Web Design & User Experience

From our experience (we have worked with a lot of clients), there are some mistakes that we see a lot of our clients fall in.
These mistakes are about some design & User Experience decisions. Take this scenario as an example.

We finish the website for our client. We have analyzed & finished everything from the fonts to user experience. Our client liked the design a lot, and he was very happy with his website.
He started to show his website to his friends, and family.
All of them agreed that the website is very good, but one of his friends told him that he didn’t like the menu (didn’t explain why, just he didn’t like it) and some other elements and told him that they look very simple and not attractive (by not attractive he means don’t have shadows, don’t animate, not 3rd ……). Our client called us and asked us to make some modifications on the menu, and he explained the reason that one of his friends didn’t like it.

We tried to explain to him some basics about user experience and the best navigation solution for both users & search engines (search engines give a lot of importance on site structure & navigation) and how too much animated elements will distract the users. but he though that we don’t want to make these edits. So we did his requested edits, and guess what? His conversion rate went from 20-30% orders per day to 5-10 orders per day.

Why his conversion rate was hurt so badly?

This client have a lot of products, he have about 50 category, and 15 brands. First he wanted to put all these categories & brands in the main menu (along with home, about us, contact us, our policy, why us, best deals, news!!!!!!). We told him that this is very wrong, users don’t like complex menu trees, and don’t like a lot of moving elements as this distracts them a lot.

The simplicity has become very important these days to deliver your messages clearly. There are a lot of information that our mind must deal with, so we don’t like complex data flow as this makes us tired, and we simply reject these messages.