UI & UX Design are two of the important things to keep in mind when building a website or product. They're also things that fail, and often. Allow us to share five reasons why.

Before we dig into the top five reasons to improve your UI and UX design, let us clear something up: the two are not the same. UI stands for User Interface, and this is concerning the visible appearance of a webpage or product. UX, on the other hand, stands for User Experience. This focuses on the entire product as a complete whole, and how the user feels after using it. 

With that, let us go into the top five issues and ways to improve both of these for your webpage or product. 

1. Your Homepage is Cluttered      

Studies show that humans ((this wording becomes relevant when monkeys begin browsing for their own sake. We're people.)) make decisions about whether to stay on a webpage in the first 10 seconds. If the majority of that time is spent with the page loading, or trying to parse the clutter from what they need, they probably aren't going to be staying. 

Instead, aim for a sleek and organized homepage that loads quickly and gives visitors the links they need. There aren't any rules that say everything has to be on one page. 

2. Your Content Is Made Up of Walls Of Text. 

      Most people tend to skip and skim through large blocks of text, especially if all of the sentences are of a similar length. Whether your visitor is a student doing research or a CEO under a time crunch, walls of text aren't going to keep your reader's attention. 

Aim for breaking up the chunks when you can. Use bullet points and lists when possible. Headers and images are helpful as well.  

3. You Don't Make Your Content Easy To Share     

In this day of social media, this is a paramount problem. If you want to draw in new visitors, other than just through search engines, you want to capitalize on social media. Whether it's Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, make it so that a user can easily show off what they're looking at -- hopefully without navigating away from your site.  Clear images, interesting titles for posts, and easy to find sharing buttons are the keys to this.  

4. Lack of Engagement      

People come to your site to interact with your brand in a one on one fashion. If they can't do that, they are going to become frustrated and bored.  Try finding new and innovative ways to engage with your customers instead.  

5. You Haven't Listened To Customer or Employee Feedback     

This one might be hard to swallow, but your customers and your employees are your best way of testing out a page or product.  If you haven't been listening to them, you might want to start now. Just as there is a need for social media, people want to feel that their input is being heard. This is especially true when they take the time to point out that something isn't working, or appealing.  

Fortunately, none of these problems translates to "end of game, do not pass GO, do not collect $200". ((Punctuation/inside/ quotations. Watch yourself.)) By working with folio1 we can help you to fix all of these. We are experts in designing and developing ways to improve user experience. If you'd like to  talk more about how to improve the UI and UX of your products, please contact us today.