So SaaS design is unforgiving? Let me expand on why I think this is the case. Building software (I think it's fair to say) is the easy part. It’s finding customers who value your software enough to pay for it, that many struggle with. And sometimes without realising it we make things harder by not delivering the experience our customer expects.
Being a product builder myself (minus the dev skills), I know how tough it is to design and build software that customers love and pay for month after month. I also know that virtually no product is amazing straight away. Products are built and improved upon over time.
That's why this blog exists. I want to help you make incremental improvements to your SaaS, so you can see your business grow and reap the fruits of your labour. After all, no one likes to work for free.
I won’t try to teach you UX principles from scratch, but rather how to make improvements to your software as it stands and why you would want to.
We’ll look at various stages of your customer’s journey. From the initial signup experience to the ‘WOW’ moment and beyond. In case you're not familiar with "The WOW Moment", it's when everything falls into place for your customer. The lightbulb moment that pushes them from trial user to paid customer. This moment is different for each SaaS and can be different for each customer. But by talking to customers and pulling out data you’ll learn what your WOW moment(s) are. If you don't have customers or data, you can work off assumptions… But I don’t want us to get ahead of ourselves.
More often than not the average SaaS customer can’t pinpoint why they dislike a piece of software (or why they like it), but I’ll let you in on a secret... 99 times out of 100, it’s due to a poor user experience. I know, what a shocker! Unfortunately, UX is both the silent hero and the villain when it comes to SaaS design.
So why make the effort to give your customers the best experience possible if they’re not going to notice? Because we’re not designing software for a pat on the back, we’re designing software to build a business, a future even. Remember, great user experience is the silent hero.
Cheers
Nathan
