Bad UX is any part of a website that makes a simple task harder than it needs to be, like buying a pair of shoes or finding a phone number.
Picture a shopper in Columbus. fills her cart with $62 worth of running gear and heads to checkout. She types her address, and the total jumps to $76 with shipping and sales tax she never saw coming. She closes the tab and buys the same gear somewhere else.
Nobody on that store’s team will ever hear about it. That’s what makes a poor user experience so expensive: most of it is invisible unless you go looking. UX Audit Tool is one free way to start looking. The 12 examples below are another.
What Makes UX “Bad”?
Most bad UX examples fall into one of four buckets. The site confuses people, slows them down, tricks them, or shuts them out.
Some of it is lazy design. Some of it is deliberate, like a cancel button hidden three menus deep. Either way, customers notice, and they don’t usually complain. They just leave.
You can also refer to our guide on website UX audit for US businesses.
Bad UX Examples at Checkout and in Forms
1. Surprise Costs at the Last Step
The Columbus shopper above is the classic case. Shipping and sales tax are a normal part of buying online. Finding out about them only on the final screen is what feels like a bait-and-switch.
The fix: Show shipping estimates and any available tax estimate in the cart. Once the shopper enters a ZIP code or delivery address, update the total clearly before they commit to payment. If you offer free shipping over a certain amount, say so on the cart page.
2. Forcing an Account Before Purchase
“Create an account to continue” is a lot to ask of someone who just wants one pair of socks. Password rules, email verification, a CAPTCHA, and a marketing opt-in all stand between them and the “Pay” button.
The fix: Offer guest checkout. Then invite them to save their details on the confirmation page, once the order is done.
3. Forms That Fight US Formats
These are small UX design mistakes with big effects:
- A ZIP code field that strips the leading zero, so a customer in Boston (02108) gets told their ZIP is invalid.
- A phone field that rejects dashes, spaces, or parentheses.
- A state dropdown with 50-plus options and no way to type “Tex” and jump to Texas.
- A country list that starts at Afghanistan when almost every customer is in the United States.
The fix: Accept every common format and clean it up behind the scenes. Turn on browser autofill, so most people never have to type their address at all.
Interruptions and Dark Patterns
4. Popups the Second the Page Loads
A newsletter popup and a cookie banner, both fighting for the same phone screen before the visitor has read a single line. The close button is a tiny “x” in the corner. Stacked like that, they can lose a visitor within seconds.
The fix: Delay signup popups until someone has scrolled or spent some time on the page. Show one at a time. Make the close button big enough for a thumb.
5. Subscriptions That Are Hard to Cancel
Signing up takes one click. Canceling means a chat with a retention agent and three “Are you sure?” screens. That gap is exactly what regulators look at.
In 2023, the FTC sued Amazon, alleging it enrolled people in Prime without clear consent and made canceling difficult. In September 2025, Amazon agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement resolving those allegations. If a company as large as Amazon can face a multibillion-dollar settlement over subscription enrollment and cancellation practices, smaller businesses shouldn’t treat those design choices as harmless.
The fix: Make canceling as easy as signing up. If you want to make a retention offer, make it once.
6. Confirmshaming
You’ve seen these. “No thanks, I don’t like saving money.” “I’ll pay full price.” The decline button is written to make people feel silly for clicking it.
It might nudge a few signups, but it also tells visitors you’re willing to guilt them. That’s a bad trade.
The fix: Write both options in neutral language. “Yes, send me deals” and “No thanks” work fine.
The FTC’s staff report Bringing Dark Patterns to Light covers these tactics in more detail and is worth a read for anyone running a subscription or ecommerce site.
Bad Website Design That Hides What People Need
7. Menu Labels Nobody Understands
“Solutions.” “Ecosystem.” “Explore.” “Discover.” Clever labels might look good in a design review, but a visitor scanning for “Pricing” or “Services” won’t find them.
Of all the common UX mistakes, it’s one of the cheapest to fix.
The fix: Use the words your customers use. If people search your site for “prices,” your menu should probably say “Pricing.”
8. Search That Hits a Dead End
Someone types “wireles headphones,” gets “0 results found,” and that’s the end of the road. No suggestions and no “Did you mean?” prompt. Just a blank page.
The fix: Handle common typos and suggest close matches. If there truly are zero results, show categories or best sellers instead of an empty screen.
9. A Hidden Phone Number or Address
For a local US business, this one hurts. A customer wants to call a plumber or check a restaurant’s address, and the only contact option is a form buried at the bottom of the About page.
It’s an especially painful kind of bad website design, because the visitor was ready to act.
The fix: Put a click-to-call number and your address in the header or footer of every page. Link the address to Google Maps or Apple Maps.
Errors, Accessibility and Speed
10. Text People Can’t Read
Light gray text on a white background might look sleek on a designer’s 27-inch monitor. On a phone in the sun, it disappears. For people with low vision, it’s unusable. That’s bad website design dressed up as minimalism.
There’s a legal side too. ADA website accessibility complaints have become a real risk for US businesses, and the Department of Justice has published guidance on web accessibility under the ADA.
The fix: Keep normal text at a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, the AA level in WCAG. Separately, many designers treat 16 pixels as a sensible minimum for body text. It’s a readability guideline, since WCAG doesn’t set a minimum font size.
Contrast is only one piece of accessibility. Keyboard access, visible focus states, form labels, and accessible error messages matter just as much.
11. Error Messages That Explain Nothing
“Something went wrong. Please try again.” Try what? Again how?
Vague errors leave people guessing, and a lot of them won’t guess twice.
The fix: Say what failed and how to fix it, right next to the field. “Your card’s expiration date is in the past” gives the customer something to do.
12. Pages That Jump While Loading
You go to tap “Add to cart,” an image loads above it, the page shifts, and you’ve just tapped an ad. It’s one of the most irritating bad UX moments on mobile.
The fix: Reserve space for images and ads so the layout stays put. Google measures this as Cumulative Layout Shift, part of its Core Web Vitals.
Quick Self-Check: Is Your Site Making These Common UX Mistakes?
Run through this UX audit checklist on your own site, ideally on a phone:
- Can a shopper see an estimated total before the last checkout step?
- Can someone buy without creating an account?
- Does your form accept a ZIP code that starts with zero?
- Do popups wait before appearing, and can they be closed with a thumb?
- Is canceling a subscription as easy as signing up?
- Are opt-out and decline buttons written in neutral language?
- Would a first-time visitor understand every menu label?
- Does a misspelled search still return something useful?
- Is your phone number one tap away on every page?
- Is your body text easy to read in bright light?
- Do error messages explain what went wrong and how to fix it?
- Does the page stay stable while images and other elements load?
If you answered “no” to two or more, you’ve found your starting point. For a faster read on the whole site, you can run a free website UX audit and see where the problems are. For the flip side, our guide to UX design principles walks through what good looks like.
Conclusion
You don’t need to fix all 12 at once. Pick the three bad UX examples that sound most like your site, fix them this month, and check your numbers again in a few weeks.
Many of these fixes are small enough to test without committing to a full redesign. Some can ship next week.
Not sure where to start fixing your layout? Reach out through our Contact Us page to request a quick review, and our team will help you spot the friction points costing you sales.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does bad UX mean?
It’s friction that gets between people and what they came to do on a website or app. That might be confusing navigation or a design that tricks people into choices they didn’t mean to make.
How can I tell if my website has bad UX?
Watch a few real people try to complete one task, like buying a product or booking a call. Where they hesitate or give up is where your poor user experience lives. Your analytics will show drop-off points too.
Are dark patterns illegal in the US?
Some dark patterns can violate US consumer protection laws, depending on how they’re used. Recent FTC dark patterns cases have targeted deceptive subscription enrollment and difficult cancellation flows, including the Amazon Prime case above. State automatic renewal laws, such as California’s, may add further requirements. Review the laws that apply to your products and customers, ideally with a lawyer.
How often should a business check its website for UX problems?
After a redesign or a new checkout launch. Between those, a quick check every few months catches the UX design mistakes that creep in as pages get added and edited.
