience.
Solution: One of the main objectives when creating a digital product must be to focus on providing a sleek, user-friendly interface. Some of the best ways you can ensure this goal is met include highlighting the primary information using design principles such as contrast, balance, proportion, rhythm, and repetition to establish a clear hierarchy, and removing unnecessary information. Use clear and concise language, making sure that the content is easy to digest, and avoid using too many colours, fonts, and graphic elements. Lastly, provide ample white space and group elements accordingly. Following these suggestions will help you create an interface that’s clean, organised, and focuses on the content that matters the most.
Mistake three: lack of consistency
The purpose of establishing a certain consistency throughout your website is to allow users to perceive a sense of familiarity as they use your product, which, in turn, will help them understand how to interact with the interface and create a more intuitive and seamless experience. Furthermore, an inconsistent design will make your site feel disjointed, negatively impacting brand recognition and perception.
Solution: A design system is the best tool designers have at their disposal to tackle issues related to inconsistent design and solve the problem altogether. This consists of defining and outlining all of the foundational elements that will make up the development of the final product. These include things such as type systems, grid systems, colour palettes, iconography, and style. Applying these elements consistently will create repeating patterns from which your users can learn their way around your product much faster, as well as ensure a cohesive user experience.
Mistake four: ignoring user feedback
User feedback is paramount in streamlining the user experience and interface of your digital product, as it provides invaluable insights into how users engage and interact with it. Thorough user research data and analysis will highlight areas of improvement that will help turn your product into something people will love and want to use, boosting engagement and retention.
Solution: The most effective way to ensure you are taking a step forward in improving the user experience and addressing your users’ pain points is by constantly conducting usability testing (especially in the early stages after the release of your product), in-depth interviews, user surveys, or focus groups as well as the subsequent meticulous analysis of this data, transforming the insights into informed design decisions.
Mistake five: failing to optimise for mobile
Another important aspect that will help set your digital product apart is responsive design. With a greater increase in tablet and mobile users, it is crucial to take into consideration mobile-friendly products that will adapt and stretch to any kind of screen and size. Avoiding this will lead to mobile users abandoning their journeys, negatively impacting brand perception and poor user engagement that will affect your SEO optimisation.
Solution: There are various responsive design techniques and technologies you can employ to embrace a mobile-first approach. Also, think about different screen sizes and resolutions, and how the design of your product will reshape and change, prioritising the most important information and decluttering from any unnecessary elements.
How to avoid UI design mistakes
User experience should always sit at the heart of every product, but learning to avoid these mistakes will help you design in a more effective, functional, and memorable way. This, in turn, will retain your users. The key is to consistently iterate and improve upon user feedback and needs, ensuring your product is engaging and user-friendly.
Best practices for UI design
Besides what we’ve explored so far, some of the best practices to keep in mind when designing digital products are as follows:
- Ensure elements are aligned and the layout is balanced, adopting the usage of grid systems.
- Use colours functionally and consistently to create a product that’s more intuitive and aids users in navigating through the interface with ease.
- Create visual hierarchy and emphasis using typographic systems.
- Make your interface more visually engaging with a well-thought-out approach to imagery and icons – when applied effectively, this is a tool that aids your audience in quickly absorbing complex chunks of information.
- Employ principles of proximity and white space to establish a more balanced preview of the information and reduce cognitive load.
Conclusion
So, what’s next for the exciting future of UI design? We can certainly look forward to a strong focus on the creation of digital products that are growing in visual appeal and user-friendliness. Our ever-evolving technological landscape sets the stage for designers to break the constraints of creativity, using colour, typography, structure, and layout more daringly, all while considering the aforementioned prevention strategies. The importance of avoiding common mistakes, such as poor navigation, overcomplicated UI elements, lack of consistency, ignoring user feedback, and failing to optimise for mobile, cannot be overstated.
The commitment to iterative improvements based on user feedback and needs remains paramount, ensuring that digital products are not only engaging but also user-friendly, setting the stage for enhanced customer retention and loyalty.
We’d love to talk to you about how Make it Clear can support your organisation with excellent UI design. Book a call here.