Designing for the web is continuously evolving with new trends and practices being formed every other month. It can be hard to keep track of what the latest design trends are but it may not be too hard to have the basic principles of UX always on point. Human psychology doesn’t change too often; we only keep realizing new ways of tapping into your average user’s mindset better.

Designing a good, interactive user experience (UX) is important. It’s also equally important to stay away from UX traps that may drive users away. Here are 5 of the most important mistakes we’ve realized web designers should be wary of.

1. Forced sharing on social media

Integrating social media into the operations of your website might help in boosting your business. When your consumers share content via tweets or status, brand awareness spreads and new user onboarding happens.

This works perfectly well when your consumers are sharing content at will. When a brand tries to force users, especially new-age millennials, it could have an adverse effect. Brands sometimes force users to share content in order to access more content or other parts of the website. This can potentially drive users off your website, never to return again!

2. Pop-ups

This is an age-old precautionary tale. You’d be surprised how many websites still incorporate pop-ups purely because they feel an aggressive foot forward is a good strategy. Now, it definitely works for certain websites like eCommerce stores where their pop-ups offer discounts, but apart from that example, it’s almost always detrimental to your user’s experience.

3. Incoherent menu design

Often extensive websites with 100+ pages struggle with designing a coherent and well-presented menu. Again an eCommerce website’s example is relevant: when you have 1000s of products with main categories, sub-categories, and sorted by brand, it’s difficult presenting all options in an appropriate manner that will ease a user’s flow.

It’s imperative to chart out the ideal user flow and design the menu and navigation accordingly.

4. Page loaders

The ideal loading time of a web page, calculated based on how long it takes a user to jump off a website is 2-3 seconds. Your website’s load time has to be within that time. Larger websites incorporate creative loaders to allow them a little more time to load the entire content of their website.

The majority of page loaders are poorly designed and end up taking way too long. Design a unique page loader that’s relevant to your website. If your website takes longer than 4-5 seconds, add a percentage bar in your design to give users incentive to wait, knowing approximately when the load will complete.

If your website continues to have speed issues and experiences a high bounce rate because of it, try loading light parts of the page first, giving users an impression that something is happening behind and things are working fine.

5. Infinite scrolling

Even though infinite scrolling solves issues like retention, it has other drawbacks. In situations where you want to reach the bottom of a page for some information that you’d expect to find in the footer, you end up scrolling forever which can be frustrating.

Another annoyance comes when you find yourself in the middle of an infinite scroll page and navigate to another page. Later, you come back and wish to resume your reading. With infinite scrolling, it will be nearly impossible to find the point where you drifted off to other pages.

Click here for our services: website developer dubai

Tags: 5 UX mistakes you can’t afford to make