Infographic: How To Avoid Designing A Bad Website
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- What is Gamification? Definition, Examples & Framework
- Facebook Timeline Cover Optimization
- 5 Dominant Social Media Marketing Techniques
- Effective Local Marketing Strategies
- Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges & Leaderboards
No one intentionally designs a bad website. A bad website is one that frustrates visitors, buries key information, and fails to convert users into customers or loyal readers.
Rather, a bad website is often the result of a variety of reasons ranging from a lack of understanding of the goal at hand, to what is essential rather than a distraction in a design.
Jeffrey Veen, author of The Art & Science of Web Design, teaches that words and pictures can never be separated — a page only communicates clearly when content and presentation are tied together so fundamentally that they achieve something greater than the sum of their parts.
Just how first time parents consult baby books for tips and advice on raising a newborn, designing a website is not something you just jump into.
It is a process that combines careful planning, an understanding of your target market’s potential interaction and creativity.
To help assist those looking to design a new website, we have spotlighted the following infographic by KISSmetrics which features tips and advice on ways to attract potential customers as well as ways to keep user frustration to a minimum.
⚡ Speed Run Notes
- A “bad” website is not ugly — it is unclear. Users tolerate ugly sites that let them find what they came for. They leave clear sites that hide the path. Clarity beats beauty every time in the data.
- The hierarchy test: if a visitor cannot identify the most important action in 3 seconds, the design has failed. Every decision on a website should serve the primary action. Pages cluttered with competing calls to action produce zero clicks because the user cannot pick a winner.
- Mobile-first is a behavioral constraint disguised as a technical one. Tiny screens force prioritization. Desktop designs indulge clutter. Teams that design for mobile first ship cleaner desktop experiences as a side effect.
- CD8 (Loss Avoidance) is weaponized on bad sites via anxious microcopy. “Don't miss out” and “last chance” feel urgent but repel sophisticated users. Subtle scarcity outperforms loud scarcity. Loud scarcity is a tell that the rest of the site is desperate.
- The deepest lesson: the best websites feel curated, not complete. Curation signals that the designer cared about the visitor's time. Comprehensiveness signals that the designer didn't. The former earns trust; the latter wastes it.