Everything You Want To Know About UX Pain Points
Introduction
Having a complete understanding of your platform’s user experience (UX) is the key to crafting successful strategies. Delivering a product as per your users’ expectations requires interacting with users closely, precisely identifying their needs, and addressing them effectively.
UX pain points are the biggest stumbling blocks to seamless user experience and, at the same time, they point out the difficulties that users come across.
With a clear vision of how users navigate the interface, you can easier uncover frustrations they have and therefore introduce relevant improvements, increase customer satisfaction, and eventually, increase your revenue.
Remember that high-quality UX is supposed to solve users’ problems.
In this blog, we’ll provide you with comprehensive information about UX pain points, explain why they are important, and give tips on how to tackle them efficiently. Join us and dive deep into this topic right now!
What are UX pain points?
Interpreting the concept of UX pain points properly is crucial for their further identification.
UX pain points refer to specific issues or challenges users face while interacting with a product, service, or system. These pain points invoke frustration, confusion, and dissatisfaction, sometimes block users from completing a task and reaching a goal thus leading to a negative user experience.
UX pain points vary in terms of scale and significance. They can range from minor inconveniences to major issues that make interaction with a product or service completely impossible. In general, pain points are related to usability, customer service, pricing, or any other aspect of the user experience.
Tracking the areas of difficulty must never be underrated. This is the right way to ensure a flawless user experience and improve conversion and retention rates.
Pain points VS usability issues
Pain points or usability issues? These two terms often cause confusion as they both are associated with the problems that users have. However, there’s a little difference you should know.
To cut a long story short, a pain point goes far beyond a simple usability problem that a user may bump into. The concept of UX pain points is broader – these can include usability issues. Usability issues, however, do not contain pain points. They refer to what directly impacts the ease of use and efficiency of a product or service. Resolving usability issues can contribute to alleviating UX pain points, but addressing pain points may involve improvements beyond just usability, such as addressing emotional aspects and enhancing the overall user journey.
Why you should know your users’ pain points
It’s no good to ignore UX pain points – they can create way more challenges for your business than you might even imagine. Damaged reputation, experiencing customers as well as financial losses, and similar failures are all outcomes of neglecting user pain points. Unaddressed pain points are the reason for abandoned carts and customer support service overloaded with disappointed calls.
You should keep monitoring customer behavior and introduce updates timely to be on the safe side. Making your customers happy and satisfied must be a priority so they will keep coming back for more. There are cases when a poor design choice at the customer journey level is enough to repel users. The market is highly competitive and this means a myriad of alternatives out there. Regardless of a user’s request, finding a service or product is not difficult now – there are plenty of available options. It only takes one little error for them to move on to another option. Users don’t want to waste their precious time figuring out how your complex design works out, do they?
As you can see, offering exceptional user experiences impacts your company’s image positively.
We’ve gathered several pieces of statistical data to expand your awareness:
- Only 55% of companies do any online UX testing.
- 74% of people are more likely to return to websites that are well-optimized for mobile.
- 52% of customers may abandon a platform due to a bad mobile experience.
Common types
Different resources provide different UX pain points classifications. We’ve gathered information and outlined the 9 most common UX pain points for you to know. Take a closer look at them here:
Navigational
These pain points are due to inconvenient menus, complex website structures, the absence of the search function, and any other element that makes the platform hard to navigate. Users would rather abandon such a site instead of desperately clicking on various icons in the hope of finding what they need.
Usability
Usability pain points include slowly loading pages, complicated check-out processes, or tools that rather create obstacles. When it comes to emerging technology integration (e.g. AR & VR), everything should be done appropriately. Innovations are supposed to enrich user experiences, not confuse them. In case they don’t get the expected performance, they are likely to leave, even if the intent was to boost accessibility and draw customer attention.
Customer service
Poor customer support service leads to a drop in satisfaction. Users want to receive proper assistance once they run into trouble when interacting with the product. Unhelpful customer service agents or lack of response to customer inquiries are the main sources of frustration. Consider that unresolved user problems lead to losing trust and revenue.
Customer support can often be stressful for both parties. Creating a comprehensive FAQ page is an effective method to address this issue and reduce pressure.
Financial
It goes without saying that users want to get their money’s worth. Price is often a deciding factor in the overall user’s journey. This is what either encourages or prevents people from paying for a product or service.
A so-called “paywall” is a clear example. We all come across it occasionally. And here’s what it means. You read an article and suddenly it cuts off. Basically, a paywall is a digital barrier or restriction put in place by content providers, such as news websites, online publishers, or streaming services, to limit access to certain content or services. It requires users to pay a fee or subscribe to gain access to the content that lies behind the paywall. In other words, paywalls prevent free access to specific articles, videos, or other premium content, typically in an attempt to monetize the content and generate revenue for the content provider.
People hate feeling lied to. Ensure full transparency with free and paid content and put reasonable prices in order to maintain customers’ trust and loyalty.
Product
Quality or functionality issues that distort the normal operation of a product or service can completely ruin the overall impression. Rigorous user testing is the best you can do to eliminate such flaws. Let people interact with your product in a real-world setting to uncover product pain points and address them before the official release.
Process
Process pain points relate to difficulties with completing certain tasks like filling in a form, placing an order, etc. These include technical issues which cannot be tackled without close collaboration between the design and development teams. If a user gets confused with the steps or has any other problem that hinders doing what’s required, your business will experience losses. Furthermore, if this is a frequent case, you will bear a severe financial impact. To avoid such misfortunes, you should reflect users’ expectations in the best way possible. It takes to monitor their behavior and fully understand what they want and expect to get.
Performance
Time is money so neither you nor your users want to waste this precious asset. Slow loading times, reliability issues, problems with responsiveness, delays, and lags can frustrate users and put a detrimental effect on your business.
Accessibility
Accessibility issues can create barriers for users with certain disabilities. This includes challenges related to screen readers, keyboard navigation, color contrast, and other features that enable inclusivity.
Content
Content-related pain points come from poorly written or irrelevant pieces of content that confuse and frustrate users. Lack of clarity, excessive jargon, and content that doesn’t meet user needs can be pain points.
How to locate UX pain points
Locating UX pain points requires a systematic approach that involves understanding your users’ behavior, demands, and expectations, conducting user research, and gathering feedback. This is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process, as your business grows and expands.
Should you identify a potentially dangerous area, do not hesitate to uncover the ground reason and take necessary measures at once.
Check out some steps you need to go through to identify and locate UX pain points effectively:
Conduct user research
Conduct qualitative and quantitative research to gain insights about your users. Methods like interviews, surveys, usability testing, and analytics can provide valuable data on how users interact with your product and what challenges they face.
Analyze the obtained data
The research is complete and you’re overloaded with data. What’s next? You should synthesize and prioritize the information. Define the most critical pain points and start planning efficient strategies to combat them. It takes to evaluate each pain point’s impact on the user experience in order to prioritize them accurately.
Find the root of the problem
Explore the root of the problem, draft a problem statement that outlines the pain points you are going to solve and develop a strategy to affect the issue.
Take measures to solve the problem
The strategy is built and the tactics are selected so you can get right down to business and start fighting the problem. Do not be afraid to save room for flexibility – you may need to allow some corrections along the way.
Estimate the impact
Finally, when the tough work is done, you can assess the impact to see whether your efforts have brought the desired results. Additionally, this way you also can identify a few more pain points and address them early on. Review your progress regularly not to overlook a single thing.
UX research methods
Judging from all the said above, we can conclude that thorough UX research is the best way to spot pain points. There are various approaches you can apply to monitor and analyze a customer journey but it is highly recommended to mix several research methods to obtain all-inclusive data. These research methods help designers, developers, and businesses create user-centered solutions that are more effective and satisfying for their target audience.
In this section, we invite you to explore the most common user research methods you are likely to use!
Analytics
Website analytics provides you with a whole pack of useful metrics (conversions, exit pages, etc) that tell you a lot about how users interact with your platform.
User Feedback
User feedback must never be underestimated since it is a valuable metric you can beneficially utilize. Feedback is typically gathered through surveys or interviews. Though these processes are resource-consuming, they should take place. Consider leveraging social media as a helpful tool in terms of collecting feedback. What do people think about your product or service? How often do they use it? What problems do they have? Get the most out of social medial platforms and receive all the answers you’re looking for.
Testing
Testing is often tedious and time-consuming but you cannot do without it. Take time to conduct this boring activity and avoid critical failures. Perform user/usability testing to see how people interact with your platform in a real-world environment. Save session recordings to go back to them later and single out areas of confusion or frustration.
Customer support inquiries
Reviewing support logs helps to determine the most common problems that users bump into. You can see a large percentage of users complaining about the same issue. In this case, urgent measures must be taken.
Contextual Inquiry
Researchers observe users in their natural environment while they perform tasks related to the product. This method helps gain a deeper understanding of user behavior and context.
A user journey map
This method involves visualizing the user’s experience and interactions with a product or service across different touchpoints and stages. Sometimes the solution is simpler than you expected and it just takes you to modify the paths that users follow.
UX audit
Take a closer look at your website performance and find out the areas for improvement. UX audit is usually done by a third-party organization so that you get an unbiased and comprehensive report along with suggestions for upgrades.
How to effectively address UX pain points
Once user pain points are located, the next step would be to solve them. This is an overwhelming process that requires a good deal of time, effort, and expenses. Unfortunately, there is no “one size fits all” solution. You may try a few methods until you find the one that fits you perfectly. Still, looking through some general recommendations won’t hurt.
Consider doing the following to address UX pain points effectively:
- Make UI as easy to use as possible
- Provide users with extensive guidance and feedback
- Ensure regular optimization
- Save room for flexibility
- Improve your customer support service quality
Bottom line
No matter what industry you occupy and what kind of product you create, convenience is above all. It’s highly important to ensure every user can easily interact with your platform, navigate it, perform the required task, and eventually achieve their goals.
Identifying and managing pain points isn’t as painful as facing the consequences in case you ignore the issues. Furthermore, this should be a regular procedure. As your business grows and expands, every change you introduce shifts the landscape.
Prioritize users’ needs and concerns to keep the loyal ones interested and attract new users. True success lies in attention to the slightest details.