Is your UI/UX strategy built to last? 5 Signs you're headed for trouble

A good UI/UX strategy means more people using your software and having a good user experience. Standing out among your competition. Low churn rate. Positive reviews and word of mouth. But is it truly that simple?

Your UI/UX strategy brings together your business goals and user needs in order to improve your software’s user experience. Are you personalizing it? Offering shortcuts? Fixing edge case issues? Any of these actions can greatly improve the way customers feel about your app.

But how do you know if your UI/UX strategy is done well? Here’s the thing - you don’t need to wait for major negative reviews and bad PR to find the answer to that. Some UI/UX issues show up discreetly and you have to pay attention and fix them as they come up.

So in this article, we’re going to talk about major signs your UI/UX strategy isn’t so strategic after all. And suggestions on how to fix these issues & improve the state of your app.

What’s a UI/UX strategy and why does it matter?

Let’s start from the beginning. Through a UI/UX strategy, you’re planning out your app’s design process in such a way that you align with both business and user needs. The key is finding a balance between what can get you more profits, good PR and a good stance within your industry, and what users need, want, and keep asking for.

A UI/UX strategy is like a roadmap for your app’s design: you’re mapping out goals & objectives, specific areas you want to improve, financial, human and technical resources you need, and specific tasks you’re going to work on.

Image source: Sherif Amin

Here are a few things to consider when creating your UI/UX strategy:

• The current state of your UI/UX. Is your software outdated-looking? Do users have trouble finding key functionality? How do users generally feel about your app? Is it difficult to use? Do you get customer complaints and if so, what do they say? Take time to evaluate the state of your app’s UI/UX before creating a strategy.
• What you want to achieve through your UI/UX strategy. Once you know what you’re not doing so well, you gotta decide what you want to achieve - what goals do you want to fulfill using your UI/UX strategy? Increasing profits? Lowering churn rates? Keeping users happy?
• Your time, financial and human resources. Before jumping into big UI/UX tasks, consider how long it’ll take, whether or not you can afford it, and if your team can handle the work or if you need to hire someone else. You should also consider if the changes you’re trying to make will take so long that users won’t need them anymore, once you’re done.
• How to measure the success of your new UI/UX strategy. You might need to install new analytics plugins, hold focus groups or send surveys in order to evaluate whether or not your strategy actually works. Focus groups, reviewing customer feedback and surveys before and after you implement UI/UX changes can help you see, in a clearer way, if they worked or not.

With a UI/UX strategy, your team gets a clear picture of what they need to do in order to offer a good user experience, what pain points they need to focus on, what your UI/UX priorities are, and how to keep up with user needs over time.

In other words, you’re helping your business by helping your users.

Signs your UI/UX strategy is headed for trouble

It’s not hard to tell you how to create your own UI/UX strategy. But unless we do it ourselves, we can’t evaluate if you’re doing it right or not. And chances are, you can’t evaluate it either - but you can probably tell that something is wrong.

So here are a series of specific signs that your UI/UX strategy isn’t working.

Sign 1: low engagement and high bounce rates

One of the biggest tell-tale signs of a failing UI/UX strategy is determined by your app analytics. These specific, real numbers will show you how many viewers you get, what they click on, what gets clicked on more and what less, if users open one page and then leave, and if they don’t interact with key app features. For instance, they may look at your product catalog, but never place an order.

Low engagement

When your app engagement is low, it means users don’t actually conduct any actions or activities within your app. This can mean key features might be hidden, you might be taking users through too many steps, you might show too many ads or pop ups, too many possibilities with no categorizing or filtering, or maybe it’s just slow and clunky.

Low engagement doesn’t mean users are lazy: it means your app doesn’t motivate them to do anything. It doesn’t serve its purpose. It either doesn’t fulfill your users’ actual needs or it tries but fails.

High bounce rates

A bounce rate shows how many people open one page within your app and quickly leave thereafter. When your bounce rate is high, it means that among the people who open pages within your app, very few actually conduct any actions. Veni, vidi, arrivederci. 

High bounce rates mean less conversions. If people close your website or app soon after opening it, they’re clearly not taking any actions. You’re not convincing enough, your app might not be pleasing to the eye, or it’s too clunky and hard to use.

So how do you fix this? Here are some tips on how to handle low engagement and high bounce rates:

• Improve your page speed and overall app performance. Oftentimes, people click out of a website if it’s too slow or clunky.
• Review & improve your content. Help users stick around by including visual elements on text-reliant pages, provide suggestions on similar content they might be interested in, open small pop ups containing offers or news, or add the possibility for users to interact with your content.
• Make your app’s value proposition clearer. Users can’t always tell right away what services you provide, unless you make it very clear. Improve your slogans, add more copy or pay more attention to your branding as a business. Eventually, use social media to bring awareness to what your app does.
• Improve your services. If all fails, you might want to take a look within and evaluate whether or not you actually provide good quality services. Users might be leaving due to low reviews or high prices.

Sign 2: you’re getting negative feedback

This one is clear as day. Users might seem unhappy, analytics might show bad numbers, or sales might be low. But when users take time to leave negative reviews, post their complaints to social media, or complain to customer service, you know for sure they’re unhappy.

In the fast-paced environment we currently live in, when people take the time to talk down about a product or service, it means they truly had a terrible experience.

You can get feedback on app stores, social media - YouTube videos, Tik Toks or Reels for faster-paced reviews, or text-based social media apps such as X or Reddit for more detailed reviews - customer service, comment sections on your app (if you have any), in the press or on blogs.

All of these are vital to your business and its well being. Without public opinion, unless you do your own research, it’s hard to get real, subjective feedback on your software. If you ask users directly, they might feel pressured to sugar-coat or downplay issues, just so they don’t upset you.

But negative reviews don’t have to be a bad thing. They can help you:

• Find specific pain points that bother users
• Get raw, honest opinions from real users
• Get good PR by replying to negative comments politely, saying you’ll fix the issue and asking for more details, or for the user to contact your customer service.
• Get publicity. Negative or not, your company’s name appearing on social media is always good publicity. People will try your app just to see if they face the same issues the reviews talk about.

But the biggest, most important advantage to getting negative reviews is that it saves you time and money. Normally, you’d need to create, distribute and analyze customer surveys, or hold focus groups, to actually gauge user opinion. Through reviews, even negative, you can find out what to fix about your app much faster.

How can you use negative feedback to improve your software?

• The easiest and clearest thing to do is fixing the exact issues mentioned in the feedback you get. Those issues could be bugs, confusing flows, lack of instructions, you name it.
• Use it as user research in order to plan for UI/UX improvements. Reviews can give you ideas for new features and enhancements.
• Build the image of a business who listens to customer feedback and cares about their opinions.

Sign 3: you need to provide detailed tutorials for users to get around your software

Very unique, specialized, industry-specific software can be truly incredible. You can innovate, create apps no one else even thought of, disrupt industries and fulfill needs the general public doesn’t even know exist.

But the biggest problem with such complex software is making it easy to use. An even bigger issue is when you’re creating such an app as a seasoned industry professional. As much as it can help you come up with functionality, use cases, user personas and edge cases, you’re also viewing it through your own, experienced eyes.

But new users who have never seen your app before don’t view it the same. For them, you’re a solution to a problem they never thought they’d fix, but then they hit a wall: they can barely even use your software.

Here’s how to tell if your software is too difficult to use:

• You get customer service requests, on the regular, about basic app features.
• Users begin key processes in your app but abandon it at a certain point. 
• You, yourself, are aware that it’s so complex you need to provide detailed tutorials every step of the way. Even more if you’re guiding users through a process.
• If you provide video tutorials and it’s full of comments asking more questions.
• You find entire Reddit or Quora posts from users trying to figure out how to use your software.
• Video tutorials by third parties get a lot of views while your own content doesn’t. In other words, you don’t provide enough details and users feel the need to create their own content.
• Your Help pages get more clicks than key features of your app.

So why is this an issue? Isn’t it useful to provide tutorials for your software? Well yes, it is. But it becomes a problem when users have to rely on tutorials and instructions to get simple things done in your app. Your user flows should actually be intuitive, you should guide users and help them fulfill their needs - and those needs shouldn’t be having tutorials.

Sign 4: your app was designed many, many years ago

Software becomes outdated as years go by, it’s a given. Trends change, user needs change, and the industry is in a constant state of evolution.

If you’re working on an older piece of software, chances are it’s not so up to date. And not just in terms of UX, but most obviously in terms of UI. Your designers likely followed that time’s trends (and we don’t blame them) but as we all know, trends don’t last so long. 

A big sign your UI/UX strategy is headed for trouble is that it’s visibly out of date. Too many gradients, 3D effects, lots of different colors in a color-block style, overdone colorful shadows, transitions, small padding on all items, you name it. A lot of things make it clear a UI was designed many years before.

The issue with being out of date is you’re not as competitive. In one day, your users might access common social media apps, delivery apps, or the Google Suite, and then they’d access your older-looking software. The difference will feel striking, and it could leave them wishing your app looked better.

Here’s what you can do:

• Redesign your entire software. Saw this one coming - is it broken? Fix it. Nothing else can fix an outdated UI better than a proper redesign. To avoid the issue that got you in this place, don’t stick to popular trends that might go out of style in a year. A visual refresh that takes your app from looking like Windows XP to looking like Windows 11 should be good enough.
• Improve your current UI. Redesigns are tough and expensive. An alternative is making small, yet important changes that improve your app’s UI. Update your color scheme (you don’t need so many), remove shadows or borders that look too heavy, improve padding to make the UI more breathable, you name it.
• Get feedback. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You might be unhappy with the way your software looks, but what if your users actually really like it? Hold focus groups or do A/B testing to find out how users feel about the look of your app.

The UI isn’t the only issue here. When working with old, legacy software, bugs slip in throughout the years and never get fixed. Such issues hinder usability and can ruin your UX. There’s no point in paying for a pretty UI if none of it works.

When looking to improve the UI/UX of an older app, make sure you don’t just slap a pretty new face on top of a feebly supported app. It’s like building your house out of wood in the middle of Tornado Alley.

A good UI/UX strategy for old software includes both visual improvements as well as user flow upgrades and bug fixes. This way, you’re giving users a much better experience and maybe even fixing issues they’ve been complaining about for years.

Sign 5: you built your app with minimal user input

Unless you’re building software for robots, you need to study potential users - and their needs - in the early stages of building your app. They’re the ones who will actually use it, and just putting together a series of features doesn’t guarantee good results.

When in a hurry to release your software, or when you’re on a lower budget, you might feel the need to skip user research and go off of your own knowledge. Or, you might want your development team to predict user needs & wants on their own.

From a business perspective, in the short term, that seems like a good approach. You’re delivering faster & with lower costs. But the drawbacks show up when you do finally release your app.

Here are the risks of building software with little to no user research:

• No one will find a use for your app. Through user research, you can find out if your software fixes issues that do actually exist. If you fix an issue your team is sure about, but you haven’t confirmed there’s a group of people facing said issue, you risk making an app that no one needs.
• Lack of direction for user flows. It’s hard to do UI/UX when you don’t know the U part well enough. You might end up making user flows that only make sense to you, as the product owner.
• Unhappy customers. A good software product accounts for user needs and thus, you’re likely to have unhappy customers if you don’t account for their real, pressing needs.
• Unclear functionality & app scope. It’s hard to create a detailed app scope when you don’t truly understand what you’re building and why.

Not doing proper user research, especially for B2C apps, can greatly affect the way your app is received upon release. Your business-driven thinking will be obvious and might push customers away, and towards competitors who seem to care more.

User research is also crucial in terms of B2B apps:

• Internal software: Talk to your employees and really listen to their opinions. It’s hard to build software for your own team when you don’t actually ask them what they need.
• Software for other businesses (SaaS): In the case of SaaS products, your user base is still made out of people. Compared to more general “customers”, SaaS users are employees who will use your software at work. They still have needs, and they’re just as important.

And most of all, without user research, it’s hard to build a lasting UI/UX strategy. You don’t know your users well enough to figure out how their needs will evolve, and your app might go out of date sooner than you’d expect.

The takeaway? A good UI/UX strategy can help elevate your business and bring you closer to your key audience. It can help boost conversions, lower churn rates and keep users around for years. But not paying attention to your users, what they like and don’t like, building overly complicated apps and making it obvious you’re just trying to increase profits will only drive people away.

Looking for a good UI/UX strategy for your own software? We build software for a living. Let’s chat and build something great together.

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