How Poor UX Can Hurt Your Business

What your user experiences from the moment they come across your business to the moment they leave is critical to your success. A quality website is more than just a nice design. As the online competition grows, only the companies that offer amazing UX can thrive. If you offer poor UX, this can hurt your business in many ways.

These days, 76% of customers look up a brand online before they buy, even if they make their purchase in the physical store. They’ll check their options online before they go shopping, or open the Web to look for feedback on the products and services before they go to the cashier.

This doesn’t even begin to cover the people that do their entire shopping online. There were 2.14 billion people buying things online in 2021. The online industry is estimated to grow to $5.5 trillion by the end of 2022.

What does this tell us?

How your business performs online can affect its overall success. It’s no longer just about getting more people to visit your site. A well-designed user experience is a necessity for business success.

According to a Forrester study, if you do this right, it could boost your conversion rates by 400%! That’s incredible, but it sure isn’t easy.

Instead of throwing tips and tricks at you, we’ll give you something extra useful – a list of the ways in which poor UX can hurt your business.

UX Mistakes That Hurt Business

Let us introduce you to the consequences of building poor UX. This way, you’ll know what to avoid to boost the user experience.

1 – No testing and UX research = products don’t match the user needs

One of the gravest mistakes you can make in UX design is not to do research. Building a positive experience for the user is worth the time and effort, especially in the development and design process.

If you want to learn how to do this right, read Maze’s guide to UX research and tree testing. The data you obtain by using tools like Maze will tell you exactly what the user needs and how they need it.

From product prototypes to website design, you can test everything. When designers skip this step, they almost always end up with products that don’t match the needs and expectations of customers.

Either the product isn’t what they were looking for or the website doesn’t provide the information they came to find. Either way, this means you are losing the customer and a business without customers is doomed to fail.

Let’s say that you created a software product without proper testing. People that went through your website and converted into customers will start using your product. If you haven’t adapted it to their needs and preferences, you’ll soon get bad word of mouth. Eventually, you’ll have to re-create parts of the software, which costs a lot of money. This is money you could save if only you did a bit of testing and research.

2 – Lack of transparency and simplicity = website abandonment

Every person that abandons your website before they take action (sign up for your newsletter or buy something) is a lost potential customer.

Of course, no business can convert every visitor into a customer. People might get to your site by mistake or don’t plan on buying something in the first place.

However, when you lose a great target customer because your site lacks transparency or is too complicated to use, this is your mistake. It is your job to make everything clear and simple for them and what you’ve offered them is poor UX, so they are leaving.

If you have high abandonment rates, you are one of many. As devastating as this sounds, the average cart abandonment rate today is almost 70%!

According to this research, people leave a site that:

• Has extra costs, which they weren’t familiar with right away (lack of transparency).
• Didn’t allow them to calculate the total cost up-front (lack of transparency).
• Has a complicated or long checkout process (lack of simplicity).
• Wanted them to create an account (lack of simplicity).

People don’t like companies that lie or are vague about what they offer. They want to have a seamless, simple, and straightforward experience. Everything else equals poor UX, which will increase abandonment rates for your website.

3 – No SEO efforts = Low search engine rankings

In the past, SEO was somewhat of a competition to UX, or at least that’s how it was perceived. Today, search engines are very focused on delivering the best experience to people who search, so the two meld together.

The quality of the user experience these days depends greatly on SEO strategies and methods. It includes everything from search-engine-optimized design to quality content writing. The experience of a person on a website is greatly dependent on what’s written and presented on it. As they say, content is king.

Simply put, SEO is what brings people to your website. Once they are there, you use UX to convince them to convert. Poor SEO leads to poor UX and vice versa.

While there’s no written rule for how to optimize for search engines to boost the rankings and user experience, this is made easier thanks to SEO tools for research and writing.

Thinking that UX has nothing to do with SEO is a grave mistake. If you don’t have anything to bring people to your website, how would you offer them user experience in the first place?

4 – Inconsistency with the expectations = no effect

The research will provide you with data to improve the UX, but if you don’t act on it – what good will it do you? A lot of the time, companies know what their targeted audience needs or wants, but they focus solely on creating products and services based on this data. They don’t make sure that the UX aligns with these expectations.

What happens then?

People come across the business but are unaware that the product will meet their expectations, even if the company made sure that is the case. They have poor UX, so they keep looking elsewhere for a solution.

5 – Not targeting the right audience = dissatisfaction and high bounce rates

It won’t matter how great your product or service is if you attract people that don’t need it. Quality UX design only works on the targeted user. A person who is not interested in what you have to offer won’t have a good experience on your site, anyways. They’ll hop on it, realize that this was a waste of time, and leave.

This is why businesses research and segment their audience – to find ways to build the UX around their needs and preferences. If you know who your audience is, you can create a website with their preferences in mind. You can use the social platforms they prefer, the colors they like, create the content that would engage them, etc.

Everything revolves around the target customer. If you don’t build your UX design with them in mind, you can surely expect high bounce rates.

Low accessibility = loss of leads

Did you know that 40% of people will not wait longer than 2 seconds for a page to load? Accessibility is vital to a good user experience and if you can’t provide it, you are doomed to fail.

Your potential customers can experience different problems with accessibility and this just starts with your website’s loading speed. They might not be able to find the prices right away. They might not know where to read the specifications for your product, or find your company’s address. There might not be a cart for them to use, or they don’t know how to place something in it.

Statistics show that 50% of visitors will leave a website if they can’t find what they are looking for. If this happens, it won’t matter that you are offering what they need at a good rate – they will leave! Lack of accessibility equals poor UX.

Does any of this look familiar?

If you’ve experienced any of these problems, the reason is poor UX. How you form the user experience can affect your brand tremendously. This is why it is important to know the consequences of bad UX decisions – to decide on how you’ll remove them and improve the experience for your users.