What are the most critical user experience problems we all face right now?  I’ve been thinking about this for months and I’m kind of at a loss. Nevertheless, I’ll outline a few things I’ve found.

1. There is a pressing need to consolidate the user experience issues under the social media umbrella. What I mean is that there is a huge cluster of UX problems I see on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and so on. (Are you following me on Twitter?) The controls are not consistent. The interactions are not similar. The widgets are freakish and are far from standard.

2. Similar to the issues above, there are performance issues with social media and web 2.0 sites. They are often slow, broken, and down. The amount of downtime is shocking. Worse, many parts of sites are broken. I’m talking about issues related to “Frankenstein designs” where sites are built on half-baked CMS’s (old blog platforms), RSS feeds, and poorly built widgets. All of these things mean one thing: performance suffers and therefore users suffer.

3. No one has cracked the mobile user experience code. What I mean is that most web sites do not offer up a clean experience to users via mobile devices, most notably iPhones and new SmartPhones. Even with ever-more-powerful web browsers cooked into mobile devices (which are needed since sites are so poorly optimized for mobile viewing), users are being punished. This is almost certainly causing a slow, steady shift of user eyeballs to new sites that are more friendly. And, “more friendly” mostly means simple, clean, dumbed-down designs. There won’t be much sophistication for 1-2 more years, in my opinion.

4. Like the comment above, buying and selling goods and services via mutliple touchpoints is miserable unless done through well-established sites. The undeniable advantage currently goes to PayPal, eBay, Amazon, and other established players. There’s been a paucity of innovation in the personal financial transaction space. In other words, it’s still not easy enough to buy and sell on the internet via the web, phone, or other channel. Yes, users are accustomed to difficult transactions but that doesn’t make them good or effective. It’s a UX problem sitll, no doubt. Social sites and mobile devices are just making this harder and hard.

5. Users are being punished by the lack of control over their identities. This is a grievous and disturbing issue. We’re not being given enough control over our online identities. There’s a lack of visibility to our own data. There are several giant sucking vaccum web sites out there, pulling in user data at a dizzying rate. More and more personal data is captured and stored. And yes, exploited. Privacy and trust continue to be real issues. Reputation management tools are likewise missing. If someone says something nasty about you, what can you do about it? In fact, how do you even know you’ve been hammered? This problem is rarely discussed, but it’s real.

What other user experience problems are you seeing?

~ John