The omnipresence of well-designed consumer applications has increased the expectations of enterprise product users. They now expect consumer-grade UX in their business applications. Many SaaS product companies have identified this trend and have started responding, making it a unique selling point (USP) for SaaS platforms operating in a competitive marketplace.
When using an enterprise SaaS application, a few common frustrations that users experience include time-consuming processes, difficulty in finding information, and concerns about making mistakes. Effective SaaS UI design can mitigate these frustrations, resulting in improved productivity, enhanced user experience, and reduced churn rates.
Enterprise design for SaaS products is about having a clear understanding of users' requirements, designing the SaaS interface based on their feedback, and ensuring it is scalable for future changes.
As a product design agency, we often encounter good enterprise products that struggle to reach their true potential due to their inability to provide a rich, consumer-grade UX.
Before we move on to understanding our SaaS product design approach, let us share our insights on the most common design problems faced by SaaS products.
How this SaaS UX/UI guide could help you
In SaaS products, common problems like a complex UI, lack of user onboarding, lower conversion rates, ineffective data visualisation, and collaboration difficulties can be alleviated through UX/UI design.
Optimise SaaS landing pages for more signups
Optimise the conversion rate of signups from your SaaS landing page by implementing effective strategies to attract and engage visitors. Through data analysis and user behaviour insights, you can identify areas for improvement and implement persuasive techniques to encourage more signups.
Increase the paid subscription from the free trials
Drive conversion and boost paid subscriptions by maximising the transition from free trials to premium memberships. A comprehensive approach focuses on optimising the user journey and implementing effective strategies to increase the conversion rate. Through data-driven analysis, you can identify key pain points and implement targeted improvements to enhance the value proposition of your offerings. (Read more: 8 tips on increasing subscriptions of your SaaS products)
Enhance product usability and accessibility
SaaS product managers are often required to spend a lot of their energy towards continuously optimising for the user acquisition. More often than always, the sales team and account managers cause disruption to the product roadmap. This often leads to lower attention towards usability of the product. And sales and support led user feedback results in adding new features to solve usability problems. A dynamic and practical integration of good UX practices could progressively instil design thinking across the teams and drive great results.
Rapidly validate SaaS concepts with MVPs
If you quickly develop a minimum viable product (MVP) that showcases the core functionality of the platform, it will allow you to gather feedback from early users, iterate on the product, and validate the concept. By leveraging expertise and advanced technologies, complexities are eliminated to deliver a robust and scalable SaaS product that aligns with unique requirements.
Common Enterprise Design UX Problems
As a UX/UI design agency specialising in SaaS product design, Tcules partners with dozens of enterprise clients annually, driving their key performance indicators (KPIs) and fostering their success. Here are some of the most common design problems we come across:
Prioritising features over experience
When you add a myriad of features to your enterprise software without researching your user’s needs and usage patterns, it leads to a clunky application. This app is not only hard to maintain but also has a bad user experience. And what follows next is users dropping off because the features you added have spoiled their workflow.
Cluttered UI
Continuing further on the point above, adding new features also adds the need to showcase them. And in this process of showcasing features and the data affiliated with them, the UI of the app is compromised too. So now you have a SaaS product with a bad UX, a compromised UI and features with no users.
Non-responsive products
Users are surrounded by digital devices that function similarly. Yet, SaaS companies fail to capitalise on this opportunity. They fail to design and develop products that are responsive – mobile, tablet friendly. This inconveniences users because it keeps them from working as per their preferences.
Lack of personalisation
Think of it like this, if you had to wear the same set of clothes every single day without any variation or options, life might become less colourful & a bit boring. Similarly, a personalised user experience in the form of a contextual dashboard & information will not only add colour to a user’s workflow but also reduce the overall frustration they might face otherwise.
SaaS UX Design framework
Over the course of designing products for over 50 clients, we use a customised SaaS UX framework to audit and design enterprise products. This SaaS UX framework is based on our years of experience in SaaS product design across different scales and industries. This framework allows you to evaluate your product on various parameters that are essential to the success of SaaS software.
Onboard
Signup
The sign up process experience of your enterprise SaaS applications should be short and to the point. This helps get users quickly in the door and you can always collect more information as and when needed in the future.
Product onboarding
The product onboarding process should focus on educating users about the workflow of the application, its features, its different modules, and its utility. This leaves a good first impression and reduces user churn rate owing to lesser confusion. Popular SaaS apps like Slack, Grammarly, Trello etc. are great examples of how the product onboarding process should be.
Hints, states, helpers
One way of encouraging users to explore the app and use the features it has to offer is to constantly provide users hints and tips through tooltips, microcopy etc. Furthermore, providing easy access to “Help and Support” from any point in the product also helps instil confidence.
Operate
Data visualisation
Enterprise SaaS applications are geared towards increasing employee efficiency. Thus, it is important that it be able to share easily readable insights through tables, graphs and charts. We conduct UX activities like red route analysis, user research, user journey mapping and more to understand user’s usage patterns. Then, provide dynamic dashboards and reports as per user needs.
Search
A powerful search and a simple IA encourage users to explore your product. We believe offering two search features in an application further enhances efficiency. One search at a universal level and one search at a local/function level. This way, users can choose what search to rely on thus limiting their time spent.
Inform
Notifications and reminders
Working in an organisation requires frequent collaboration between users. Thus, to ensure smooth collaboration and continuity in work, features like notifications, reminders are keys. They help meet task deadlines and ensure no work is delayed due to dependency.
History and Activities
When working with multiple people on a project/document, it helps to be able to track the history of progress. So that in case users want to jump to a previously saved point or want to track how the endpoint was achieved, our designed history tracking feature can help.
Control
Let’s say if a user doesn’t want the product to access their camera or microphone, they can disable the permissions, keeping their interaction private & safe. They can set their own reminders & personalise notifications as per their preference.
Grow
The users of a SaaS product are not always the decision-makers, and yet they could be key supporters of business growth. This is because they are the first-hand benefactors of it.
Given the steps we follow for designing SaaS products, we are able to provide users with a delightful experience. This translates to users becoming promoters of the product. And if the users are happy with the product, it reflects on the overall growth of the business.
Conclusion
There has been an increasing demand for well-designed enterprise SaaS products. And a consumer-grade UX can help you optimise your enterprise SaaS product as per the user’s preferences.
If you own a SaaS product or are planning to build one, we’ve mentioned a few good points to get you started with optimising the UX.
And if you are looking for an expert partner to redesign your SaaS product, or have an idea that you want to prototype, be sure to fill out the form below and we’d love to hear from you.
We can turn the design of your SaaS product into a USP.
