I recently ran a poll on LinkedIn to find out how your website pet hates compared in relation to mine. I started with 4 choices and these were the results:
- Instant play video with sound – 45%
- Text you can’t read – 14%
- Can’t find the contact details – 32%
- Where’s the menu? – 9%
But the comments also provided plenty of other features that drive us mad when we visit websites:
- Trying to get your contact information before you can read the website
- Websites that don’t even allow you to see the content unless you accept the cookies
- Can’t find the price of the product
- Not being able to find contact details
- Cookie pop ups, particularly on mobile
- Pop ups that interrupt the user while they are trying to complete their task
- Difficulty in closing pop up ads to get to content
- When you go to click on something and another item pops up (overlay pop ups) and you accidentally click that
- Accessibility including things like layout, design, colour palette, typography
- Speed to load pages
- Spelling mistakes (especially in headline messaging)
Some of these are simply errors that have been overlooked or poorly designed and could be easily rectified. Others are more intentional. Whilst, as a web design agency, we know some of these are important marketing functions, it is clear that getting the right balance between getting across our message/gathering information and making the website a good experience for users is vital to the success of any web design.
So if you want to create a website that doesn’t frustrate your customers get in contact.