We recently published an article on why every business needs a website. In that article we detailed the 5 key reasons why you should get a business website. If you missed that article, quickly go to read why getting a website for your business is primary to your modern marketing needs. Following on that article, we published the top 10 web development trends in 2025. The goal of that article was to help integrate the best industry trends and practices into your brand website or application. This we believe would help you deliver the best user experience to your users and increase the value to your business. You can take a quick view of that insightful article to understand what the future of web development is for your business.
With those two insightful articles as precursors, today we present to you one on two of the most important things that keep people on your website or application; user interface(UI) and user experience (UX). UI/UX design represent a core component in web and software development processes. Though these two terms refer to different things, they are inherently inseparable. That explains why you see their names often boxed together and spoken as if they referred to the same item.
What is UI/UX design?
User interface (UI) refers to the look and feel and interactivity of a web page or product screen. User experience (UX) on the other hand refers to the overall experience one gets with the product or website. The goal of UI/UX design is to ensure easy navigation, accessibility and interactivity. The purposes are to ensure efficient and enjoyable interaction with your product and deliver a positive and engaging user experience. No one would want to spend time on your website or application if they cannot easily move across its interface, find it hard to read and difficult to locate where the buttons are placed.
Nearly every software product, website, web or mobile application includes UI/UX design which is part of the first sets of processes to be completed before programming starts. As a result, many are tempted to allude to the notion that the work of UI/UX is completed once they deliver the design for the coding team to commence work and it is completely over once the product has been delivered.
If you belong to that school of thought, you are off to a wrong end. While majority of the design work may come at the start of a project implementation, UI/UX design is a living part of the project as long as the project is active, maintained and accessible to users. You can refer back here to read more on why the UI/UX design process does not end once the project is completed but for today, let’s not forget why we are here.
Now that you understand the context, let’s explore the 5 UI/UX design mistakes that can kill your business.
Poor Navigation
Are you surprised that this is on top of our list? If you are, relax. How much time would you spend on a website or application if you don’t know where the home, back, settings and other key buttons are placed? Websites and applications are designed to serve a purpose, the same purpose led you to the site or application. Imagine building a house in the middle of a remote area such as a mountain top with no access roads. Inasmuch as living there would be exciting, the trouble to access it would kill any excitement to live in there. This analogy explains how people would feel about your application or website when they find it difficult to navigate due to wrong placement of buttons, poor colour or font choices or broken navigations/links.
Cluttered Interface
Simply put, overloading users with information or overwhelming users with content. User interfaces are meant to make it easy to use the platforms thus providing a positive user experience. However, some people either have too much information, are poor in planning or generally care less about how the users interact and feel about the platforms so they bombard users with too much information. Dense text blocks and excessive media can affect user experience. Using wordy names for navigations, bad use of description and use of improperly sized images can all contribute to a bad user interface and resultantly, bad user experience.
Inconsistent Design
Another of the major blunders in UI/UX design is inconsistent design. Mostly brands have defined brand assets including colours and typography among others. These are to ensure consistency across the brand’s product interfaces. Misuse of brand assets or the lack of a defined brand elements could contribute to each project team member using their discretion to work on the part they are responsible for. The result is a design that has unnecessarily unmatched patterns, colours and typography. Thus, a failure to develop a style guide could be your UI/UX grave to bury your project or business.
Ignoring Mobile Optimization
This may seem too obvious to be ignored by any company so its appearance here may look weird but the truth is, most companies fall foul of this design mishap. The prominence of mobile phones in our today’s digital space is something no serious person should ever think of ignoring, let alone a business that is competing for customers. The GSMA’s sixth annual State of Mobile Internet Connectivity Report in 2023 revealed that at least 54% of the global population (4.3 billion) owned smartphones. According to Statista, there were approximately 15 billion mobile devices in 2021 and that number is expected to reach 18.22 billion by 2025. A staggering 62.45% of global internet traffic comes from mobile and 1.84% from tablet according to MobiLoud. All these go to underscore how important mobile or small screen devices are and why ignoring them could be catastrophic.
Ignoring User Feedback
Finally, we get to what many people or businesses care less about. Businesses sometimes lose focus when trying to find out why people don’t use or spend more time on their platforms. They hire teams of experts and spend millions trying to find solutions that were not even far from them. User feedback is the number one source of primary information any business can use to improve itself in nearly all areas from design through content to sales. However, many either ignore the signals left by users, neglect deliberate actions to collect feedback or scornfully discard user feedback. The time a user spends on a particular section of your application or website can give you clues on whether they enjoy it or not. Analyzing data from the various touchpoints of a user journey on your application or website is vital to securing this particular UI/UX sickness.
Conclusion
The above are not the complete list of UI/UX design blunders that could lead your business to its early demise but they represent some of the most critical ones. UI/UX design is an iterative process and must be done using primary data you generate from your platform’s visitors. The emergence of new technology, evolving user needs, the need to maintain a competitive edge and data-driven optimization are all triggers that necessitate updates to your website or product’s UI/UX design.
