Have you ever been excited to see what an exciting new startup is up to and once you visit their website or download their app, you start to reconsider your excitement? Well, you’re not alone.
Everyone knows that effective and engaging UI design is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to conversion rates. Chances are that as a digital service or product, your customers are finding out about you online and the entire process is on digital channels.
Therefore, it is critical to look at your UI design and rethink your strategy.
What is the difference between UI and UX?
While there are fundamental differences, often people get this wrong.
UX actually refers to the term User Experience, while UI stands for User Interface. Both are extremely crucial to a product (website or app) and are often tied closely together. Where they differ mostly, is the roles that they play or the different part of the process in building and refining your product.
UX design is often a more analytical and technical field, UI tends to be closely associated to traditional design and the look and feel of the product and service.
What are the most common UI design mistakes?
Looking at it from a website standpoint, both UI and UX design are two crucial parts that affect your conversion rate. Today almost every online business needs to provide a proper experience so that they could attract and convert web traffic into potential leads.
However, most brands tend to get this wrong and here’s how:
Unresponsive design on mobile
Having a website that isn’t mobile optimised is the cardinal UI design sin.
The use smartphones continues to increase in comparison to PCs and laptops, so you’re eliminating the largest portion of your potential customer base. Your website has to be optimised for mobile usage and have the same functionality.
This is something as too much information
Often we feel that having as much information visible means a higher conversion rate for my business. This unfortunately is a fallacy and can be a huge detriment to conversion.
Visitors want a smooth and informative experience at their fingertips. Imagine landing on a very busy home page with animations, content, images or videos and pop-ups. I believe the term is “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
We look at 5 design tools for early stage startups
Really slow web pages
We tend to lose interest if there is even the shortest delay in getting the information. The likelihood of someone waiting more than a second or two to access your website is very low.
The majority of your visitors expect immediate loading times and will often leave your website if they have to wait. So make sure that you’re website is designed to load fast.
No customer testimonials or reviews available
One of the first things on your website should be customer testimonials. Though many designers then forget these, they \can make a huge difference to your conversion rates. Often conversion is dependent on social and industry validation.
Also, make sure you have any PR coverage or say a mention or story about your brand on publications like Tech Collective.
Messy design is a costly mistake
The line between creativity and randomness can be quite a thin one.
While many may consider their mess to be creativity personified, what actually matters are your visitors. Avoid messy or cluttered layouts as they can frustrate the users and make sure there aren’t too many elements on a page, users lose their focus and it adds unnecessary efforts in their journey.