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5 Ways that Bad Design Will Put a Crimp in Your Customer Journey

Nowadays, there’s a lot of content on the internet about website design. It usually goes hand-in-hand with keywords such as “digital marketing,” “content marketing,” “SEO,” and “social media marketing.” And although you can get a lot of genuinely helpful content about designing a good website from this content, there aren’t many articles out there about what you should avoid. What are the things that turn customers off? What’s going to make them leave your website right away? What prevents a visitor from turning into a customer? Although there’s no fixed answer to all these questions, since each customer is different, there are certain “don’ts” that many people would agree with. Here are some of the things that result in bad design:

  1. Busyness: When people go to your website, how many colors do they see? Do you have a simple color scheme consisting of two-three colors? Or do you greet people with all the colors of the rainbow? There are times when using a lot of colors can work for you, especially if you’re in a creative field and the colors are scattered around the website tastefully. However, most of the time, a website with too many colors just comes across as a hodgepodge. So it’s best to keep things simple, as far as colors and layout are concerned. Don’t try to do too much on one page. That’s what tabs and links are for.
  2. Unrelatable Images: Are you selling plus-size clothes? Then obviously you should be using images of these clothes draped on plus-size models. If you use images of regular-sized models (who are generally even thinner than regular women), it’s obviously going to turn your customers off because they won’t be able to relate to them. Similarly, you can’t sell artist’s supplies by using images of people in corporate attire. You can’t address a diverse audience and use images without diversity. A picture is worth a thousand words. But when your picture is simply not working, even a thousand words won’t be able to make up for it.
  3. Too Many Special Offers: It’s great to have special offers for your customers; it helps in customer retention as well as attracting new customers. But you don’t have to throw these offers in your customers’ faces. Using and reusing words like “zero,” “sale,” and “discount” can come across as a little bit suspect. And if these words are blinking in a large font on your website, without allowing your customers to focus on anything else, you might want to take it down a notch.
  4. Unexpected Videos.: You know how you’re sometimes sitting in a café with a bunch of other people, all working on computers, and yours suddenly starts blaring something, causing everyone to turn and look at you with annoyance? That can happen when there are unexpected videos on a website. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have any videos; you absolutely should. There are many people out there who don’t have the patience to read your content and would prefer to watch a video instead. But it’s best if you give the customer the option to play the video rather than letting it start on its own.
  5. “Whaddaya Mean It’s Not Available?” Nothing sucks as much as going through all the pictures on an ecommerce website, finding something you like and then realizing you can’t buy it. It’s something that can really turn people off, unless they’ve been loyal to your brand for a long time. Technically, unavailability of items isn’t an example of bad design; it just happens when your website hasn’t been updated in time. Still, it’s yet another example of the kind of thing that you want to avoid because it definitely puts a crimp in your customer journey.