Do you know why your site visitors left? Hint: It’s not what you think
Okay, I am not talking about users who bounced in 10 secs or less. I am sure you would have read about bouncing users a million times earlier. I am here to talk about the interested users here who could have been converted to a loyal customer base if ‘Handled With Care’.
The other day I was watching this talk by Suhail Doshi (Founder, Mixpanel). Suhail focussed on growth and how user retention impacts it. If you are responsible for the growth of your business, I would definitely recommend you to listen to this talk.
Chances are your new user’s acquisition strategies may or may not make or break you. It is the lower churn rate which will make your business viable and survivable in a long run.
Now, the bigger question is what makes your users come again and again on your product. We all have a set of features in our minds but one feature that would be consistent in all of our minds will be flawless user experience. For example, Amazon incurs huge losses by offering users a “No Questions Asked” return policy but what they get in return is customer loyalty which is indirect yet powerful. They give users a delightful experience which makes them come back on Amazon for shopping. We are emotional beings, after all, a lot of what we do is often driven by intangible emotions and not just rationality. If we were rational beings, Amazon could have just focussed on lowest prices. Alas, it’s not as easy as that.
Let me talk about bad user experience now and what makes your users leave? My biggest worry while talking to a website owner is they are not even aware of these issues. While as a user of their website, these issues are all too evident.
I have identified a few UX issues in some of the popular websites like Reddit and SEMRush. As a user, these issues were evident to me but clearly the owners are either not aware or ignored these issues. It is hard to believe that they did not care so the only reason could be ignorance, right?
How do you make yourself aware of UX issues?
There are several tools to record user actions in form of videos. But, the more I go through all these clippings, the more I start to question the use of my time. The next best thing out there is feedback forms offered my multiple products. Although, in this case, you are relying on users to not only face the issue but to report it as well. This happens rarely and in most cases, users leave your website without saying a word and will go to a competitor website for a better experience. They may or may not get it but that’s a story for another day!
What UX issues I have experienced?
The undermentioned issues are the ones that I have experienced on SEMRush and Reddit.
Recently, I went to [SEMRush](https://www.semrush.com/) backlinks landing page to check the backlinks for one of my products. I immediately saw an input field which asked me to enter the domain name. I was happy till this point since it looked pretty straightforward to me.
Then I entered my domain name and…well, nothing happened. I pressed the “Get a Free Trial” button again and yet again nothing happened. This made me agitated yet curious at the same time because they were not throwing any errors.
Now, being a software developer, I tried to dig in a bit deeper by examining network calls and console logs. But, I was unable to find any JS or network errors. Although, I am still not 100% sure why they were not allowing me to go forward maybe I was supposed to accept cookies before proceeding further. Now, this was and still is a mystery to me and I am surprised that I did not get any alerts when I was unable to proceed. These types of experiences can immediately throw your users away as it’s a brutally competitive world out there. No country for ‘UX issues’ man.
Another example is of Reddit which has a humongous user base. Now, I was using their “SAVE” button to reply to an email.
When I tried to save the email, it said “submitting…” yet the button was active. For a very long time (like 30 secs) it was still showing “submitting…”. Instinctively I thought the send had failed and I tried to click “SAVE” another couple of times. Finally, it worked, in fact, I saw the mail was sent thrice to the same user and that was so embarrassing to me. It made me think why did they do the same action thrice when the button was supposed to be inactive while submitting a response.
These are a couple of UX issues that I came across in this week itself. I think there are so many UX issues that we come across as a user. Only sometimes it makes us leave a feedback to the website owner but I would say most of the times it gets ignored. The tragedy is it leaves a bad impression on the user to the mark that they do not even come back sometimes. If you have recently come across any such UX issues on a popular website, do let me know!
