User Experience (UX) design is one of the most important elements of site design. A well-designed site is intuitive and usable, whereas a poorly designed one is not. Employees who can navigate the site without stress or difficulty are less stressed and can do their jobs more efficiently. So how can you tell if your site has a good UX? To help you out, we thought it would be useful to put together a brief article on this subject. If this is something that you're interested in learning more about, read on for four tell-tale signs of poor UX design.
Utilizes Overly Complicated Design
A well-designed intranet should have only the essential information on its home page. Your site should also be easy to use and browse through, with automatic updates and fast responses to all your queries so that you get the information you are looking for quickly. The best design is user-friendly, so anyone can use the intranet without any difficulty.
Has Over-the-Top Design
This idea also touches on the topic of "too much," but in a different context. In the previous section, we talked about content. Here, we talk about functionality. The more a site tries to do, the harder it is for an average user to use. If a user submits a form and hears a special animation each and every time, they're just going to get annoyed. Your intranet site shouldn't try to do everything; it should focus on its simple purpose. Any extraneous features—cute animations, tacked-on modals—just distract users and hinders them from using the site properly.
Allows Incorrect Behaviour
Any well-designed product should guide the user as they use it. But no matter how good of a guide a product is, it won’t work if you allow people to misuse your product. Remember, you’ll want to minimise the possibility of a mistake. File misnaming, uploading incorrect documents or document types, or other similar errors happen when people misuse systems. If you have too many people misusing your systems, you probably have systems with poor UX design.
Lacks System Feedback
Lastly, it’s important that your website provides system feedback. Whenever a user interacts with a website, they should get feedback as to what happened. If they submit a form, they should know whether it was successfully submitted. If they have initiated a process that is running behind the scenes, they should be able to check on it by logging into their account. An intranet should never leave its users wondering if something worked or not.
Conclusion
We hope this article proves to be useful when it comes to helping you determine whether or not your site is poorly designed. If you find that you’re not offering the best user experience, it would be wise to remedy the problem as soon as possible. Be sure to keep everything you’ve learned here in mind so that you can maximize your website.
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