Study: Bad Web Design Is Killing Us With Stress
It's a devil's bargain to be a tech tester. Sure, you get to see the latest and greatest things, but you are also being digitally poked and prodded to measure everything. It gets stressful sometimes. This new study by Cyber Duck UX Agency of the UK went further with digital torture to measure stress levels.
Participants were placed in front of a website designed (by Cyber Duck) to be filled with some of the worst user experience (UX) elements we encounter online. Images not loading, weird animations, and buttons that don't work were several of the 10 categories.
Each type of web torture had 110 participants, so 1,100 people aged 20 to 58 total were part of the study altogether. Researchers measured each person's systolic blood pressure (the amount of pressure in arteries during heart contraction) as the participant used one of three of the custom-built sites. Normal blood pressure measures at 90 to 120, elevated is 121 to 129, and hypertensive stage one is 130 to 139. After that, you're in the high BP category; higher than 180, you're in crisis. No participant had any known health conditions; they also didn't have any background in IT or web UX.
The results speak for themselves and indicate exactly what you should not do in designing a website. The chart above shows the offenders, with the items on the left being the worst. Slow-loading pages (those taking 8.8 to 10.5 seconds to fully load) caused a 21% spike in blood pressure, while multiple pop-ups and auto-play music were almost as bad, causing a 20% increase each. Items such as broken pages and non-clickable buttons were just middling annoyances in comparison.
Other problems include multiple image sliders (so maybe slideshow carousels aren't that bad?) which caused
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