Things To Take Away From The User Inyerface Experiment

Posted On: 20th August 2019
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Read Time: 1 Minute
User Experience Mistakes
The User Inyerface game circled the internet a few weeks ago and showed us the importance of usability and highlighted some classic user experience mistakes.

 

Businesses across the world work really hard on their online presence, directing users to their website and encouraging visitors to become paying customers. Over the years we’ve seen some classic examples of where businesses will achieve great results in paid advertisements and search engine rankings, all for their website to let them down.

From spammy pop-ups to hard-to-read clashing backgrounds, some design decisions just don’t work. The Inyerface experiment shows us just some of the reasons that people may leave your website before purchasing from you. The nature of the game is to simply enrage you with misleading forms, complicated errors and mislabeled buttons. It’s all fun and games until you realise just how many times you must annoy customers with your own website.

Here are some of the things we took from the game.

You Need to Qualify Users Before Asking for Information

From the moment you land on User Inyerface, you are asked for information. For many people, this is an immediate turn off and will have them running away from the website before looking any further. Why would you want to give a website, personal information about you and spend time completing their survey, if you’re not even sure they have what you want?

You need to make sure you verify to the user first that you are offering the information, service or product they are searching for. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a high bounce rate which isn’t good for anyone.

The Customer Journey Must Be Easy

After starting the game you’re then told to ‘Please click here to go to the next page’. Despite being highlighted in a different colour, you are left disappointed when you aren’t given a clickable link. You have to move your cursor over the whole sentence to find which part can be clicked on.

Getting users to take action on your website is sometimes harder than you realise, but making sure your call to actions are as clear and easy to navigate as possible is a no-brainer. If you’ve got potential customers on your website, don’t fall victim to mistakes like broken links.

Be Careful with Pop-Ups

On the next page, you’re greeted by a huge red banner asking you about cookies. This has to be clicked so you can view the website page again. Pop-ups have a time an a place on a website – we’re not saying that it’s not important to ask about cookies but make sure that if you have a popup, users can easily navigate off it on all devices.

Assume the Customer Doesn’t Understand

You are then asked to complete 1 of 4 pages, this is your password and email address. The password needs to be 10 characters long, to include one capital letter, one number, one letter of your email and one Cyrillic character.

Albeit an extreme example here (hands up if you just Googled what a Cyrillic character is), but the point is you can’t assume the user understands the terms you’re using. If you’re an expert in the industry, chances are your customers aren’t. Make your website easily understandable by your user or you might just lose them.

Have Live Features? Great! Use them!

Ever gone to a website to find they have a live chat? We’re sure you have which is why we’re also sure you will agree that one way to frustrate a customer is to offer a quick response live chat system that doesn’t work. If you want to implement systems like this, great, but make sure you can reply to instant messages or send a comprehensive response. A solution to this would be to build a bot to respond to all queries, although this tends to be a big project as you’ll want an accurate answer to all questions that customers might ask you.

In Summary

This is a brutal example of how small errors in design can affect your user experience. While you may be thinking that this is an extreme case (and you’re right) you’ll also be horrified by how many websites share similar characteristics.

There is so much competition out there online. You need to make sure that your website gives the visitor the best possible user experience possible so they are not put off and choose to go elsewhere.

Why not chat to our team to review your website? And see how we can help improve your user interface experience. Call us today on 01733 286 646 or email us on [email protected].

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Leah Brown at Echo Web Solutions
Leah Bull
Digital Marketing Manager
A real keyword geek at heart, Leah has over 4 years experience in SEO, PPC and CRO now working as the team lead at Echo. She loves trying and testing new techniques and strategies and sharing them for others to enjoy too.

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