Many conditions must be met for users to accept and enjoy a product. You need to know who the target audience is, what problems they need to solve, how your solution improves on their current methods, and how to guide and support them, among other considerations.
As a user experience designer, you have a great deal to consider: attracting people to the product, helping them get started, and enabling them to solve real problems. Yet if the product repeatedly makes users feel unable to control it, all of that effort is wasted. This article examines several common UX (User experience design) issues and considers how to help people use products more smoothly and naturally without unnecessary confusion or frustration.
1. Prioritizing Creativity Over Usability
Creativity is valuable, but pursuing novelty for its own sake while ignoring the product and its target users puts long-established mental models at risk—and potentially the product's core value.
An unconventional and creative navigation model may work well for certain mobile products, but what happens when it is placed on a desktop web page? Mobile design patterns are often brought to desktop experiences, complete with inventive visuals, novel interactions, and polished motion. Yet none of these compensate for the confusion and irritation users feel when their prior knowledge becomes useless in a familiar product context. The usability problems created by an ill-suited design pattern only follow from there.
Designers should apply creativity where it belongs and ensure that new ideas are both usable and easy to use. Provide the right amount of guidance when needed. Users will accept some learning with a new design, but they are often extremely impatient—consider how we react to a new APP ourselves. Guidance should therefore be selective and prioritized. At the same time, help cannot be so limited that users have no way to understand what something is or how it works. If a product offers only a sophisticated appearance and novel interactions while withholding useful support where users predictably need it, confused users will soon conclude that either they or the product are unintelligent.
2. Overdesign
When an interface does not look exciting or distinctive enough, designers may feel that they have done too little, and others may criticize it as lacking design. For most product interfaces, however, clear, precise, immediately understandable information matters far more than an overworked visual style. Overdesign includes excessive complexity, excessive minimalism, and any style-first approach that disregards the product's characteristics and information hierarchy.
Usability is the foundation of interaction design, while discoverability is the door a product should always keep open. For many products, a consistent, visible global navigation structure is the interface's most important element. If a style forces users to spend time and attention finding the navigation menu and then adds further interaction cost to use it, they will not appreciate that stylistic choice.
Beyond visual style, interaction design also requires restraint. For example, in mobile APP design, avoid too many custom gestures, excessively novel interaction models that impose a heavy cognitive load, and needless changes to established patterns that already work.
No one wants to make a product boring. The question is whether the elements intended to make it interesting are applied appropriately and in moderation. Ultimately, this work should strengthen the product and serve its users; how many likes the interface receives on Dribbble is far less important.
3. Assuming Users Know What You Know
It is easy to assume who users are, that they solve problems as we do, or that they share particular life experiences, educational backgrounds, needs, and contexts. The remedy is to conduct research—formal or informal—before design begins.
A detailed discussion of early-stage research is beyond the scope of this article, but common methods include:
User Personas: Define one or more representative target-user profiles, including psychological, behavioral, and professional characteristics and how those traits relate to product use. A novice persona may highlight uncertainty, while intermediate and advanced personas focus more on speed and efficiency.
Experience Maps: Map a representative user's experience across the full product lifecycle—before, during, and after use—to build a clearer understanding of the overall context of need.
User Interviews: Speak directly with real users, interact with them, and document what they say and do, including contextual research where appropriate.
Understanding the differences between novice and more advanced users does not mean diluting the design until it serves only beginners. A strong product experience should be flexible enough to help experienced users complete tasks efficiently while also providing the support newcomers need to get started quickly.
4. Forcing Users to Follow the Designer's Rules
It can be revealing to watch users operate an interface in ways you never anticipated. As designer Marcin Treder said, “Never underestimate the power of the path of least resistance.”
In usability testing, seeing people use a product in an unexpected way is often a valuable result. It shows that the test was worthwhile. You generally have two choices: 1. Encourage them to continue the task in their own way. 2. Stop them and direct them to the so-called official path.
Choose the first. If participants show a consistent pattern, reconsider the functional flow in the next iteration. Their method may better match expectations in the real context of need. By investigating why, you may discover an interface that feels genuinely natural to the target audience. When users are forced into a “standard process” devised by the team and cannot quickly adjust their mental model, they are likely to feel unable to control the software.
Standard patterns exist to shape products and serve users, not the other way around; practice is the test of truth. If the team's assumptions prevent target users from completing tasks efficiently, the team's thinking may need to change. Users should not have to spend extra time and effort learning new tool rules in addition to solving the original problem.
5. Failing to Test with Real Users
After the update to iOS 7, keyboard issues caused widespread frustration that persisted for a long time. The new space bar was too short, the Shift key's state was unclear, and other problems angered many users.
Apple addressed some keyboard issues in subsequent updates, through the period leading up to iOS 9, but the damage had already been done. We do not know whether Apple conducted comprehensive usability testing with real users before launching the redesigned operating system. What we do know is that the keyboard problems since iOS 7 clearly demonstrated the importance of usability testing.
Formal or informal usability testing can identify potential issues that would otherwise confuse users after launch and make them feel incapable. The benefits often exceed expectations.
During testing, focus on questions such as:
1. Task completion: Can participants complete the assigned tasks? Observe how they use features and handle errors without assistance.
2. Navigation effectiveness: How smoothly can participants navigate, and what interaction cost does the process impose?
3. Information hierarchy: Do participants notice the interface's most important information and functions?
Conclusion
Truly outstanding experiences combine grounded creativity with genuine care for users. A thoughtfully designed product can help people act efficiently and confidently, as though the feature's designer were beside them helping complete the task.
Whether you are new to UX design or an industry expert, the goal should be the same: design products that serve users' tasks, provide a natural and smooth operating experience, and prevent confusion and isolation. With that goal in mind, designers should consider many recurring issues, including the five discussed here:
1. Showing off clever ideas rarely produces a genuinely usable interface. Do not make users pay an excessive cognitive cost simply to use the product.
2. Avoid overdesign, whether overly complex or overly minimal. What looks “boring” to a designer may signal clarity and ease of use to an ordinary user.
3. Do not assume users know what you know. Provide a small amount of effective guidance in the right context.
4. A flow devised by the team may not fit how target users solve real problems. Conduct the necessary research.
5. Keep testing. Observe whether representative users can complete task scenarios smoothly with a prototype, iterate from the results, and test again.
