UX Design Tricks & Treats

Fall is in the air, leaves are on the ground, and there’s bad UX everywhere! This Halloween, we’ve got UX Design tricks (and treats!) on our minds here at LunarLab.

App designers use tons of tricks to keep people in apps and boost engagement metrics. Any time you’re creating software, the pressure is on to get more subscriptions, sign ups, or screen views. Unfortunately, sometimes UX tricks seem like a good idea, but are ultimately harmful. They can increase metrics… but they also create a bad experience by annoying users or even creating harmful situations. Choosing to give users a treat (instead of a trick) ensures they have a great experience. This can organically increase metrics, and increase your app’s success in the long term.

Read on to learn about 5 common (but harmful!) UX tricks, and how to give your users a treat instead.

Push Notifications

Push notifications are those app notifications that come directly to your phone. They can be really great! Push notifications let you know about important things like Venmo transactions (cha-ching!), messages from friends, or when to check in for your flight.

The dark side of push notifications is that sometimes apps overdo it. Turning them on by default and sending them frequently gets them in front of users all the time, which seems like a good thing. But when they are unhelpful or pushy, they can be intrusive and stressful. This can be annoying and lead to notification fatigue, which in turn leads to customers leaving your app.

Give a treat instead

In general it’s a good idea to use push notifications sparingly, absolutely no more than once a week. Too many of these notifications will cause users to disable push notification functionality altogether, which means you can’t reach those users. They may even delete the app.

Most importantly, if you’re adding push notifications to your app, make sure they are done in a way that supports what the user wants to achieve. These messages should be personalized and relevant to a real person’s needs. They should never be spammy or irrelevant.

Confirmshaming

We’ve talked about confirmshaming before in our UX Dark Patterns blog post, and yeah… we still hate it. This is what happens when users are guilted into doing something. For example, let’s say a user is prompted to add something to their cart to get a discount. Confirmshaming happens when the only way to opt out of the discount is to click a link that says, “no thanks, I’d like to pay full price.”

It can seem funny to add this kind of text, like you’re creating a joke between yourself and the end user. In reality, these types of messages can create negative feelings with users. They might feel guilt, shame (as the name suggests), or like they’re being coerced into doing something they don’t want to do. Sure, they might feel bad enough to click. But if they feel bad about it, you risk them never coming back. Any time users have a negative feeling while using your product, they’re at risk of churning.

Give a treat instead

Be clear and concise with any language you use within your app, especially actions that allow users to opt out or cancel. At LunarLab, we always err on the side of creating more transparency and clarity, which creates a much better user experience for everyone. Creating a positive experience (instead of negative one) will give people better feelings about your app, which encourages them to come back.

Friend Spam

Friend spam happens when users share their contacts with an app for what seems like a great reason (finding other friends on the app), but the app spams the contacts to get them to join the app. If you’re an app creator, this can seem like a good idea to implement because you’ll get a ton more users this way. You’ll also expand users’ networks with people they already know. In a lot of cases, it works and you do get more sign ups!

Friend spam is very common… but it’s also illegal. LinkedIn settled a $13 million class action lawsuit after they violated California law with friend spam in their sign up process. It’s also manipulative, and users will be upset if they find out you’re using their contacts in this way.

Give a treat instead

The best way to grow your app is through organic growth, because it means that people love it and want to use it. When people sign up because they want to (not because they were deceived into it), they are more likely to stick around and increase your user retention metrics. To achieve organic growth with manipulating people, give users easy ways to share and lots of reasons to share! Invest in proven growth strategies, and learn how to effectively build your product’s network.

Giving tons of choices

Hot take: giving users too many choices creates a worse user experience. This can feel kind of paradoxical, because it might seem like users want tons of choices! When you’re building an app, it’s tempting to think, “users need to do this.. and this.. and this.. and that… and it all needs to be right on the screen for them.” Sure, they might need to do all of that. But giving too many choices all at once can feel confusing and frustrating. It can slow people down from doing what they actually want to do, and make your app feel hard to use. People experience cognitive overload. When your app feels too complicated, people will stop using it.

Give a treat instead

The title of Steve Krug’s classic design book Don’t Make Me Think says it all. Don’t make users spend too much time thinking about the choices they want to make in your app, or they’ll get frustrated. Work to limit the choices presented to only the most important actions. Doing so will help users find what they actually want or need quickly, and give them a positive perception of your app. Every action doesn’t need to be present on every screen. You can use good information architecture practices to prioritize the most important tasks.

Autoplay audio and videos

Autoplaying audio and videos seems like it would be great for boosting engagement, because you’ll hook people in to watching or listening. Even Netflix did this by autoplaying content to suck people into watching longer. And it probably did exactly that, creating an engagement boost in their metrics. This is a great example of how the data doesn’t always reflect the user experience. In reality, this is annoying and disruptive, which creates a bad experience for users. In fact, if you google “Netflix autoplay videos”, the entire first page of results is populated with articles about how to turn it off, because it’s so annoying.