How can you set your workplace software apart? The answer could be in UX/UI design.
Used for everything from CRM to project management and marketing automation, the inherent nature of complex SaaS products creates unique challenges for both designers and end users. Designers face the challenge of balancing diverse, powerful functionalities with simple, intuitive interfaces—a challenge made more difficult by the increasingly high standards set by consumer-grade UX. For the end user, modern competitive business environments make getting up to speed quickly a priority, providing limited time for explicit training.
Overcoming these challenges for designers and users is critical for standing out in the never-ending torrent of new SaaS choices. In this article, we’ll cover six best practices for SaaS product design, focusing on pragmatic tips for creating SaaS products that are both powerful and intuitive.
1. Embrace the way users really learn
We’ve all seen (or been) the end-user who excitedly opens an extremely sophisticated piece of B2B software with a grand outcome in mind. It may have been purchased to increase sales, mine for insights, or just help projects get done. But far too often, the smile of hope quickly fades as the daunting task of learning this new tool sets in. Promised functions might prove more difficult to learn than anticipated, and interfaces and menus might be less intuitive than the colorful UI looked at first glance.
This familiar tale perfectly illustrates Carroll and Rosson’s “paradox of the active user”: most people buy software to get something done, not to learn how it works.
In an inherent contradiction, some level of learning investment is required to attain the command needed to reap the benefits of the tool—but that’s not what most customers do. Much to the dismay of engineers and technical writers, many end users would rather dive right into using products than consult highly structured training manuals. So, what’s the solution to creating training for people who don’t want it?
Successful user experience design increasingly gravitates towards creating workflows that encourage trial-and-error learning within the product environment—not in a dense PDF or user guide. Asana is an excellent example of powerful software that nudges the user into easy, early wins by suggesting templates and allowing for quick toggling between display options (like Gantt charts or Kanban). By simply applying preexisting knowledge about how most software works, one can set up tasks and reminders via tooltips during the first minute of a software trial. Even if this barely scratches the surface of delivering the product’s full potential, it gives users a preview of the desired outcome (in this case, to improve project management and remember tasks, not to learn how to use Asana). No matter how great your product is, understanding that most users want to “learn by doing” will go a long way toward maximizing the success of your SaaS solution.
2. Nudge users toward more efficient methods
The paradox of the active user doesn’t just present challenges for initial adoption. People’s tendency to acquire software through results-oriented thinking often produces mere surface-level command of tools—just enough to get the job done. Often, users gain basic knowledge of using SaaS products but only utilize a fraction of the tool’s capabilities. Given the pressure on most users to deliver timely results, emphasizing efficiency over deep learning is understandable, but it doesn’t have to be the only way.
One solution for helping users advance their knowledge of complex SaaS products is software design that pushes users incrementally toward mastery. The end user’s productivity will increase, and they’ll do so at a pace that avoids frustration and information overload. No matter how pretty we make them, truly powerful tools require practice—and time—to grasp. Anticipating common bottlenecks or areas where users could save time or effort can create particularly helpful spots for context-informed learning cues. In this manner, mastery will occur in a sequential, natural flow, and highly technical aspects of the product will reveal themselves to the end user when they’re ready to assimilate more complex information about it.
3. Ditch rigid workflows and design for flexibility
Powerful SaaS tools must be flexible enough to work for many functions and end users. Rigid, unidirectional workflows are getting more antiquated by the day, and in their place, nonlinear paths are common in SaaS UX design. Having multiple ways to accomplish the same outcome can be liberating for users and increases the likelihood that your product will gel with different learning styles and workflow preferences.
While there may not be a singular starting point, there will be commonly taken routes, and user journeys are a great way to understand high-probability usage pathways. Once these common navigational routes are clear, tooltips and design can guide users toward desired outcomes. Rather than reintroducing rigidity, any guidance you provide should focus on allowing navigational freedom. Particularly for newer users, avoiding rigid, linear workflows is a key ingredient to frustration-free self-directed learning.
4. Limit clutter, not functionality
Any B2B or B2C software that’s sufficiently powerful will contain elements and capabilities that some end users just won’t utilize. This quality is not a negative reflection of the tool but an inherent quality of highly capable and versatile technology. In practice, this problem manifests through visual clutter: menus, toolbars, and functionality that simply add visual information without usefulness (at least for some users who won’t be using all of it).
Staged and progressive disclosure are two techniques that can solve the problem of clutter by revealing functions to end users at appropriate times or levels of mastery. Staged disclosure can break highly linear processes up into logical, sequential steps. This works great for drill-downs, and for many, this concept instantly evokes the familiar “Wizard” construct. Progressive disclosure can also work well for novice users, but in some cases, hiding functions or options can hinder a sense of control. Whichever method you use, ensure that both power users and beginners can equally get to what they need.
5. Formulate clear information hierarchies
No matter how good your product is, inherent limits to working memory and focus require moving some information to secondary levels. Not everything can show up at once, and that’s okay (and even good). There’s no shortage of examples in the B2C space, with apps like Notion, editing suites like Logic Pro or Adobe products, and even browsers like Google Chrome storing more granular preferences in logical secondary levels. But accessing secondary information shouldn’t feel like digging up forgotten relics. By providing more top-level, contextualizing information, dashboards can make the transitions between primary and secondary information less jarring.
To get a better idea of how this might look in B2B product design, let’s imagine that we’re looking at CRM. Here, a dashboard could show a sales pipeline, upcoming tasks, and performance metrics. However, we wouldn’t expect to see addresses and contact info for individual customer profiles on this dashboard. Instead, an effective solution would be to allow for drill-downs from the high-level dashboard into the corresponding granular information. This has the bonus effect of helping users see how primary and secondary data naturally connect. At Neuron, we solved a very similar dashboard-related problem for a client by restructuring the way data was presented to sales reps to avoid showing everything at once.
6. Leverage design to emphasize importance
When using your software, customers will have to search for information visually, and it may not map to their expectations in a personally intuitive way. However, by making critical elements stand out with font, color, or size changes, designers can decrease the probability of information overload. In enterprise product design, sometimes less is more, and designers can also increase visibility simply by deleting nonessential elements. When combined, amping up visual salience and removing nonessential elements can deliver more impactful, intentionally designed products.
In our work with Realbricks, a real estate investing platform, our team used design to emphasize information in dashboards. By modifying font size and employing spacing, we were able to clearly demarcate different segments of the page. Each element is emphasized in order of importance by flowing from a clear label of the asset, then to the current price, and finally to more granular information about investment performance.
Designing a SaaS user experience for real impact
Effective SaaS UX design requires understanding the technical complexities involved and the unique ways people acquire information. Any successful UX design agency knows that it's challenging to make powerful tools that are simultaneously cutting-edge and intuitive to use for customers. But by allowing learning by doing, helping users learn efficiently, keeping things flexible, reducing clutter, creating clear hierarchies, and emphasizing the right features, you can ensure that your SaaS solutions are effective and intuitive to use.
At Neuron, we bring principles like these into everything we do. Whether you’re looking to optimize an existing product or build something from the ground up, reach out to our team today to learn more about how Neuron can help you build better SaaS tools.