6 Bad UX Examples You Must Avoid

I will be direct.

User Experience is the biggest factor that affects your growth. If you want your product to be successful at the end of the day, you need to improve and optimize the experience of your users because the satisfaction of your users is what determines your overall success.

There are dozens of bad UX examples that prevent famous products from being flawless.

Some products might already be too mainstream for its users to quit when experienced flaws, so it may look like they are getting away with those.

You, however, can not take the risk of designing bad UX. If your users have a hard time getting acquainted with your product or basically using it, they can easily switch to another solution.

Although it will be useful to point out the wrongs of your competitors to, um... steal their customers, it would be extremely valuable to learn from their mistakes in designing UX. Here are 6 poor design examples that you can see all around and avoid.

Before you read further, did you have a chance to check out our list of the best tools for UX designers? If not, click here to access the complete list of the best of UX tools.

1) Are you torturing your Users for Money?

The case: We cannot deny that the ads are a major source of income for digital product owners. And some websites and apps use it as a trick to cheat on the users to get clicks. But, at what cost?

Why a bad UX: When a user clicks to open the link of a page they want to see, there pops an endless number of ads. What's more terrible is sometimes when you click on “X” to close the ad, it directs you to another ad. It’s like the designers mock your communication skills and champion themselves as the winners of a prank contest. Expecting to have a successful product when having such flows integrated would be foolish since your users will quit using your product after going through torture like these.

2) Deleted(?) Messages on Whatsapp

The case: WhatsApp is famous for its encrypted messages and security concerns. But probably its designers are too honest to get you off the hook of an accidentally-sent or a regretted message. On WhatsApp, when you try to delete your message for everyone, it only hides the content and presents both sides with a note “This message was deleted.”.

Why a bad UX: Therefore, the other side gets aware of the existence of such a message anyway. It is not deleting, but hiding the content, to be honest. If you are offering your users a feature, try to provide it properly. Even huge companies sometimes forget this and display poor design examples.

3) Wait, this isn't what I'm looking for!

The case: Let’s say you’re looking for a PDF online, or maybe you are trying to go to a page you are interested in. Some sites seem like they are offering you the link by ornamenting it with bold, italic, or underlined characters. It sounds good.

Why a bad UX: However, when you canalize your hopes into your touchpad and click, you get disappointed because it’s not even clickable. Or the worst scenario: The link goes to an irrelevant page. The creators of this hoax should question their ways to get the most clicks. If not, their brand value definitely will decrease significantly.

4) Clickbait 101

The case: Remember a time when you were scrolling down on any social media feed. When you see some news with scandalous headlines, you may open them.  But this doesn't mean you won't get disappointed if you may get directed to some other content.

Why a bad UX: You probably opened it because you wanted to learn more about what you saw in the headline. Some designers' utmost priority is only to get the attention of users. UX design, as a field, was born to eradicate the motivations of these so-called "designers". You are not only displaying a bad example of UX here, but you are also lying to your customers.

5) Looks good, but what does it do exactly?

The case: Most users value the presentation of what's offered to them. Colors, shapes, font, and so many other things are all critical. But you may come across a landing page with a perfect look, but fails to deliver the message.

Why a bad UX: If you have difficulty making sense of a page, this is one of the bad UX examples. Though an artistic design may sound preferable, it shouldn’t be chosen over practicality and usability. The majority of the idea behind UX design explores the interaction of users with a product. Although it would be a big plus to have a breathtaking design, without getting your users to experience their Aha! moments, it would not make it a product eligible to be successful.

Click here to learn what Aha! moments are and how to search for them.

6) Are we using Spotify to its full extent?

The case: Spotify is a successful product loved and used by millions of users around the world. However, some users don't know about some of its features, especially the podcast feature. Many users are not using the application to its full extent.

Why a bad UX: When you design a product full of useful features, but the users are not aware of them, this is also considered a bad UX experience. You need to know your user and provide them an easy path to your features. If no one knows about them, what is the use of these features?

To overcome such problems on feature and product adoption, working with a 3rd party user onboarding software might be the solution you need. Learn all about product adoption here.

Also, see here to understand how exactly can a user onboarding tool help you by boosting customer success.

A good UX experience gives your audience a valid reason to use your product. Know your audience and appeal to their preferences to avoid ending up in lists such as this one. You can learn from these bad UX examples and avoid them in your future designs. Also, testing some functions on users can be of great help for UX designers. And maybe they may create an easily accessible feedback points for users, and try to get the most out of them.