Five obstacles we find on almost every site

After enough audits, patterns appear. These five turn up on sites of every size, in every market and every language we work in. None of them is exotic and none of them requires rebuilding anything.

1. A button named after the mechanism, not the outcome

Validate. Submit. Confirm. Every one of these describes what the software does. None describes what the visitor gets. Testers pause on these buttons and say the same thing: what happens if I click it, and can I get back?

Name the button after the result. Go to payment. Send my request. The hesitation disappears.

2. An error message that blames without explaining

Invalid entry. Which entry, and invalid how? A visitor who cannot see what is wrong will try the same thing again, then leave.

The fix is to say what was expected. The postcode should have six characters costs nothing and ends the loop.

3. A required field with no stated reason

Any field the visitor did not expect creates suspicion, and suspicion at checkout is expensive. If you need a phone number for the courier, write that next to the field. One line of text converts an intrusion into a service.

4. A price that is not final until the last screen

Covered at length elsewhere, and still the single most common cause of an abandoned basket. Whatever the true total is, the visitor should meet it before they invest ten minutes in reaching it.

5. A mobile keyboard covering the field being typed in

This one is invisible from a desk. On a phone, the on screen keyboard occupies half the display, and on some layouts the field it opened for ends up behind it. The visitor types blind, cannot see the error message that appears above, and gives up.

It is a rendering problem, not a design one, and it is found in ten seconds by anyone actually holding a phone.

The point of the list

Not one of these needs a new visual identity, a new agency or a new platform. They need somebody to notice them, which is harder than it sounds when you built the site yourself and know where everything is.

That is the whole value of a stranger. They do not know, so they show you what not knowing costs.