In fast-paced or competitive marketplaces, delivering an exceptional user experience (UX) is critical for success. Yet, many products fall short, leaving users frustrated and disengaged.
After experiencing the frustration with numerous products that struggle with UX, we’ve identified five common traits that lead to poor user experience.
By recognizing and addressing these issues, companies can find success by creating products and services with high user satisfaction.
Let’s get started.
Products with a poor user experience…
… don’t really know who their users are.
A deep understanding of the user is fundamental to the success of any product. This research gives your product a problem to solve and helps you speak to your customers.
When a company doesn’t know their users, their products:
- lack insight into their users’ needs: They fail to conduct thorough research to discover what users really need, resulting in features that miss the mark.
- don’t align with the users’ expectations: Poor alignment between what users expect and what the product delivers leads to frustration and dissatisfaction. They don’t analyze the typical user journey and confuse their users by forcing them into navigation and interactions that don’t seem to make intuitive sense.
- ignore common error patterns: A lack of understanding about where users typically encounter problems prevents teams from effectively minimizing, mitigating, or preventing these errors.
- use an inappropriate communication style: Without knowing their audience, these products use jargon or overly complex language that alienates users.
But… when a company knows who their customers are, they can be confident their message is being heard.
If you are familiar with the high price of shaving and the irritation that comes with using a dull razor blade then Dollar Shave Club is speaking to you.
Great, now you know who to direct your messaging to.
Products with a poor user experience…
… don’t know what they are and what their value is.
Another major contributor to poor UX is a lack of clarity about the product itself. It’s great to know your users, but if your product doesn’t have a meaningful impact on their lives, your great messaging, not to mention your product, will fall flat.
Here is where your product may be going astray:
- You have an unclear value proposition:
If a product team does not articulate the core job the product performs for its users, they risk offering something that doesn’t resonate. It’s important to communicate not just how your product does a better job than a competitor’s product, but also how it impacts the user’s life.
- You don’t know the underlying reason why your user’s choose your product: When teams don’t grasp why users choose their product over competitors, they fail to build and speak to features that leverage their unique strengths. Even if all your messaging is true, it won’t resonate with your customers if it isn’t their reason for choosing your product.
When you know your customers’ WHY, it is easy to be confident in the service or product you provide. Let’s look at the Emirates air line and how they differentiate themselves with the service they provide their customers.
In a similar way to how Dollar Shave Club differentiated themselves by focusing on low cost and minimizing features, Emirates stands out from low-cost carriers by focusing on the experience, or the ‘added features’ of their service. It’s not that they don’t have lower cost options, Emirates offers business and economy flights, but regardless of the cost they provide a variety of additional services to ensure their customers have a great experience. In this way Emirates shows their impact is by leaving their customers both at their destination AND in a great mood.
Your product will need to evolve to continue serving your customers, which could be difficult if your products…
… don’t have a clear vision for where they are headed.
A clear vision is essential for guiding product development. It will act as a guiding star to know which features can improve your product, which opportunities are only a distraction, and how much progress your product has made.
Products that lack vision this often suffer from:
- Constantly Changing Priorities:
With no solid direction, teams shift focus frequently, resulting in a chaotic design and development process.. These teams often have conflict between members of upper management or otherwise frequent changes in upper management.
- Reactionary Development:
These products react too strongly to market trends and user feedback instead of anticipating user needs and concerns. This leads to missed opportunities, loss of trust from customers, and feature backtracking or abandonment.
- Feature Selection Chaos:
Without criteria for prioritizing new features, teams tend to chase the latest fads rather than delivering meaningful solutions to users’ problems..
“To capture and share the world’s moments”
And,. I bet you can already think of the company that owns that vision statement. If you were thinking of Instagram, you were right.
… spend too much effort trying to look good.
- Make arbitrary aesthetic choices: This happens when products emphasize looking pretty or sticking to branding (colours, fonts, style) at the expense of functionality, user experience suffers. Early product, project, or feature design meetings that are focused on colours and typography or have too many high fidelity designs are characteristic of this pitfall.
- Neglecting usability: This focus can overshadow essential usability principles, resulting in an interface that is visually appealing but difficult to navigate.
This vision statement makes this company’s goals clear even without any additional statements And,. I bet you can already think of the company that owns that vision statement. If you were thinking of Instagram, you were right.
Lastly, products that have a poor user experience…
… try to be everything everywhere all at once.
Finally, products that attempt to do too much often leave users overwhelmed and unwilling to continue using their product. This too often occurs after a product or company has some combination of the first four product UX pitfalls. Instead of spending time researching and clarifying the user’s problem and how their product will solve it, they give their users more information and more features and have their users do the work. These products often lose their users when there are too many steps to take before they reach their goal. These products are characterized by:
- information overload:
When too much information is presented simultaneously, users struggle to find what they need. These products don’t know why a user is here and what information is valuable to them and follow the philosophy of more is more.
- Sensory overload:
A cluttered space, both physical and virtual, can lead to confusion and fatigue, increasing irritability and making it hard for users to engage effectively. These products often have poor visual hierarchy, making it challenging to organize information, prioritize tasks, and understand navigation.
- Feature overload:
These “Jack of All Trades” products try to do everything so that they have the largest possible user base. What often results is a diluted offering that fails to excel in any area. Digital products will have no clear use case, and physical products aren’t as easy to use or as functional as they should be for any user.
Both reMarkable and Light Phone have cleared the clutter from their products. They have focused on a specific use case and removed nearly all additional functionality that would otherwise distract from their core use case.
In Conclusion
In the quest to create outstanding products, understanding user needs, maintaining a clear vision, and balancing form with function are critical. By avoiding the common pitfalls discussed above, project managers can enhance user experience and drive product success. Remember, a product that truly resonates with its users will not only meet user’s needs but also foster loyalty and advocacy in an increasingly competitive landscape. Embrace these insights, and let them guide your journey toward exceptional user experiences.
