Avoid These Top 5 Development Mistakes for Assured Positive User Experience

SEO is not only about search engines, it is also about users. In fact, SEO and digital marketing is more about the user experience than search engines. Thus, each SEO expert must know the fact: their job is also to ensure the developed website or software is user friendly. This blog shares the top 5 most common, yet serious mistakes which mustn’t happen to ensure a good user experience. Also, it gives the solution to resolve these mistakes to deliver great user experience which can convert into a lead.

1. Throwing Exception
This is the proof of naïve development if your code throws exception at any stage of website or software. Code should never expose to your user and showing an error message is the worst thing you can do from a UX point of view.

Solution:
The 1^st thing you can do while coding a website or software is to ensure how to gracefully handle exception. This is pretty human that we can’t think about each possible use case or workflow, so it is important to add a code to handle exceptional case and show an elegant looking page with ‘an error message with a clear direction of the next possible step’.

2. Showing Error code
I have often encountered a line of error code or some sort of code while browsing a website. As mentioned in the above point, your code should never come across the end user to ensure the best user experience.

Solution:
There are multiple things you can and must do to handle this gracefully. Some of them are listed below:

• Debug the code to encounter a loose coding and such errors
• Take help of 3^rd party QA and Testing team
• Run occasional checks at regular interval

3. Throwing user out of the website or landing him on a hanging page
This is the weirdest issue a user encounter and results by clicking close button and leaving your website or software forever. Why? Because there is no hint of action user may take. Generally, this happens while web developers or software developers don’t handle ‘page not found’, ‘Request time out’ and similar errors gracefully. This results in a blank page with a default error message. No hyperlink to click to go back to the main site or dashboard! Another case is, developers develop a landing page with no navigation or clear hint of the next step called CTA (Call to Action). It is like putting your user in the middle of the desert.

Solution:

• Add user friendly pages to handle known errors and give hyperlinks to go to the home page or sitemap. You can also give the search option to find similar page to what the user is looking for.
• Give clear CTA (Call to Action) to guide the user with the next step.

4. Never ending processing
The user takes an action and system keeps on loading and taking no action. This is damn frustrating for any user to see it is loading, loading and keep on loading, but doing nothing, especially, in the era where we all run out of patience pretty fast.

Solution:

• Add a timeout for your functions because it is pretty obvious that something went wrong with the system or server and it keeps on loading. Thus, define the timeout and after that give an error message which tells user clearly that the step couldn’t get finished.

5. Not giving appropriate messages
The last thing you can do to contribute in the worst user experience is to leave your users clueless about what’s happening and why? Or rather I say why is it not happening?!. I’ve seen so many sites where we, as a user, take an action and the page refreshes. That’s it! We stay in dilemma whether the action we took is finished or not? If not, then, why not? We try again and the same thing happens again: page refreshes with no action, no message! This frustrates your users at the summit.  This is just an example! There are many as such example in which system gives no message! Also, showing the same message everywhere is silly!

Solution:

• Show appropriate ‘success’ and ‘failure’ message to ensure the user is notified with the status of the last action.

These are the top 5 mistakes along with the appropriate solutions. Please be noted, you can get succeeded to bring millions of users with digital marketing and sales techniques, but if you are not delivering a good user experience, your users will leave you faster than you ever thought of! So be careful and wise while making any such mistakes.

Would you like to add any more points or your feedback? Please leave that in the comment section. We, Digital Marketers India, offer SEO and user friendly development services. For more details, contact us!