The most annoying UX mistakes?

Even nowadays it’s rather difficult to find a website which is perfectly designed to meet their audience’s needs and expectations. Here is our list of the most annoying UX mistakes we come upon everyday. We’d love to hear your comments!

1) ‘Sign up for an email newsletter’ form which pops up straight after you visit a website, without even having a chance to see what the website offers.

2) Those ‘Top 20’ websites with click-baiting pagination, where you have to click a ‘Next’ button to see each item in the list. They exist to get more clicks and the page views. A terribly cheap and annoying way of exploiting users.

3) ‘Cancel’ and ‘Proceed’ buttons in the wrong order. In majority of the countries we read from left to right, so if we have two buttons at the end of a product’s description page or in the Shopping Basket page – ‘Proceed’ and ‘Cancel’ – which one should be on the right if we want to sell this product? Unfortunately, quite often, the order is wrong and we end up cancelling the transaction, to our frustration.

4) The unexpected; items that don’t have a purpose or they don’t communicate their purpose immediately.

5) When we follow a link to a site from a smartphone, and we can only get to the content if we ‘download the app’. Would you really bother to download the app?

6) Slow loading times and heavy websites – your competitors list is huge; let’s see if they can provide what we’re looking for faster.

7) Websites that lie to you that you need to undergo a “quick” registration process that will take only a minute, and 15 minutes later you still are trying to enter the right CAPTCHA at the end. Don’t forget about re-entering your password every time, because it resets for security purposes.

8) Complexity – a website which doesn’t communicate its purpose in a clear and consistent way. Clean it all up and make your projects simple as users don’t blame themselves anymore when they get stuck, they blame your company.

9) Sliders – bad for SEO, often reduce page loading speed and push the important content below the fold forcing users to scroll.

10) Websites that don’t understand the user and the business they are trying to promote – they show it by using web templates without optimising them to match their users’ and business’s needs.

What about your experiences – would you like to add anything to this list?