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Experts Reveal 13 Features That Can Ruin Your Website UX

The overall appearance and feel of a website speak for itself as a good one can reap rich rewards in the long-run and a bad one can clearly destroy your brand’s web presence. Seriously, your customers will take it as an opportunity to look for alternatives. This is why you have to design and maintain a user-friendly, visually appealing, and up-to-date website.

But it’s not that easy to provide potential customers with the easy and satisfying user experience. You might have read a plethora of articles on features which you should definitely integrate into your web presence in order to make it much more influential. 

But there are a very few pieces of content that describe the irrelevant features that may intimidate your consumers or make it difficult for them to navigate your site. Let’s take a look at thirteen such features outlined by 13 Forbes Technology Council members that can either make or break a digital transaction for your business.

1. Pop-Ups That Are Interfering & Irrelevant

According to  Chalmers Brown, who is the CTO and Co-founder at Due a leading provider of payment solutions, pop-ups are extremely useful but not at all the times. They definitely help customers in resolving their queries. But if pop-ups keep reappearing at every single page then visitors will get annoyed at some point.

He said that these pop-ups must be incorporated but in a smart manner. Remember not to overburden your site with lots of pop-ups but discover some unique way to convince customers that you are at their service 24*7.

2. Drop-Down Lists

In the opinion of Arnie Gordon, who is the owner of Arlyn Scales a leader in design and development of technology for the weighing industry drop-down menus are quite frustrating because it’s almost impossible to keep them away from disappearing frequently. Also, these elements can be even more clunky on smartphones.

According to him, we should rather keep these menus in the sidebar so that it will be easier for visitors to have an idea of where they actually are on the website. Also, they won’t have to go through that frustrating experience of struggling with pull-down lists.

3. Autoplay Videos Which Are Forced Fit Into The Interface Of A Website

Tom Altman, who is a tech-geek and an employee of a renowned marketing consultant Leverage, powered by Clickstop consider autoplay videos as annoying elements which we try to force feed into our customers and visitors. These videos act as frustrating pop-ups and customers might find them out of place.

He thinks that if you will create an influential video and market it to your target audience they will definitely see it. But there’s no point in making it a compulsion for customers to play and see a particular video.

4. ‘Surprise’ Interactions Can Be Considered Scammy & Pushy

According to Ayo Jimoh, who is the CTO of Visibly a leading digital vision test provider surprise interactions are not always turn out to be good. Rather when a user is navigating your website, it’s not at all a good idea to hit them with sudden video, mailing lists, graphics, and advertisements.

Customers can see these interactions as pushy and scammy which are barging in unnecessarily when they dive into automatically triggered content. It’s true that engaging users can be the primary goal of many sites but using such interactions can never be the best way to attain it.

5. Homepage Video Backgrounds Are A Complete No-No

David Isaac Murray who is the CTO of an esteemed marketing automation platform for medical practices Doctor.com thinks that homepage video backgrounds do more harm than good to your web presence. For instance, LinkedIn tried this a few years back but ultimately it was ineffective.

The reason is that human beings easily get distracted by noticing a motion in their peripheral vision. Therefore, such videos can be the major cause to drive people away from your desired call to action.

6. Confusion Arise Due To Lots Of Calls To Action

OptinMonster is a top online lead generation and optimization company founded by  Thomas Griffin. He has an opinion that too many calls to action on a website confuse customers and they can’t decide where to click next. In such situations, the majority of visitors just abandon your website.

It’s advisable to incorporate one big call to action at every single screen which is visible. This will leave space for having other CTA buttons below the major one which will get disappeared as the user scrolls over it. Check ResumeSeed as an example.

7. Heavy Imagery That Is Slow-Loading In Nature

As per Anne Bisagno, who owns Xantrion which is an enterprise-grade IT service provider to mid-sized businesses suitable images are inevitable for a visually appealing site but don’t ever incorporate large, slow-loading images as they can be the primary reason why most of your visitors are looking for other options.

8. It’s Not A Good Attempt To Trick Customers With Features That Are Over The Top

The Hoth is a white label SEO service provider and it’s CTO Jason Gill has an opinion that if you will try to outsmart users by providing them with over the top features there are chances that they will get annoyed and leave your site.

For example, it might be your first attempt to get on the nerves of your users if you try to offer some extreme features such as changing the browsing history or reversing the standard scrolling behaviour of the browser or just trying to block a few clipboard actions. It’s good to make your web presence unique but not at the cost of forcing users to learn the fundamental concepts again.

9. Over Use Of Flowery Content

Brian Contos, who is the VP Technology at Verodin Inc. a cybersecurity leader thinks that you should not overburden your website with a plethora of content which is lengthy and flowery in nature.

Being promotional tools websites should only have to the point content which is brief and simple for users to comprehend. Avoid using lots of buzzwords and jargons and make visitors understand your core values and objectives.

10. Embracing Chatbots Way Too Much Can Be Dangerous In The Long-Run

According to  Artem Petrov, who is the CEO at a top mobile app development company Reinvently you have to be extremely cautious in the way you use chatbots. Extreme use of these bots can make users feel like they’re on a robotic journey and riding through a messed up interface. It’s true that smart chatbots make a site much more intuitive and personalized but visitors can consider them as over-pitched elements that irritate them.

11. Ignoring The Mobile-Friendly Design

Vikram Joshi, who is the Founder and CTO at pulsd a leading information resource for New Yorkers think that nowadays it’s not a good practice to make your website desktop-centric because the mobile traffic has already surpassed the desktop traffic percentage. This is why, get your UX design agency to keep your site concise by not over stuffing it with lots of content and too many pages.

12. Continuous Scrolling Isn’t The Ultimate Solution

As per Dmitry Dragilev, who is the Founder at JustReachOut.io a renowned PR platform continuous scrolling is good but only for social media channels such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

But when it’s used in the website users get annoyed as it gives them a feeling that they have missed out on something really important or will never reach the end of the page. This is because in continuous scrolling as a user scrolls down the feed, new content shows at the bottom of the page on its own.

13. Autostart Audio Won’t Work

Marc Fischer, who is the CEO & Co-founder at Dogtown Media LLC a mobile technology studio considers autostart audio completely useless because it can give a sudden shock to the users.

Imagine when a user opens a site unknowingly that the sound is full and he has to listen to a loud message which is audible to the people sitting nearby. It has been observed that most of the digital videos are consumed without sound and hence autostart audio can create a terrible user experience.

A website is an integral asset that can either make or break the digital identity of your brand. This is why it should be designed cautiously without any loophole that could be dangerous in the long-run.

Author Bio: Anubhuti Shrivastava is a content crafter at Arkenea and Benchpoint. She is passionate about writing articles on topics related to design and the software development industry.

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