The five most common UX design mistakes and how to avoid making them

Our advisory and design team works on strategic design with the largest private and public sector companies in Finland, with me and my colleagues working on design challenges that vary from teleoperator business to public healthcare every week.

These are the five top UX mistakes we come across repeatedly. I want to share them so that you can avoid these faults and achieve a much better design outcome.

1. Forgetting to establish clear goals and KPIs at the beginning of the project

Setting clear goals and KPIs is the most important phase of the project, as it steers all design tasks towards a common goal. Align the design KPI’s with your most important business goals. This will help the entire team to effectively take the service towards the desired outcome.

2. Adding too many user actions before the goal you want people to complete

Think of the most important goals and actions on the website and emphasize those with CTAs. If you want your user to perform a specific action, do not include too many steps on the path to that goal. The CTAs should also have a strong visual emphasis, and they should be quite high up on the page. If you have a registration or subscription, also include a light version with a quick checkout option.

3. Inventing the wheel all over again

Do not forget to borrow the best ideas! Benchmarking is a great tool in the ideation process when you come up with potential solutions to your problems. You can also look at leading solutions from completely other fields and apply the best ideas to your business.

Another related point is Jakob’s Law: users expect similarity across all digital services. Since they spend time on various sites, they prefer your site to work the same way as all other sites they already know. Benchmarking with the best solutions will also help provide similar user logic as in the industry standard.

4. Failing to include real users in the design process

Sometimes organizations think they know what real users need, and so they decide to design merely on gut feeling. I can assure you that this is not an effective way to craft high-quality design. Real users should be included both in the insight-gathering phase and during prototyping where you test how well the design functions in real life. I have not seen a single project where user feedback would not have brought remarkable insights.

My favorite way to include users in the design process is through interviewing, performing user tests and analyzing online behavioral and heuristic data and analytics. Also, user personas are a wonderful way to bring the user to the center of the design process.

5. Designing the same components again and again

Figma and other modern design programs make it easy to craft a design system that includes re-usable components and other visual elements. This not only makes design faster, but also ensures a coherent layout across the website. Giving your design team the right tools for the job is a prerogative.

So, there you have it – the top five mistakes to guard against in UX design. I guarantee that if you watch out for these pitfalls, then you are going to be much more able to provide a future-proof user experience that delights existing and new customers alike.

Do you want to hear more? Be in touch and let's talk!