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A bad UI/UX design can be detrimental to your business in so many ways. The immediate impact that your website will face is that your bounce rate or exit rate will be too high. It means that you have somehow been able to make people land on your page, but they are losing interest once they have visited your site and are deciding to leave your site immediately.

When people leave your website, there goes your business opportunity! You won’t be able to convert those leads into customers. There’s one other issue. When people see a website with bad UI/UX design, they form a negative opinion about your brand, which in turn lessens their trust and finally prevents them from being your future prospects.

A badly designed website may have a deeper and longer-lasting impact than you think. So you need to be very careful while designing your website - whether in-house or through an agency. Wondering what makes a bad design? Here’s what you need to know.

What is a bad UI/UX design?

When your website’s layout is messed-up, the navigation menu is hidden, color contrast and whitespaces are absent, design is non-responsive, and fonts are small and inconsistent, you have a poorly designed website. In short, if a website is not user-centric, it’s a bad design.

How to understand that a website has a bad UI/UX design?

Knowing the definition of a bad website is one thing, but identifying one such website is quite the other. How can you look at a website and instantly identify that yes, it’s a poorly designed website? Have a look at our next segment to know the answer.

9 elements of a bad UI/UX design

Cluttered navigation

The first design mistake that your UI/UX design agency might make is to make your navigation system difficult. Users want to find their desired information easily and quickly when they are browsing your website. If your navigation system is confusing, if you can’t direct your visitors to the exact pages they want, they won’t stay on your site for long. This will drive your visitors off the page and prevent them from engaging with your site.

Slow loading

If your website takes too much time to load, people won’t wait for it. According to Google, if your page doesn’t load in under 3 seconds, you will lose traffic. People have a common misconception that this loading time is applicable for laptop versions only. But the truth is, loading speed on mobile devices is equally important, if not more. Because today most of the users are visiting your website on their phones or tablets. So you need to be careful about your site’s loading speed on those screen sizes too.

Non-responsive design

As we were saying in our earlier section, today over 50% of internet traffic comes from mobile. People are even browsing the internet on their smart TVs. So you’re making a big mistake if you are not optimizing your website for different screen sizes.

Element overload

There are websites that contain too many elements on the homepage itself. It looks like they’re trying to stash everything in one space. Too many elements make your visitors totally confused. So they normally hit the ‘back’ button to head back to the search result page to find another website.

Low-resolution image

Today, almost all the screens have 4K output and/or super AMOLED display. If a website has low-res images, the final output on a high-definition screen will not be attractive at all. If so happens, visitors will immediately form a negative opinion about that site.

Typography

Some websites may contain written content in too many fonts. Or the fonts may be so overly designed that it gets difficult to read what is written. This is yet another example of bad website design.

Call-to-action buttons

One of the basic purposes of your website is to make people act. You may want your visitors to set up an appointment with you, get a quote, follow your social media pages, or sign up for a newsletter. Because that’s how you turn your visitors into leads. If your CTA buttons are not visible or not placed in the right place, you can’t make them do what you want. Having lackluster buttons is detrimental to your website.

Broken links

This happens with your blogs mostly. You might have a fantastic blog with the exact information on a given topic. You have also put anchor texts in your blogs to validate your information or to redirect them to another blog of yours. But if there is no internal or external linking, or if the links are broken, your readers will lose the momentum and might just lose interest in what you are saying.

Bad color choice

If you use a color that’s inconsistent with your brand color, people will get confused. If you’re using multiple color layers in a limited space or different colors for different pages, it will overwhelm your visitors.

How to make your UI/UX designs better

Here’s a checklist for making your website design better:

• Have a well-planned navigation hierarchy so that your visitors can browse through the pages without any hassle.
• Use page speed tools to know your page’s loading speed and find ways to speed up the loading. Compressing heavy elements will help you achieve a faster loading time.
• Make your website ideal for any screen size.
• Don’t stash elements in one place. Use white space where you can.
• Avoid low-resolution visuals and confusing typography.
• Have a clear call-to-action button placed where needed.
• Use internal linking wisely and remove broken links if there are any.
• Use a color palette that reflects your brand color.

Having a poorly designed website is more harmful than having no website at all. So be very careful while choosing a UI/UX design agency for designing your website. And now that you know what to avoid; have a clear discussion with your agency on how to build a website with impactful design.