UX Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Conversion

Here at Elevate, we work on a lot of websites. From fully custom ecommerce builds to Shopify storefronts to loyalty program landing pages, we’ve worked with our clients to create many types of digital shopping platforms. Through all of this work, we’ve noticed that many sites suffer from common UX issues that can have very tangible impacts on business goals.

User Experience (UX) is a widely encompassing term for the philosophy of design that focuses on how a user interacts with and feels about a digital product. Wikipedia defines UX as “the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.” Even with a definition this broad, we’ve been able to identify five common mistakes brands make with their UX, and how they impact both the success of a user’s time and the accompanying results a brand can enjoy.

1. Bad CTAs

Calls to action are perhaps the most important features that usher users through the conversion journey. Whether it is a button, a form, or something else, a call to action written with ambiguous and unclear language leaves users wondering what the consequence of their interaction will be.

2. Flow Blockers/Checkout Process

When creating an onboarding, a signup flow, or a process wizard, a micro-detail can macro-affect your conversion rate. Also called Pipeline Killers, these tiny details can affect even a perfectly designed experience. Some examples of these killers include failing to provide confirmation when a user completes a task, like adding a product to their cart, or not clearly highlighting any issues with form field inputs that prevent a user from submitting information.

3. Not Knowing Your Users

Try to understand the motivation behind your users’ actions, then cater to those motivations through an effective UX strategy. In that way you will ensure that your product can be tailored for your audience. Our blog includes a number of posts on understanding consumers to help get you started.

4. Credibility/Trust Symbols

Even in today’s world of increasing reliance on ecommerce and the internet as a whole, every visitor to your site has some level of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about buying from you. Clear messaging and efficient (and beautiful) design instills trust and greatly increases the likelihood that users will move through the funnel.

5. Page Load Speed/Performance

Our users live busy lives and have grown accustomed to broadband and high-speed networks, so they don’t have much patience for slow-loading websites. A slow site means many of your potential customers will never even see your site because they’ll click away at the first sign of hesitation in page loading. Google considers anything over 2 seconds “unacceptable.” Beyond technical performance enhancements to your site, it’s also important to address the perception of speed your site provides. Making sure at least some of your page content loads quickly (referred to as the “first paint”) can make the rest of load time more bearable. Another tactic is to employ Skeleton screens, or empty state templates that provide users a preview of what content is about to load, making the wait less grueling. And in a weird turn of human psychology, some common approaches to address loading time, like spinning indicators or progress bars, can make load times seem longer by drawing attention to the fact that we are waiting for something to happen.