Common UX Mistakes (and how to fix them) – Part 4: TL;DR

August 16, 2018 6:07 pm

This is the fourth, and final, installment in my multi-part series on common issues I see that create a poor User Experience (UX) on websites. The series covers some pretty big issues that will cause visitors to leave your website. If someone opens your site then goes back to their Google results page, you’ve just lost a customer.

If you missed the first three you can find them here:
Part 1: Cluttered Design
Part 2: Auto-play Media
Part 3: Bad Typography

The issue: Too Long, Didn’t Read (TL;DR)

Like it or not, we live in a world of lazy readers. So if you want to get a message to your site visitors, you’re going to have to make that message short and sweet.

No matter how interesting your content may be, long blocks of text are intimidating. Not many people are going to take the time to actually read though it. At best, they’ll skim it at worst they’ll go back to google and visit your competitors site.

The fix: Make it skimmable

Break up text into short paragraphs. This breaks up the block of text while making it easier for a readers eye to skim through.

Section the article/content into groups with headings and subheadings. Again, this is more easily skimmed to glean the information a visitor wants off the page without needing to read every word.

Use images when appropriate. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. A quick look at the images on a page should give you a basic idea of what the page is about. If it doesn’t, many of your visitors probably decided the page was about something else and didn’t read it.

Consider a video instead. Some statistics claim visitors are 80% more likely to watch video content than read an article. Google therefore prioritizes video on many cases, since that’s what their users want. There’s really no disadvantage to using videos when you can. Be sure to include a transcript though it will definitely help visitors who might have trouble viewing or hearing a video and it can even help your SEO.

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