Facit Digital Top 10 UX Fails – Experiences from 10 years of research

Facit Digital turns 10! Ten years of user research have given us an almost inexhaustible pool of UX dos and don'ts. Many UX trends have come, some have stayed, others have quickly disappeared. Here are our Top 10 UX Fails from 10 years of research at Facit Digital (and how to make it better).

UX Fail #1: Look at this! Listen to that!

Automatically starting video and audio has been one of the biggest annoyances on websites for years - yet users still expect it.

UX Fail #2: Fast or Slow Food Overview?

Hamburg menus have established themselves as helpful navigation elements on mobile devices, but on the desktop they slow down orientation and information reception considerably.

UX Fail #3: Where am I here?

Longpagers are "in". Especially for websites with a lot of content, however, they sometimes (too!) place high demands on good user guidance.

UX Fail #4: Navigation at good luck. 

Split buttons seem to be the perfect solution to transform extensive desktop navigation menus to mobile devices. For users, they make navigation unpredictable and a matter of luck.

UX Fail #5: Hidden UX pearls.

When we hear from users: "This is a great feature! But how can you get it", it's usually because features are hidden behind wipe gestures, longpress or key combinations.

UX Fail #6: I'm not blind.

Believe it or not, there are still people who use desktop websites. Simply "bringing up" text-rich and visually stunning pages designed for the phone on the desktop does not fit the context of use or a serious mobile-first approach.

UX Fail #7: Too many icons spoil the broth

Icons take up little space and can help users find the content they are looking for more quickly. But only if they are used specifically and unambiguously.

UX Fail #8: Internet is not TV.

Sure, videos are nice to watch. But: Too many of them tend to overwhelm online users and possibly block the way to relevant content.

UX Fail #9: Everything can, nothing must.

Since the turnaround to flat design, everything that is supposedly superfluous (e.g. drop shadows of buttons) has been left out. The consequence: users can no longer intuitively distinguish between active and passive elements.

UX Fail #10: Take me home!

Home navigation via logo has been standard in UX concepts for quite some time. However, it is by far not known to all users - and the way back to the home page is correspondingly difficult.