A clunky Web site or app user experience compromises an organization’s ability to engage their intended audience and generate revenue through their platform. Visitors explore a platform to seek answers to their questions or find viable solutions to their problems. Therefore, the best way to engage your target audience is to design a visually appealing, functional platform that facilitates their access to relevant information and functionality.
However, offering a seamless user experience might not be easy because you could encounter various challenges. In this article, I’ll discuss best practices for identifying and solving UX design problems. Let’s dive in.
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What Is User Experience?
The user experience encompasses all aspects of the user’s journey while trying to perform intended actions using a Web site or app. Depending on how easy or difficult it is for the user to perform those actions, we would classify their experience as good or bad. For example, if a visitor finds it difficult to purchase the desired products through an ecommerce platform, it provides a subpar user experience. In contrast, if visitors can easily find the products they want, add them to their cart, and complete the checkout process, the platform is offering at least a satisfactory user experience.
Common User Experience Problems
Developers spend more than 50% of their time trying to fix UX design problems that you could avoid creating if you’re careful. However, you can’t eliminate the possibility of any UX design problems’ occurring. The chance of users encountering such issues always exists. Now, let’s consider some UX design problems that users frequently encounter.
User-Interface Complexity
One of the most common UX design problems is unnecessary complexity, which makes accessing useful information or performing desired actions through a Web site or app more difficult. For example, it’s sometimes difficult for users to navigate to the information they need because of a platform’s complex information architecture or poor design. As a result, users might have a frustrating experience and end up bouncing off the platform for good.
The complexity of a user interface could lead to cognitive overload. A user’s inability to access relevant information for decision-making could significantly affect users’ level of satisfaction and cause them to consider other alternatives. To remedy this issue, craft a simple information architecture and simplify the navigation menus and presentation of information on pages. Figure 1 provides an example of a site with a simple site architecture and navigation system.
Figure 1—A simple site architecture and navigation system
Plus, adding a search feature to your platform could help users access the information they need with ease.
Legibility Issues
Compromising a platform’s legibility could contribute to a poor user experience. Even if users can easily access a site’s published information, it might be of no use if they struggle to understand it. A number of design issues could cause legibility issues such as a designer’s selection of the font style, background and foreground colors, or the use of whitespace.
The best way to fix legibility issues that lead to a compromised user experience is to select minimalistic design elements. Being creative to make your design stand out is one thing, but you shouldn’t go overboard and end up making odd choices that could impair legibility. Figure 2 shows examples of text whose spacing is too tight, good, or excessive.
Furthermore, you should use whitespace carefully. Leveraging whitespace complements the user experience and can increase users’ attention by 20%.
Poor Responsiveness
People’s preferences for accessing your platform could be diverse. A common mistake many make is optimizing their Web site to perform best on the desktop. They forget that visitors might choose to access their preferred Web sites through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. More than 55% of traffic on any Web site is likely to come from mobile devices. So it’s important to ensure that your platform offers a seamless experience on different screen sizes. Doing so requires effective responsive design. Figure 3 shows ways in which users commonly interact with their mobile phone.
Testing the responsiveness of your platform on different devices is key and enables you to offer an enhanced user experience.
Cluttered Layouts
The ways in which you present useful information on your platform has a significant impact on the user experience. A platform with cluttered layouts could overwhelm users, which in turn would hinder their ability to make informed decisions, as the ARNGREN.net Web site in Figure 4 demonstrates.
Figure 4—Example of a cluttered layout
Leveraging simple layouts and content structures helps improve the visitors’ user experience. Facilitating visitors’ access to useful information not only improves user retention but also helps establish an organization’s online presence, enabling their Web site to get more eyeballs.
Slow Page Loads
The load times of a site’s pages has a significant impact on the user experience the Web site offers. Pages that take a very long time to load compromise a site’s ability to engage visitors and keep them coming back. Figure 5 shows the negative impact of slow page-load times.
Figure 5—Impact of slow page-load times on bounce rates
A high page-load time leads to user frustration because it’s difficult for users to access relevant information or perform their intended actions. Therefore, if your goal is to offer a seamless information-seeking and navigation experience, you should focus on improving your Web site’s load times.
Poor Error Handling
When users are trying to purchase something online and complete the checkout process, imagine their frustration if the system prevents them from proceeding because they’ve entered certain information incorrectly. When users encounter a problem while exploring an ecommerce platform and they don’t know what to do next because the Web site doesn’t tell them what they’ve done wrong or how to fix the problem, this is the result of poor error handling. It is likely to lead to a frustrating user experience, causing users to abandon their purchasing process. Figure 6 provides a common example of a poor error message.
Figure 6—A bad 404 error message
Users see a 404 error message on a Web site when either a page they want to explore is unavailable or they’ve made an input error when filling out a Web form. Effective error messages are necessary to complement error handling and facilitate the user experience.
Best Practices for Identifying and Solving UX Design Problems
Now that we’ve looked at some UX design issues that users commonly encounter, let’s explore best practices for identifying and solving UX design problems.
1. Understanding Audience Expectations
To ensure that you offer a seamless user experience, it’s important to know your target audience’s preferences. Without knowing what your users expect from your site or app, it won’t be possible for you to meet their expectations. The best ways to gather such information are conducting surveys or user interviews. Analyzing the resulting data lets you understand users’ preferences. Once you’ve collected and analyzed this useful information, let your insights fuel your user-centered design process, enabling you to offer an enhanced user experience.
2. Creating User Profiles or Personas
Although your users could have diverse interests and preferences, their needs and expectations often align. You can classify your users based on their characteristics and create different profiles or personas to represent them. This helps you organize user information and put it to good use.
For example, you could personalize the user experience for specific user personas, keeping their diverse needs, expectations, and goals in mind. Creating personalized user interfaces that are based on specific user profiles improves both the early adoption of a site or app and user retention in the long run, because 80% of people prefer platforms that offer personalized experiences.
3. Leveraging User Interactions
One effective way of identifying and solving UX design problems requires you to leverage users’ interactions on a platform. Tracking how users interact with a platform makes it easier for you to discover the issues they encounter and come up with viable solutions.
When you observe your users’ journey, you get to know how they navigate your platform to access relevant information or the products they need or to benefit from the capabilities it offers to help them achieve their goals. Understanding user journeys enables you to discover and fix potential UX design problems and offer an enhanced user experience across all touchpoints in the journey.
4. Prototyping
Ideally, you should identify and solve UX design problems during your site or app’s development stage. Once the design and development process is complete and your platform is ready to launch, going back to the drawing board to fix bugs isn’t really a viable approach. This would result in the ineffective utilization of your budget, time, and available resources. Therefore, prototyping the user experience is a strategy worth considering. The goal here is to see whether your platform behaves correctly in response to certain user inputs or requests and ensure that users can complete specific actions or navigate to the information they need with ease.
5. Eliciting User Feedback
Continuous improvement is the key to offering a seamless user experience. The goals of a site or app’s intended audience can change over time. Therefore, it is important to collect customer feedback to identify areas that need improvement and ensure that you can offer an optimal user experience. Whether users are encountering specific bugs or the overall experience that you offer doesn’t align with your audience’s expectations, user feedback can help you identify problems and illuminate the best course of action to fix them.
6. Analyzing and Understanding the Problem
Once you’ve identified the problems preventing users from having a seamless user experience, you need to understand the issues so you can come up with viable fixes. The goal here is to explore the potential causes of a compromised user experience. Understanding the UX design problems and their causes increases your chances of successfully fixing the issues and preventing such unpleasant issues from occurring in the future.
7. Devising Viable Solutions
Once you’ve identified the UX design problems and explored their potential causes, you need to devise viable solutions for these problems. Offering an enhanced user experience is a collaborative effort that requires close coordination among different disciplines. To initiate the process of remedying these problems, gather all concerned stakeholders, clearly communicate the problems to them, and get them on board with your solutions.
8. Prioritizing Fixes
You might come across a number of UX design problems during and after the product-development stage. Some of these issues could have devastating impacts, while others might be trivial and not pose much of a threat. In either case, neglecting UX design problems is never an option. But prioritizing your design fixes is key to keeping a project moving without overwhelming your team. Attempting to fix all UX design problems at once could be a daunting and stressful experience for your team. Therefore, it’s best to create a timeline and prioritize solving any problems that could have a big impact on the user experience first.
9. Conducting Usability Testing
Conducting moderated or unmoderated usability testing are two of the most effective ways of testing the functionality of a Web site or app. During usability test sessions, you assign certain tasks to participants and ask them to complete the tasks using your platform or app. You can then assess their task-completion rates and ask participants to report any hurdles they encountered while attempting to complete the assigned tasks.
Testing can help you identify areas for improvement in the user experience you offer to your target audience. Through iterative design and testing, you can greatly enhance the user experience.
Once you’ve made any design changes that are necessary to remedy issues, you should test your fixes before going live with the updates. Only in this way can you ensure the functionality and usability of your platform before launching changes to the user interface. Iterative design requires that you conduct a series of tests to verify that the functionality of your platform meets users’ expectations.
Final Thoughts
In this article, I’ve covered best practices for identifying and solving UX design problems to help you offer an enhanced user experience. Discovering the design issues that compromise the user experience that you offer can be challenging. Iterative design is a time-consuming activity that could overwhelm your team, especially when your resources are limited. The recommendations I’ve made in this article could help you explore UX design problems that users commonly encounter and enable you to come up with viable solutions for them.
As the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site, Syed is one of the leading WordPress experts in the industry, with over ten years of experience,. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social-media networks. Read More
