Causes of negative friction in web design

It’s not enough for a website to look great. It must also be well designed to work perfectly on a range of screen sizes and devices, ensuring a positive user experience. This is unfortunately a stumbling block for many companies and businesses, whose website users are greeted with negative friction, and barriers to website browsing. So how can you avoid this? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we build websites specifically tailored to the requirements of companies and businesses across Manchester and the North West, including Blackburn and Chorley. We provide the perfect web design solutions for clients in all areas of business and industry. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you should know about the causes of negative friction in web design.

What is negative friction in web design?

Friction in web design is a term used to describe the different barriers that can slow down your website users, and interrupt the browsing experience. While some friction can be good, such as using a pop-up with a voucher offer for signing up, other points of friction bring no benefits to the website user. These points are known as negative friction, and should be avoided.

What are the causes of negative friction in web design?

Negative friction in web design can be caused by a number of different things, including:

  • Broken links
  • Poor image positioning
  • Poor button positioning

Broken links and negative friction in web design

When using your website, your potential customers and clients expect to navigate between different pages and different points without any interruptions or distractions. But if the web page they expect to land on doesn’t load, or they are greeted with a 404 error message, this stops the browsing experience immediately, and can lead to an increase in bounce rate. Making sure all of your links work, and any changes to page address are updated regularly, is something any company should consider.

Poor image positioning and negative friction in web design

This is a point of friction that can occur more frequently for website users on a mobile device or tablet, as it occurs when the website is resized to be responsive to different screen sizes and resolutions. By not optimizing website images effectively, or using the right tools to allow images to respond to website changes, your images can become too large for the screen, obscuring text and other content. This means that your website users will simply leave your website, as it is unusable. Making sure that your images are displayed effectively on all screen sizes is something you should test regularly, as well as using appropriate compression options, and image display options, for every image on your website.

Poor button positioning and negative friction in web design

Much like the point of friction caused by poor image positioning, poor button positioning often only occurs for mobile users too. This occurs when the button size and position is not optimized effectively, and instead is simply too large, blocking the page, or too small. Either way, the button cannot be interacted with as intended, and your website users will have no choice but to visit the website of a competitor.

For more information or advice, or for high quality, professional web design solutions, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.