User experience is one of the most important features of high-quality websites. It doesn’t matter if you are running a blog, a small business, or the international corporation – your webpage must provide users with an excellent experience. A study even proved that more than 60% of visitors who don’t conduct the purchase cite poor user experience as the main reason.
In this article, we will show you four outdated user experience elements that should be gone by now.
Things You Don’t Want to Allow on Your Website
User experience depends on various factors: the choice of colors, mobile optimization, audio effects, etc. If you want to make it better, you should follow the trends and remove annoying features. For instance, ESPN revenues jumped 35% after they listened to their community and incorporated suggestions into their homepage redesign.
Our job here is to tell you about certain factors of user experience that you simply must eliminate as soon as possible. Let’s take a look at four such elements:
Full-screen ads
We can hardly remember anything more frustrating than opening a website just to notice a Jupiter-sized ad right in front of our eyes immediately upon landing the page. Okay, perhaps the only thing more annoying is to see the same thing once you are already in the middle of an interesting video or a blog post. Full-screen ads indeed force you to recognize the brand but you will probably start hating it after seeing this type of promo content.
They are the biggest reason why more than 600 million devices worldwide are running ad blocking software. And even if website visitors don’t use ad blockers, a full-screen ad will probably go unnoticed.
Website visitors see pop-ups and banners as obstacles that they need to overcome in order to consume the desired content. They simply jump over the hurdle and move on. Full-screen ads are even more discouraging for smartphone users because it’s harder to cancel an ad and go to the actual content. Therefore, you should stay away from full-screen ads and turn to more productive types of digital marketing.
Disastrous back buttons
A back button has always been one of the most recognizable elements of all websites. Studies have consistently found that the back button is the second most commonly used navigation mechanism, behind clicking on hyperlinks. It’s a must-have website feature that allows users to return to the previous page simply and quickly.
However, a lot of contemporary web pages have a complex design, which creates confusion between the real last page and elements that resemble it. The latter are contents like multiple-page articles, accordions, and overlays. All these features distract users and make the back button pointless on many occasions. Given the fact that Internet surfers embraced back buttons as inevitable parts of webpage design, it is your duty to align it with the overall user experience.
Nancy Laws, a webmaster at BestEssays, explained how her team solved the problem: “A lot of banks and retailers made poor back button solutions. Their sessions expire almost immediately and you can hardly ever return to the page you visited a few seconds ago. On the other hand, our team made ordering process seamless and comfortable with no need for back buttons usage. We created a fluid user experience design, so our visitors can return to the previous page without losing a single piece of information they had seen before.”
Ridiculous ads
Digital marketing is the main channel of promotion for most companies but some advertising solutions are just way below the acceptable threshold. How many times have we all seen ridiculous ads like these:
- How to earn $1 million in not more than 3 days
- You won’t believe the efficiency of our diet
- Professional moves your couch will never teach you
However pompous or incredible these titles may sound, they are nothing more than stupid and annoying. As the matter of fact, Google’s Chrome browser will soon come with preinstalled technology that will block the most annoying ads currently marring the web experience. Why they do it? It’s because no one really wants to see ridiculous ads anymore.
Avoid using ads like this
Ridiculous ads are mind-insulting and lack value. They represent the yellow press of digital journalism. If you are running a serious blog or a business, you shouldn’t allow this type of content to compromise the authority of your website. Stick to native advertising and allow users to enjoy the webpage experience.
Multi-page articles
A good user interface allows visitors to surf through the website quickly and without any major interruptions. If you are reading high-quality articles, you definitely don’t want to click the next page button every minute or so. On the contrary, you want to keep your stream of thought consistent all the way to the end of this post. In that regard, multiple-page articles are one of the most disturbing user experience elements.
This format is so irritating that some experts think that Google should severely punish websites that use pagination for articles. We agree with this way of thinking – articles with multiple pages take too much time to click, reload, click again, reload again, and so on. What’s even worse is that most websites use multi-page articles for ‘How To’ posts with ten or more tips, which adds to the overall frustration of the reader. We know this type of content can boost your marketing potential but it can seriously jeopardize website popularity, so try to avoid it at all cost.
Conclusion
Business success depends on various factors but the user experience is one of the most influential features in that regard. If you are running a website with a lot of annoying elements, you will probably chase away most of your clients. In this article, we showed you four outdated user experience elements that should be gone by now. Keep our tips in mind and feel free to share with us your comments about this topic – we are looking forward to seeing your suggestions.