First impressions count, and it can be tempting to want to integrate a few flashy features to excite your audience and outperform your competition. Many extraneous elements will only serve to irritate rather than impress, so here are a few UX-related errors that you should be avoiding.

Unexpected Interactions

Imagine you are happily scrolling through a website and are unexpectedly met with an advert, mailing list sign-up request or surprise video. Would it disrupt your browsing experience? Yes. Might it also feel overly salesy? It’s highly likely. Driving conversions or boosting engagement is important, but interrupting your visitor’s browsing experience is not the way to go.

Dropdown Menus

Disappearing menus are a guaranteed way to encourage your visitors to leave almost as soon as they have arrived. All dropdowns should be kept in the sidebar to ensure visitors always know where they are and how to progress to the next stage of their customer journey.

Irritating Pop-Ups

Pop-ups that are overwhelming, can’t be closed or appear on every single page will frustrate your visitors very quickly. Pop-ups are especially tricky to get right on mobile sites, so make sure to work closely with a professional Yorkshire web design team, such as etempa.co.uk, to ensure that your visitors find your pop-up content helpful and not a hindrance to an otherwise seamless browsing experience.

Autoplay Video Content

Video content that autoplays is extremely annoying. You probably haven’t ever been thankful that a video has autoplayed as soon as you arrived on a webpage, and your visitors likely haven’t either. This Verge article notes that Google has even started blocking autoplay video in its Chrome browser. Video is powerful, but if it’s interesting and compelling enough, your audience will click the play button to watch it. You don’t need to force your visitors to watch.

Video Backgrounds

Humans have evolved to notice any hint of movement in our peripheral vision, which means that video backgrounds will only ever detract from the rest of your content.

Poorly Optimised Images

Integrating imagery into your website will help you to establish a distinct ambience and visually communicate your brand identity and values. It is critical, however, to ensure that this imagery is carefully optimised to avoid impacting page loading times because you only have a very limited window within which to engage your audience.