This tale starts with an offline experience related to an online struggle.
A bad user experience.
Knowing my love of anything “shiny” (literally & figuratively ) my coblogger Paul presented me with a “cool fun thing”. A foil peacock sticker project. I was excited to give it a try that night when I got home from work.
I pressed the shiny foil sheets onto the bits and pieces that were destined to become a peacock. Everything was fine and dandy, and in fact (for those Firefly fans out there. It was indeed shiny) until, I got to the assembly instructions.
My instruction related peacock assembly failure got me to thinking. If only the instructions were written in a user friendly manner – I would have a perfect peacock instead of this Picasso inspired monstrosity. I had a bad ux with the peacock assembly.
What is a bad UX ( user experience)? It can range from a small annoyance to something financial that will loose you a customer. I asked on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and here are a few things people listed as bad experiences that will send them running:
- Auto-play anything: For most people asked, anytime they go to a site that has music or video playing as soon as you land on the page, if there is not a mute button immediately accessible, they will leave.
- Hidden social media connections: Now here’s a bad experience I can personally relate with. When I am reading a post that I want to share or find a blogger I want to follow online, it helpful to have the author’s social media information with the post I’m looking at. It is surprising how many people do not make it easy to follow them. Particularly on Twitter.
- Having to register or answer a survey just in order to read “free” content
Essentially, anything that disrupts the flow from landing on a site to completing the action you went there is damaging to the user experience and can lead to people leaving the site and not coming back.
How do you make sure your site has the best possible user experience for your visitors?
