Really bad UX mistakes that even big teams make

Some of your most important UX decisions will be the things you don't do.

Creating that hamburger menu, changing the scroll direction and adding more features can be important decisions that make it easier for users to use your website or app and keep them engaged for longer. It's easy for even great teams to build great products and make terrible UX mistakes in the process - because it's not always clear what will resonate well with users.

If you experiment and iterate with your product and make mistakes along the way, that's okay. These mistakes are also opportunities to better understand what users need. But to make sure your mistakes are constructive, you need to educate yourself on why certain things work and some don't.

Really bad UX mistakes will frustrate your users if they are overlooked for too long. Below are some really bad UX mistakes that occur even in popular products with talented teams behind them. Let's learn from these mistakes and understand why they don't work so we can avoid them in our own product. Or we can learn to understand the meaning behind them so we can work towards a better overall experience for our user.

When I look at something, I should be able to recognize which operations I can perform. If that's not the case, you don't know how to use something.

The "Norman door" in UX design, for example, is a button, menu or other digital object that gives no indication of how to use it.

Every element of your product gives some kind of signal to your user - whether you intend it to or not. You can unknowingly create really bad UX if the signals you send don't match the actual use of the application. This leads to low "usability" - users can't figure out how to use the product or feature.

This is not just an aspect of digital design. It also exists with analog objects that we interact with every day. Design consultant Don Norman coined the term "Norman Door" to refer to a door that doesn't signal with its design how someone should open it.

Some apps do the same thing by using buttons or features that are not self-explanatory. If someone has never used the app before, it leaves a user guessing how to use the feature.

For example, for someone who has never used Google Translate before, this icon - is it a snake? a lasso? - is not easy to understand from the context clues. You may not know that you can use this button to write words for translation with your finger on your phone.

Findable is not the same as intuitive. You can introduce a new icon and provide enough signals in your product to help a new user understand the function, even if they are not familiar with it. Some key ways to do this include:

Create prototypes and gather user feedback: most of the time, findability is improved with simplicity - but sometimes you can oversimplify and remove necessary context. Test prototypes and see how real users, who the app is for, interact with it. The best way is to find out exactly how much context is necessary for your users.

Provide clear and simple user onboarding: Simple explanations should always be integrated into the onboarding of your product. You don't always need to display a text label next to a button. However, as a user learns to navigate through the product, the label should stay there, or the introduction to the feature should include a tooltip explaining the function or button.

When building your onboarding, you should have a clear idea of what your features look like. If you find that you have to explain the functions of your feature too much, they are probably too complex.

It is tempting to rely on familiar menu controls. But hiding critical parts of an application behind such menus could have a negative impact on usage.

Elements in the "last resort" category make navigation more difficult for your user. But too often, they're the first choice for product designers because they're widely available and easy to create.

In reality, these last-resort UI elements - like dropdown selectors and hamburger menus - can almost always be replaced with something more convenient for the user.

Dropdown menus are not only annoying, they make users click multiple times to make a selection, but they make it easy for users to make a mistake by grouping selections so close together in horizontal rows.

Similarly, hamburger menus should be considered the last hope. They have been overused because they give designers a lot of space in a small area. But ultimately, they make users forget features (because they're out of sight) and cause more work for the user (because it takes more taps or clicks to navigate).

For example, when Facebook changed its mobile iOS design to include a tab bar on the bottom instead of a hamburger menu in the top left corner, the result is more engagement, higher user satisfaction, higher revenue, and a higher perception of speed.

Look for alternatives that show users what they want and make it hard for them to make mistakes so they don't have to resort to the convenient but last resort:

Make decision aids visible and give users more control: simply put, interaction increases when users can see what their options are. Instead of creating hamburger menus, experiment with tab stops. Use steppers or sliders for quantitative options and radio buttons or buttons for qualitative options instead of drop-down menus.

Identify what is important, not everything can and must be visible. You need to prioritize the features you want users to interact with the most. This starts with understanding what is most valuable to your users.

Don't bother thinking that these menu controls simplify the user experience - they just hide complexity.

Personalization is a hypothesis like any other design or feature change and should be treated with similar precision. And that's by looking at the data to make sure it improves conversion rates and other important metrics.

When you use data from your users to create real, personalized recommendations, it goes much further than a "Hello, dear {customer}!" It requires a little more effort, but higher success in UX and engagement.

Every inbox is full of subject lines with their personalized name. This was once a useful tactic for building better relationships with customers by adding an element of personalization through which to make an emotional connection. But it's outdated.

Now that many marketers understand liquid tags, superficial personalization like a name doesn't have much impact. It's a nice gesture, but the personalization can't stop there. The value of personalization is taking what is unique about a person and using it to achieve their goals and drive interaction.

This type of superficial personalization - which isn't based on meaningful data - isn't enough because it doesn't align with what the user wants to do or help them get there.

For example, a company marketing a new membership can't settle for just a name in the subject line - because it makes the personalization seem hollow.

Instead, it would have been more beneficial for that company to use the data from the user's history and recommend specific packages that fit in with their preferences.

Really good UX is more than just a well-designed user interface - it's about optimizing every single interaction your user has with your brand. Data-driven personalization can help you connect more deeply with your user and provide them with truly helpful ways to achieve their unique goals.

To truly create value and increase engagement, look for ways to use the data you have on your customers to provide personalized advice and recommendations:

Use behavioral data to influence users' future actions By providing users with metrics on their usage, you can give them tailored recommendations for improvement. Not only will this increase user satisfaction, but your recommendation will lead them back to the product and make them more successful.

Enrich your lead data to offer specific personalization. You can pull more information about your leads or current customers to learn important details - like the industry they work in. Some companies use this data to provide helpful personalization such as landing pages for specific industries to address the specific concerns of customers in that industry.

There's a wide variety of data you can use to make personalization authentic and helpful - behavioral, local, industry-specific, and so on. Create better user experiences that offer three-dimensional personalization.

Responsiveness is a fundamental design rule for user interfaces that is dictated by human needs, not by individual technologies. A fast user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people interact more with a website when they can move around freely and focus on the content rather than its endless load time.

The first things users notice about your website or app are load time and response time. No matter how much time you spend perfecting your navigation menu or color scheme, people will never find your design great if they leave the page before a screen has loaded.

According to Jakob Nielson, responsiveness is so important because people have strict attention and control needs:

We have natural limitations on our attention and the longer we wait for a page to load, the more our attention wanes and the more likely we are to be distracted.

We would prefer to be in control of our own navigation, and poor performance makes us feel that we are at the mercy of others' incompetence.

Kissmetrics published an infographic showing how slow response time is killing your product - but the most alarming and remarkable observation was that literally every second counts.

After just two seconds of waiting, over 10% of users have already left your website. And the frustrating wait is so impactful that the consequences aren't isolated - poor performance will stick in your users' minds for so long that they'll even associate slowness with the whole brand.

Even though it's much less sexy than UI tweaks, making improvements to your product's performance can have big benefits:

Design around attention constraints. Users generally feel like a 0.1 second response is immediate, a 1 second response is fast but delayed, and a 10 second response is on the edge of tolerability. With a response time of around 0.1 seconds, users feel as though they are manipulating the product directly, rather than waiting for the product to work for them.

Be aware when using elements that slow down the load time: If a special widget or complex data processing feature on your website slows down your response time, don't place it on the landing page. If you need to add something that slows down response time, confirm this in a message to the user so they are more aware and able to stay in control.

Small improvements are important here. Even a 0.1 second improvement in response time can improve conversion rates. Optimizing performance means achieving tangible engagement results.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace. The complicated is simple, incredibly simple: that's creativity.

If you get too attached to the features or design elements of your product, it's hard to let them go. However, this can be detrimental to the UX, as adding complexity can overwhelm and confuse your user.

As with many things in life, simplicity in product design is often more difficult than complexity. True simplicity requires you to figure out what's most important and prioritize ruthlessly - which often means a lot more work than adding everything you can think of.

This is difficult because some products are really complex. What's more, the people who build products are aware of the complexity and how interesting and nuanced all the features are. Imposing a hierarchy of importance on features and actions for a user is difficult from this perspective.

Two of the biggest contributors to complexity are too much content and visual overload, because when the most important information is lost in content or visual overload, it becomes much harder for the user to find what they need or figure out what to do next.

It's not always easy to figure out what to remove, but it's important in order to develop a good UX. There are a number of ways you can bridge the gap between what a product designer or engineer wants to create and what the user actually needs:

Focus on the core value of your product. If your product is overcrowded, go back to basics - what is required in your market? The best way to find out is to talk to users and do market research. Identify the core features that lead to the underlying value and prioritize them. If necessary, you may need to remove features or content that are not aligned with this value and reject disruptive feature requests.

Prioritize visual simplicity: Many users perceive that less visually cluttered user interfaces are easier to use, even if they are objectively less helpful. It's simple, but visual elements like white space and clear calls to action have the benefit of making a product easier to use.

To ensure simplicity in your product, you need a strong product vision, supported by real user experiences and preferences that guide you to the most important elements.

As your market and your product evolve, your UX is constantly changing. That's why really good UX can't be seen as a single achievement. You need to keep delivering great experiences to your users. You need to understand the mechanics of different user experiences and the impact your product has on your user.

Jim Nieters, Global Head, User Experience, HP Consumer Travel Division, comments:

"The big question is not knowing that a product has a great design. It's knowing what it takes to deliver great user experiences time and time again."

Understanding the importance of UX mistakes and recognizing their impact on your users is the first and fundamental step.