5 Fantastic Ways to Deliver a Terrible Mobile Website User Experience

Fortunately, developing a website that delivers a terrible user experience continues to be both cheap and easy.

If you are looking for a surefire way to frustrate your visitors and virtually guarantee that they will seek out your competitors the next time they need advice or a product, have your web developer incorporate these 5 simple features into your responsive web design.

Really Tiny Buttons

Mobile gaming has made the average phone user very capable and precise. They might even enjoy the process of constantly refreshing the page after they miss and hit the wrong link. An added bonus of using really tiny buttons is that it allows you to have more room on the screen for other content that can clutter up the visual design.

Unreadable Font Size

Phone screens are much smaller than desktop screens. Maybe by 11 times or so. The logic follows that the font size should decrease by the same ratio.

So that size 11 font you used on the desktop version of the size? Size 1 should do the trick for mobile users.

If they squint and hold the phone close to their face, it should be easy enough to figure out.

Neverending Forms

Start with the classics, like “Name”, “Email” and “Phone Number”. These are fairly fundamental questions.

Even though your product has nothing to do with location services, ask for a “Postal Code” anyway. It wastes a bit of the user’s time and it also looks fancy.

“Fax” is fairly outdated, and your service almost certainly doesn’t require this information, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, right? Heck, you might even be able to get their “License Plate Number” with this same reasoning.

Include a large number of checkboxes with misleading information about receiving email offers, being added to subscriptions lists, and approving monthly donations. Make sure to negatives into the question so that the user has no idea what they are actually agreeing or disagreeing to when they check the box.

Long Loading Times

Data is cheap. So having a 20 MB homepage shouldn’t be a problem for most users. Besides, most mobile phone users are on the go. That means they are probably walking between locations or riding public transit. So they have lots of time to wait for a website to load.

Besides, commuters are notoriously patient.

No Obvious Purpose or Direction

This is the crown jewel of horrible mobile web design. By creating a truly aimless website, you can give your visitors no clear impression of the next step. It’s probably the best, most efficient way you can frustrate and alienate your users. Try hidden important features or not using a clear visual hierarchy. This makes the page difficult to scan and understand.

I hope you can make excellent use of this guide to build you own terrible mobile user experience.

Most importantly, just remember not to consider the user throughout every interaction they have with the site and you’ll be bothering your target audience in no time.

Alternatively, if you’re looking to make an exceptional website (you know, like, for whatever reason), consider checking out RC Design to see how we can help you out.