15 basic but common UX Mistakes in Apps

15 Basic but Common UX
mistakes in Apps
CHRISTIAN KRAFT,
WWW.KRAFTUX.COM, CHRISTIAN.KRAFT@GMAIL.COM

1. Meaningless App icons and names
See your App icon a bit like your company logo, it is most likely what
your customers will see most, and they have to be easy to find if you
want your customers to come back.
Too often I see icons that do not indicates what your Apps are about, at
all. I am sure the graphical designers had some ideas for the IOS Photos
and the Google Photos icons, but most users will fail to see the logic
(flower Apps? Paint programs?), and they are even easily to mix up for
a confused user.
Also too often, the text does also not indicate which company is
behind, like the Google Drive icon, saying just “drive”, no mention of
google at all.
CHRISTIAN KRAFT, WWW.KRAFTUX.COM 2
Drive

2. Constantly changing App icons
If you change your App icon too much and too often, your customers
may not be able to find your App again and in some cases you may even
lose them.
My advice is as said to treat your App icon a bit like your company logo –
and no sane company would change their company logo every 3 months.
There are numerous examples of companies not taking the App icon
serious – the App icon will change when it is Christmas, when a graphical
designer feels a desire to update it, for different platforms etc.
Also, remember that some users primarily look for colors in your icon,
others may look for “shapes” and others again are more textual, so if you
really have to change your App icon, you may want to maintain several
elements and e.g. do the change over a longer period in small steps.
Gmail is a relatively positive example, changing the logo in steps but
never radically: shapes and colors have staid for over a decade.

3. Slow start-up
As an App developer, you most likely have the latest, fastest and
greatest devices to test your App on.
However a vast majority of your users are likely on older or cheaper
and hence slower devices. Also, if your device requires online
connection, again assume that many users will have far slower
connections or even no connection sometimes.
An App that starts up too slowly is likely to be much less used or even
eventually deleted, especially if the user feels that the slow start up is
due to graphics that may often is not as important for the user as a
faster start up.
I still wonder why most Angry Bird variants (even those with no
(essential) web connectivity, can take 10-20 seconds to start up –
on my latest generation iOS device.

4. Forcing users to sign up
Getting contact information from user may be essential for your App,
but I also see Apps where it is not essential (at least not initially)
“forcing” users to sign up or leave their name / email etc. The latter are
often done for the (wrong) marketing reasons.
Forcing users to sign up or leave their personal data may sound great
for many less experienced marketing people, but what they may forget
is that forcing users to sign up may make you easily lose a high
percentage of your potential customers just a few seconds after
downloading your App. The user may not know or trust you yet, and
will you give your e-mail address and name to a stranger that asks for it
on the street?
Always allow users to get to know you before signing up or leaving data
– the world online is not really that different than real life on e.g. the
street: Let people get to know you first.

5. Never invade the user’s private life
If I download an App that I hardly know, and the App then asks
if it can “use your location even when the App is not used” or
“Can we get access to all your emails, photos etc”, I will delete it
right away. And so should any user.
For me such Apps are spam or even viruses. A great UX is about
building trust, and when you have that, people will start sharing
their information and start spending..
Yes, we know Google, Microsoft, Facebook and the other big
players all benefit from our personal data, but especially if you
are a relatively new company on the market, you may easily lose
50-90% of all your customer even before they have really
entered your App!
Let users in first, and when they trust you, they may allow some
level of their privacy to be shared with you, like in real life.

6. Don’t make me wait
I mentioned the start-up time, but there are thousands of Apps that
either have extremely slow transitions from one step/level to another,
or even worse, has deliberately put in additional steps with “Ok”,
“please confirm this”
There can in few cases be bandwidth reasons, but most often it has
nothing to with this, but it comes from either graphical designers that
want all users to see their “great” transitions (thousands of times if the
user plays a lot), or it comes from interaction designers that want you
to feel “great” every time you receive a small useless “freebie”.
The worst example I know right now is Angry Birds 2 – where the (still
good) basic game play has been destroyed by constant, repeated and
endless transitions and steps where the user need to confirm, then
wait, then accept a useless freebie etc. Sorry, even though I admit that
the basic game play is quite intriguing, please don’t insult me with this.

7. Don’t expect users to understand (your) colors
I see this mistake in almost every App available, a single graphical
designer believes that he or she has found the color interpretation that
every human being understands, and hence the interaction designer
(if available) is told that textual indications of status is not needed.
Even Skype, owned by Microsoft that has
thousands of UX people, hasn’t understood this.
Look at the image: Is video on? Is microphone
Off or On? And is the “End the call” on or off?
I struggle with this interface on a daily basis, and even after 25 years
working with UX, I every time find myself in doubt what is the status.

8. Free the Freebies
I understand the need for App developers, in this case maybe
primarily game developers, to earn some money. And hence I
understand the need to ask the user to e.g. watch a commercial
video to get the freebie.
However, again, I see graphical and interaction designers trying to
built a new “game” around getting these freebies: Fortune
wheels (of course with videos), lucky draws (with videos) etc.
But the fact is that your average user / game player (due to your
hopefully great game play of the core game) is not interested in
your extra (often boring) UI around your freebies, it will in fact
just slow down what the user truly wants to do: Keep playing and
using your App/game, so let the user do just that – as fast as
possible…

9. Dark side UX: No trust, No money
A great UX designer can not only make you love using your App, but he
can also lure you into the “dark side”. He or she can make you click, by
using colors, the position on the screen where you normally click, or by
constant pop-ups, into purchasing a product that you do not want.
Dark side UX is extremely outspread today, since most Apps today are
free initially, but then the App later wants to make you pay.
My experience is that using these methods to “force” people to pay will
have the opposite effect: users will stop using your App and delete your
App. You will end up like a bad sales person in real life trying to push
product that your consumer is not ready for until they trust you more.
My clear proposal is: If you make a great App, with great benefits or
with a great game play, all for free, then you will gain the trust and
money from your users. You will not get one penny before you have the
trust. Trust and benefit is key!

10. Orientation Ignorance
How many times have you been sitting in your sofa or lying in your
bed, while charging your phone or tablet, and the App is forcing you
to use it in only a single direction? And usually that direction is where
your charger and cable has to be below so you will have to lift the
device in an awkward position?
I have some understanding for smaller App developers not having
resources to design and implement different landscape and portrait
modes, but I have absolutely no understanding for App companies not
being able to even do a 180 degrees turn, so that the charger may not
end in your bellybutton. That is pure laziness.
When all this is said, and when you decide to go for more than one
orientation, please do not go crazy in making two very different
versions of your App depending on the orientation, I see another
worrying trend now doing just that.

11. Never put your user back to square one
I am truly surprised about the amount of Apps that often put users
back to square one.
This can be after an App update or after not using the App for some
time, but always then forcing users to type in password, user name,
personal data again.
This has happened multiple times with the App I use for my D-Link
camera that I already purchased, paid for and signed up for. Almost half
of the times I want to look at my remote camera, I need to (again) type
user name and password. Which I have stored on another device for
security, of course.
And I see it also with games, productivity apps etc

12. Be my crush, not crash…
A bit along the same lines as before: A great UX can make your
customers truly like or even love your App, and this will also make them
spend more time and money. Crashing is however the sure way to end a
crush…
Some will say that App stability is not UX: Wrong. An App crashing will
destroy the user experience for the user no matter how great your visual
and interaction design is – or your overall “product”.
I would have hoped that in 2017 crashing software would be a thing of
the past. But I still see Apps, in fact most often from the bigger
companies, crash almost every day.
Google Chrome on iOS is truly unstable – and if it crashes you will not
only need to open the App again, but it will have deleted all your open
webpages – surely this is not making me feel love, it rather makes users
want to delete the App in anger…

13. Different platforms are not different worlds
A key problem is that many companies have totally different
departments and UX teams dealing with mobile, web and
other platforms.
But sorry, your users and customers are most likely the same
and they actually live in only one world, and may swap as they
desire.
Asking your consumers to learn multiple “languages” (visually,
interaction wise, structure wise) is a total no-go for almost any
service.
Facebook Messenger was a truly bad example until recently,
but there are still a huge amount of examples, many of them
from big players.

14. The user’s content is still King
I am sure that most people have tried an App where a
keyboard is basically taking over the screen. This may be
somewhat acceptable for short chat messages and the
like.
But for applications with more extensive content creation,
it will require new solutions.
Truly bad examples are Microsoft PPT, Word and Excel for
IOS where you basically lose all overview when typing. In
my mind those Apps are useless for mobile devices (even
if you have an external keyboard). It is like trying to use a
pocket calculator to write a novel.
There surely are solutions, but that requires that you care
to find them.

15. Corporate destruction of UX
In many cases with bigger companies, the biggest challenge in making a
great UX is often the “corporate”.
Some of the worst App User Experiences come from big corporates,
since they are often driven by marketing and strategic managers that
want to turn your experience into something that may give money
tomorrow.
The fact is that loyal, paying customers come from creating the best
product with the best UX.
If you want success, make people like or even better love your App and
Service, anything else will not work…

15 basic but common UX Mistakes in Apps

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15 basic but common UX Mistakes in Apps