As a UX designer, your job is to make sure Web-site visitors have the best user experience possible. However, users are bound to make mistakes. Whether because of their being unfamiliar with your user interface, clicking something accidentally, or simply misinterpreting your instructions, mistakes are all but unavoidable. Nevertheless, you must take steps to prepare for the unexpected so your audience has a smooth, positive experience when they engage with your brand.
While it’s true that some mistakes are great learning experiences for visitors, too many errors can make them feel frustrated and possibly drive them away from your site. So you need to have a little foresight, predict what mistakes your visitors might make, and prevent them before they turn into problems. In this article, I’ll cover several actionable error-prevention strategies for UX design and describe the benefits you can expect if you decide to act by following these strategies.
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Benefits of Error Prevention
Reducing visitors’ errors when they’re interacting with your user interface translates to many great benefits for your business in terms of user satisfaction, brand loyalty, and cost reduction.
Let’s take a closer look at some specific benefits that come with designing for unexpected errors.
improved customer satisfaction—A user-friendly interface reduces errors, which helps people complete whatever task they want to do both quickly and smoothly. People who have a smooth user experience are most likely to report feeling satisfied when you ask for feedback.
greater customer loyalty—Beyond improving satisfaction, reducing errors also makes it far more likely that people will return to your site to make future purchases or place additional orders, then tell their friends about their experience. When you consider that user loyalty is founded on trust and dependability, this makes sense. People are not going to remain loyal to a company if they run into problems every single time they visit their Web site.
better conversion rates—Another benefit is that you’ll likely see better conversion rates across the board. People are more inclined to take action—whether signing up, making a purchase, or filling out a form—if they encounter little to no resistance. Every error they make causes them to stop and consider whether they want to keep going. Meanwhile, a smooth, easy-to-use experience dramatically reduces the chances of a user dropping off, which means more sales and subscribers!
lower costs—Preventing errors during the design process is an excellent way to lower development and support costs. If UX designers can identify error-prone painpoints early, they can reduce the number of revisions, bug fixes, and reworks that are necessary over time. This means your team will have time to work on other projects or make updates that might otherwise take much longer. On the support side of things, each error users encounter could translate into a call, ticket, or email message that weighs on your Customer Service team. Effective error prevention means users are less likely to need help, which frees up your resources, saves time, and reduces support costs.
a better brand image—People tend to see brands in a more positive light if they offer an engaging, easy, valuable experience. Errors can certainly get in the way of a successful user journey, which can have a negative impact on your brand image. On the other hand, fewer errors lead to a better brand image. People see your company as a streamlined, highly effective organization instead of one that takes more time to deal with than it’s worth.
Actionable Strategies to Prevent Errors
Now that you know the various benefits to which you can look forward when you design for the unexpected, I want to explore several actionable strategies that can help you on your way. Virtually any business can follow this advice to minimize user errors and ultimately create a better experience for its current customers and first-time visitors alike.
Understanding Your Users
Devising a good error-prevention strategy starts with gaining a strong understanding of your audience. If you don’t know much about the people who are visiting your Web site, it can be tricky to plan around the roadblocks they might encounter.
The good news is that, through user research, you can collect data on your audience’s behaviors, preferences, goals, and painpoints. When UX designers know what users are trying to do and understand what frustrates them, they can anticipate their needs and put up safeguards to ensure that their process is as easy as possible.
Develop customer personas, which are fictional profiles that cover everything you know about your customers. Figure 1 provides an example. As you design solutions, you can check these personas and learn more about what customers want from your product and what they expect from your brand.
These profiles can help you figure out how people might engage with your navigation menus or your user interface as a whole. By considering these different user types, designers can anticipate the sorts of errors each might make, regardless of whether they’re beginners, experts, or somewhere in between. Understanding your audience can help you make the user experience more inclusive and users less prone to errors by ensuring that you’ve considered all user groups and integrated their needs into your design solutions.
Designing with Forgiveness
No amount of planning can stop all mistakes from happening. Everyone is bound to run into trouble at some point, so it’s a good idea to make sure there’s an easy way out of any problem.
Designing with forgiveness involves creating a user interface that not only guides users toward success but also helps them recover when they make errors. One of the basic building blocks of this approach is clear, concise instructions. Helping users get through complicated or unfamiliar processes using simple language minimizes their confusion and ensures that they completely understand what each step entails.
Step-by-step instructions—especially for processes such as account creation or making online purchases—can go a long way toward reducing errors and engendering confidence in users as they proceed. Similarly, a forgiving design also needs real-time input validation and feedback. Real-time validation helps keep the user on the right path, preventing potential problems down the line. Immediate feedback lets users make corrections as soon as they complete an interaction. For example, an alert might appear, informing the user that a password does not meet security requirements. Such feedback is crucial to maintaining users’ interest and confidence and making them feel well directed rather than punished when something doesn’t go according to plan.
Streamlining the User Journey
The more complicated the user journey, the more likely users are to run into errors because there are more chances to accidentally overwhelm or confuse them. You can greatly reduce the number of potential errors by making navigation easy to use and interactions simple. A clear information architecture and streamlined navigation system give users a clear idea of where they are and what to do next without having to guess. When navigation is easy and content is well organized, fewer mistakes result from user confusion or disorientation.
Progressive disclosure is another technique that helps users avoid errors by showing them only the information that is relevant at each step of their journey. Rather than overwhelming users with all the information at once, progressive disclosure presents information gradually, allowing users to focus on a single task at a time. This decreases users’ cognitive load and lets them make decisions confidently, without accidentally missing critical steps or details.
One of the best ways to implement this strategy is to provide high-quality onboarding and guides for your customers, as shown in Figure 2. You could, for instance, include a six-part tutorial for people who buy your digital product. This type of guided onboarding leads to fewer errors and a better user experience.
Since no amount of proactive design can eliminate every mistake, it’s very important to handle errors in a way that does not break users’ trust or make them feel like they’ve done something wrong.
Create clear, informative error messages that appear when something doesn’t go according to plan. Instead of displaying some cryptic code or technical jargon such as "ERROR: 5B23111," effective error messages describe what has gone wrong, expressing the problem in plain language, and suggest actionable steps to correct the problem.
If we go back to our earlier password-security example, a UX design team that wants to help the user quickly and easily resolve the error might display a message like this: “The password you have entered is too short. Please use at least eight characters.” The clarity of this message allows the user to understand what went wrong and learn how to correct it, preventing user frustration and making users feel that you want them to succeed and are there for them at each step along the way.
Think about other ways in which you can improve error recovery such as FAQ pages and tutorials. Knowing help is at hand is relaxing to users when they’re experiencing a problem and encourages them to push on. Provide support resources—especially for more complicated tasks—to ensure that help is available to users when they need it. This type of support helps build trust and encourages customers to feel confident and well supported even when something goes wrong. Figure 3 shows an example of an error message that provides such support.
Figure 3—Support resources in error messages
Image source: Usabilitygeek.com, “Error Prevention in UX Design: How Facebook and Gmail Get It Right”
Running Plenty of Tests
As for most business strategies, testing and iteration are fundamental to effective error prevention. You should run many different types of tests over time to make sure you’re delivering a top-notch, memorable user experience.
Start with usability testing, which involves observing real users’ interacting with a user interface to gain firsthand insights into where users might stumble or make mistakes. By identifying these painpoints first, UX designers can create better user experiences and handle issues before their impacts spread.
As shown in Figure 4, A/B testing can also come in handy, by allowing designers to test different design approaches and determine the most effective way to reduce errors. For instance, testing your checkout page with different error messages and measuring the results when people actually encounter them can help you figure out what works best for your audience. Through this iterative process, designers can continue to enhance the user experience and optimize error prevention in real time.
Once you’ve implemented some of the strategies I’ve discussed in this article, be sure to measure how effective your design changes are in comparison to the original user interface. You need to know whether the changes you’ve made are having a positive impact and, if not, what else you could do to improve the user experience.
Keep an eye on several key metrics so you can figure out what’s working and where you can make improvements. One of the most telling metrics is your error rate. Monitoring how often and where errors occur can help you determine whether your design changes were effective. A decreasing error rate means your strategies are working, while a flat or increasing error rate suggests there are areas you still need to improve. Keep detailed records of errors so you can spot recurring issues and address their root causes.
Another useful metric is the task-completion rate, which is the percentage of users who can complete a certain task—for example, joining your email list or making a purchase. A rising task-completion rate means users are encountering fewer obstacles and are finding it easier to navigate your site. Combine this data with the error-rate data to get a more complete picture of how things are going.
It’s also super important to gather feedback via online surveys, usability testing, and feedback forms. Eliciting and reviewing this direct input from your audience gives you insights into their experience and can help you discover unanticipated problems.
Final Thoughts
Error prevention is about investing in a user experience that ultimately benefits both customers and brand owners. By understanding users’ needs and designing forgiving user interfaces, UX designers can create experiences that minimize errors and maximize user satisfaction. There are many great benefits to devising successful UX design strategies for error prevention. Make these strategies a standard part of your design workflow.
While it might take some time to get things rolling, once you’ve started gathering the necessary data and making adjustments accordingly, you’ll be well on your way to creating more memorable, successful experiences for your customers.
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
