Writing About 7 Web Design Stereotypes that Make Websites Be Worse

It does not matter how cool you are as a designer, how much experience you have and how much you earn. What matters is the fact that you are ready to learn new things every day to differ trends from design stereotypes.

As PaperCheap experts made numerous homework tasks for web design students, they know this world to be full of myths and stereotypes which still influence the quality of most design solutions. It is time to bust them all.

1. The Main Page Is the Most Important

Things used to be like that long ago. Nowadays, things changed, and the web-surfing principles to find interesting contents changed as well. Just ask yourself: how frequently had you got to a main page of websites during the last week? Let us guess: you can’t remember, or you’ve done it so many times that you can count them with your single hand fingers.

Everything is simple here: there are two ways for the user to get to the website. The first way is a link to a good/content in social media networks. The second way is the link in Google results leading to a certain request about the same good/content. As a result, nobody gets to a main page of the website nowadays. The magic of the Internet can get you straight to the content you’re interested in.

Still, this does not mean you can forget about the main page completely. It has its goal, too: to demonstrate things that can interest the user. For instance, homepages of resources like BuzzFeed or Darling Magazine show most popular posts. And there are websites not having homepages as we know them at all, like Facebook.

All in all, there is nothing bad in your website having a perfectly functioning homepage. But let’s be honest: comparing with other pages, the main one is not that important.

2. Minimalism Is the Only Way to Reach Design Simplicity

Minimalism is a style, and simplicity is the overall look and functionality of a website. A complicated structure can be expressed through simplicity as well. But here is a thing to memorize: a total minimum of UI elements is not the goal of simplicity.

Minimalistic design approaches are about no many visual (!) elements, while a simple design improves comfort and speed of a website usage.

For example, let’s review UX elements without visuals, just a text. In such cases, the lack of icons and labels makes design be more minimalistic, but can confuse users if they need to interact with the website through printing some kind of data. By adding visuals to such pages, you can make it “heavier” but it becomes easier for the user to interact with it, and the design becomes much more understandable. Remember this as the description of a difference between a simple design, and a minimalistic one.

The main conclusion here: they are not the same.

3. Limits for the Quantity of Navigation Elements

Many people have a wrong perception of the theory about human brains to be able to process 7 to 9 bits of information simultaneously. A theory can’t be named as fake, but it can be real only if to take a short-term memory into account. But the most wondering thing is the fact about this statement to get into a web design craft and to touch navigation menu questions.

Among all other things, they conduct researches on limiting choices which were popularized by Barry Schwartz. In his researches, he describes the process of buying jam. He found out that the user feels it more difficult to choose and to order it when he or she has many variants. Clients bought jams for a higher price if they were offered more choice options. This can touch other products, too, like cars or smartphones. None of research theses has things in common with navigation. Its task is to help the user find out what website can offer him or her to get. Navigation can consist of numerous elements. The point is, it should help clients find what they look for really quickly.

And at the same time, good navigation structures do not hide many pages but groups them by categories correctly.

4. Any Action on the Website Should Be Made with No More than Three Clicks

There is a similar rule for apps: everything should be made in two clicks for them.

Some researches on the website surfing comfort prove directly the opposite. Users don’t even care about how many mouse clicks it took them to send a lot with sneakers to an online-shop basket. Fist of all, they are interested in the information they look for or in the process of a logical finish of a task performed on a website.

Plus to this, if the client thinks that he or she will not find what is looked for, there is a possibility for them to refuse clicking at all. And it does not matter that they’d receive the desired content after this simple action was done.

5. Smartphone Users Are Distracted and Always on the Move

That’s not true.

Google research revealed most smartphones to be used at home (60%). Other data found by InsightsNow says that 68% of pages opened with smartphones were opened by users at home. And yes, the last research excluded text messages, calls and emails from statistics.

To say about the distraction of mobile users: their live is the distracting factor itself. A TV-set working as a background, family members, jobs even: this all distracts just the same way as if you were scrolling the Facebook page with a PC.

6. If There Is a Good Usability, Design Does Not Matter

Don Norman once devoted a whole book to explain humans that emotions and design go close to each other. Usability is great to start with, but it is not enough to finish. Design creates the emotional connection between a website and a user. This contact can suit very much if the point is to sell something.

There are many researches proving that goods served better in terms of design are better sold. Sellers shouldn’t save funds on designs. Emotions mean people, and usability means technologies. Websites are developed for people, not for robots, aren’t they?

7. Users Always Tell What They Want

The question of users’ feedback is very important. But it is equally important not to perceive their comments literally. People are rare to be able to explain reasons of their decisions and deeds. And a precise perception of all remarks with a careful correction according to them can cause problems, because people speak more about solutions and not reasons for problems. For instance, the user said that your website needs a larger font size. Of course, he or she won’t tell you why. And the reason can be hidden in your client’s vision problems.

The same thing works for user comments. Yes, it is important to listen to them. But first, you need to get to the point of the problem. In fact, there are many more myths about web design, but these seven seemed to be the most widespread for us. We really hope your design to become better after busting them in this article

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