Are You Killing Your Website With These 7 Bad UI Elements?

Your website’s user interface, or UI, plays an important role in how your users interact with it—but this isn’t always a good thing. In fact, some of the more common UI elements could potentially cause you more harm than good if they’re not done right. Here are seven UI elements that can seriously hurt your site if used incorrectly and what you should be doing instead.

1) Clutter

Clutter is a type of visual noise that causes confusion for users and distracts them from the content they are looking for. It can also cause confusion in the navigation or advertising, making it difficult to find what you are looking for. 

Clutters can be caused by too much text, many fonts, graphics that are too small, or something else. 

If your website has any of these elements, it's time to rethink your design and make changes accordingly.

2) Lack of Whitespace

If you're like me, you love working with white space. It's a design element that can help create clean, uncluttered layouts. Whitespace is so important because it not only provides breathing room for your content, but it also creates contrast and defines boundaries. The problem is that many designers don't use white space because they feel like adding in more elements will make their website look better. In reality, this just clutters up the page and makes it difficult to read the text on the page.

3) Complex Forms

Don't make me think—that's the mantra of usability. Don't make me think about the meaning of your form fields, or what I should enter into them. Make them clear and intuitive to use. Make it obvious which fields are required and which are optional. And don't ask for any more information than you absolutely need to do your job (i.e., if all you want is my email address, then don't ask for my phone number).

4) Auto-Playing Media

As you scroll, the video will start playing and gradually increase in volume. This is a great way to engage your users by adding sound to their experience, but it can get annoying if they're trying to read something or work on something else and the audio suddenly starts blaring out of nowhere. There are ways that you can make sure that this doesn't happen too often though. One way is by setting a timer so that the video won't start until a certain amount of time has passed. For example, you might set the timer for five seconds before the video starts playing automatically as soon as someone scrolls down to it.

5) Slow Loading Times

Slow loading times are a pain for everyone. Users, developers and business owners can all agree that they're bad. They not only make the user experience worse, they also prevent your site from ranking well in search engine results pages (SERPs) - which leads to lower conversions and ROI. Thankfully, there are plenty of things you can do to help minimize slow loading times.

6) Pop-Ups

Pop-ups are one of the most annoying and frustrating parts of any website. They not only take up a lot of space, but they can be hard to close, too. When you pop-up on someone's screen, you're asking them to do something--almost as if it were a form. But even worse than that is when there's no option at all--you're just looking at the pop-up while you wait for it to go away.

7) Intrusive Ads

Intrusive ads are one of the worst offenders. They ruin user experience and distract from content, just like pop-ups or banners. In fact, they're so bad that they can cause people to leave your website altogether. There's a reason Google has banned intrusive ad formats on their own properties—because they know how much of an impact these ads have on consumers.

Final Note

If you are not a UI/UX designer, it might be time to hire one. Hire UI/UX Design company in Bangalore is a great place to find the best talent for your project. Take some of these bad UI elements into consideration when looking at hiring a UI/UX designer.