Interaction Design Mistakes NOT to Make

Websites are extremely essential in today’s day and age as they are the one credible source of information about your brand in the wide and vast world of digital media. To attract customers in this vast world, it is important to have two things on your side.

The first is good content. The second is seamless website design. Website design has become more flexible and innovative over the years. Greater flexibility can improve the over-all user experience, but it can also lead to user frustration. Web designers want to have a top quality product. As with all design elements, a top quality website should have both form and function.

Unintuitive Innovations

Image: Designmodo

It can be easy for a designer to focus energy on the form of a design element only to sacrifice its utility. This often results from ignoring the reasoning behind standard design elements. These elements are standard because they allow the user to intuitively interact with every element of the webpage.

When innovations do not match any of the standard elements, the user becomes confused. Confusion leads to frustration, which may cause the user to leave the webpage entirely.

While this may imply that innovation is never a good idea, it isn’t so. Innovation, when applied properly, can be a tremendously important tool. However, innovation should always take the standard rules into account. Otherwise, the designer may violate rules that they were unaware of. These standard rules are what allow users to interact with a feature intuitively. Violations of these rules make the overall design less intuitive. A designer can minimize the impact of new elements by keeping enough of the old elements to contextualize the experience.

Web designers should keep the user’s experience in mind when designing new features. Although a feature may seem intuitive to the designer, remember that a designer has access to more context than the users. Make certain to test all features to keep your design innovations intuitive. Undergoing an exhaustive testing process can ensure that you do not have to seek website redesign services in the future. Always make sure to test on people who are far away from the design process so you can get a real feel of what your end user will experience when they are going through your website.

Sizing Problems

A key part of website redesign is to make it intuitive for all different types of readers. You do not want to end up alienating an entire client base just because you did not take their psychological factors into consideration while designing your website. The elements of your webpage need to be sized according to their function. In particular, the font needs to be sized so that individuals of all ages can read your webpage.

Many web pages will set a standard font size that is too small for people over 40 to read easily. These individuals will struggle to read your content. Another problem with setting a standard font is that it can disable the user’s ability to resize the font using their browser. If the designer doesn’t account for that and sets different standard options, a website can become inaccessible.

No matter what other options you give on your web pages, allow people to resize their font. Whether you take advantage of the browser’s utility or give options for increasing the standard size, keep usage intuitive. Options are best labeled as ‘smaller,’ ‘standard,’ and ‘larger.’ This ensures your options’ clarity.

Confusing Navigation

The most important aspect of any webpage is navigation. Unintuitive navigation can ruin a user’s experience faster than any other problem. Although the standard labels may seem uninteresting, they allow for easy navigation between elements. Unclear navigation will ruin a page faster than any other element

Choose the right number of primary categories on your menus. Between the labels and the menu options, it should be clear where users need to go next. Sometimes you may need as many as seven options, and other times as few as three. Using the minimum number of labels for clarity and efficiency will help people navigate your website easier.

Keep your search page efficient and intuitive as well. Your results should be in order of frequency, rather than the number of times the search term appears on the page or in the document. Ordering options in terms of frequency means you have a greater chance of giving your user what they needed immediately.

One thing to keep in mind when making your site easy to search with help from SEO agencies is that people are mostly in a hurry when searching for things on search engines like Google. At this time, they are likely to make more spelling mistakes, which is something you cannot ignore if you want them to find your site easily. Search engines should take common misspellings into account. Part of the intuitive process is allowing your user to find what they need, even if they can’t articulate it expertly. If your account for common misspellings and missing hyphens or pluralization, your page will be far more intuitive for the average user.

Limit the number of pop-ups and do not open new browser windows without some way of indicating that the window has opened. Users may feel like their experience has been hijacked and leave the website. If they don’t notice the new window, it may also confuse them to not be able to use the browser’s back buttons. Any top Website Design Company you approach today will tell you that these pop-ups are a growing concern as they increase the bounce rate of your website. It is something you need to take utmost care of. If it is not possible to completely eliminate the pop-ups, you need to make the options to cancel it easily visible to the eye so that people do not quickly exit your website.

Irrelevant Content

While every page may have different definitions of what irrelevant content is, there are common violators of this principle. Every page should have a single overarching theme and minimize any content that is not relevant. Sometimes, you might need to have information that seems irrelevant, but it should be clearly marked as not being content.

Frequently asked questions pages are frequent violators of this principle. Many people go to a FAQ and wonder who would even think to ask most of the questions. A website that doesn’t get many questions per day may find that not having a FAQ page is a useful solution.

Another frequent form of irrelevant content is advertising. The owner may be paid for advertising, but most users find it amusing at best and annoying at worst. Pop-up advertising is the worst offender. Most viewers dislike any form of pop-up because of these advertisements.

Branding agencies have a rule of thumb that they follow for the placement of advertisements. When designing a webpage, advertising should be either to the right or the bottom. Do not mix ads with text, as users may think the advertisement is content and select it. This leads to users leaving your site, and these users may not return.

Another thing that irks users is when they are unable to go from one article to another with ease. Here, you need to make sure that the navigation between pages is seamless so as to allow the user to enjoy the content that they are consuming. Content management systems and web development languages can help you achieve this with ease. Forms need to be both attractive and meaningful. A user should not have to fill out a new form every few pages. Forms should also have clear markers of what information is necessary and what is additional information.

Image: Designmodo

Creative Agencies state that while the design and aesthetics of your site are important, they will not count for much if your user is not comfortable on the site and decides to leave it as soon as they land on it. You need to stop this from happening at all possible costs. Web design los angeles is only good as long as it is not hampering your end goal- which is to get users to interact with your brand and eventually buy your products. In all cases, the ease of experience is more important than the form the design takes. If a feature makes a webpage easier to interact with, it is a good design. If not then leave it behind.