UX/UI Best Practices - 3 common mistakes when designing web and mobile software interfaces

UX/UI Best practices - 3 common mistakes when designing web and mobile software interfaces

In the video and below are some of the most impactful UX/UI best practices you should apply to your product today, as well as common mistakes that can frustrate users and cause negative outcomes for your company's goals.

To begin, these practices assume you are already following a user centered design methodology.

Link color logic

By far the most common mistake I see is product and engineering teams not using a clear consistent and painfully obvious call to action or link color logic. 

The end users of your product don’t want to think, so there should be a clear glanceability to what elements on the page are interactive and which are read only text. 

This may sound obvious, but the amount of all black sites and apps I see, along with using multiple color buttons, is really hurting your users experience. 

Typically you should be using the company's main branding color or a solid secondary color to compliment the branding if it contains no color. 

Also these colors should be ADA compliant and or meet Apple’s minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1.  

When we remove this basic friction on apps and websites, it has the most profound increase in good usability for being a relatively low hanging fruit todo from an implementation standpoint.

Cognitive load 

There is a common myth that the least amount of clicks it takes to do something the better. While this is a helpful starting point, user testing and research has shown that this is not always the case. 

When a user lands on a landing page or dashboard screen - they should have enough information to understand their navigation options and see the information they requested. 

If you put everything on one page or one click away, you will have pages that have way too much information on them resulting in cognitive overload, and as a result overwhelming the user and potentially having them abandon their user journey or shopping cart.

Contextual Awareness

Another impactful change and strategy when designing sites and apps is making sure you give user clear contextual awareness. 

What does this mean? Well simply put - when a user is in the beginning, middle or end result of a user journey, let’s use contextual copy to help users understand what their options are as a next step, where they just came from and where they are at right now. 

The more complex the app, the more important this becomes to help orientate a user. This is used in everyday life in places like airports, why not in navigating sites or applications.

These are a few key UX/UI best practices that can really improve your conversion rates, user stickiness and improve those engagement rates. When these are applied to your websites and apps, your business will grow as a result of user happiness. 

There are of course many more best practices out there, like using clear and concise content, I&A and navigation, consistency across the UX, testing and iterations and error handling, to name a few. 

Using these, along with a good data-informed design methodology that incorporates user testing and feedback along the way will give you the best information on designing the best overall experience tailored to your specific business and end user needs.