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10 Ways to Instantly Repel Customers From Your Site

Even today, there are “things” that designers and developers think are cool, often brought on by pressure from above, which end up on sites we use daily. Here is my current top 10, which can change weekly!

  1. Sign Me Up Overlays - It is like entering a store and having an assistant pester you to sign up to a store card, and they will deny access to the store until you decide whether to sign up or not.
  2. Social Media Widgets - Social media likes, counters, clickers, widgets… they take an absolute AGE to load, it can add up to 20 seconds to a page load time. I often find myself clicking away from the page, I simply do not have the time or patience.
  3. Enter Here Screens - Why do we have these? to what end do these screens serve? I cannot even fathom why anyone would want a screen which makes a user have to click again to enter. I wish they would just fade away, but alas no, I do still discover them.
  4. Horizontal Scrolling Content - They seem to be a bit of a trend, content which you have to scroll to the right to read. Why? It isn’t creative, unique and will not make you “stand out”. They are difficult to navigate and not always obvious. Often I have missed content where I was meant to scroll right to find.
  5. Cookie Acceptance Widgets - We know they are necessary, but why don’t they disappear when clicked, or stay hidden on subsequent visits when set to “Accepted”.
  6. Tooltips on “Accidental” Mouseover - When you mouseover a link, an annoying popup appears holding information about the site it links to, or a definition of the word. If I want to know what the word means, or what the site is about, i will click!
  7. Overly Complicated Passwords - Strong passwords are important, what I don’t like is having to set a ridiculously strong password for a site which doesn’t and never will hold any personal or sensitive data. Set a minimum strength level, but to have it 25 characters long with an uppercase, lowercase, symbol and numbers. OTT!
  8. Forms Which do not Remember Your Entered Information on Error or Timeout - It may not be obvious which fields are mandatory, or what the correct format for entering dates is, but the form should display the entered data again for correction with a clear message of why the form encountered an error.
  9. Auto Play Videos and Audio - Please, let ME decide if i want it to play!
  10. Deceptive Content Architecture - It’s an oldie, but when you click on a link expecting to see a page of content, only to be presented with another set of links to click-through again.
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