UI/UX Design, referred to as “User Interface/User Experience design,” has become very important in the field of digital design, and there is no reaching thousands of users without focusing on creating a good visual interface and improving the experience of the product or service for the user. In this article, we will discuss the importance of UI/UX design and how much it should be taken care of while building your next SaaS product. But let’s first discuss the basics.
Importance of UI/UX Design for Your SaaS Product
What is SaaS Product Design?
SaaS, an acronym for “Software as a Service” is a software application that is hosted on the Internet and provided to customers over the Internet mostly on a subscription basis. SaaS product design, or Software as a Service product design means creating a user experience and user interface for the product hosted on the Internet and delivering that experience to the customers on the Internet. In simpler terms, SaaS product design can be understood as designing the UI/UX for a SaaS product.
The Role of UI/UX for Your SaaS Product
As we already discussed in the previous section, UI/UX plays a major part in the success of a SaaS Product. The role of UI/UX can be summed-up in the following points:
- Branding of the SaaS product.
- Communicating the unique selling proposition.
- Getting more users and better retention.
- Better interface and experience of the SaaS product.
- Ease of navigation though the product.
- Making data driven decisions.
- Sharing your mission and vision of the SaaS product.
- Converting first time users to loyal customers.
- Creating a sense of community (not true in every case).
- Retaining the users to increase the life time value of a user.
- Better and more informed decisions on features and functionality of the product.
Importance of UI/UX design for a SaaS Product
- User retention: Retaining the user to spend more time on your SaaS product is completely independent of how good the codebase is. The user only looks and interacts with the interface not the code. Key to User retention is a good user interface coupled with great user experience. This hooks the user with the product and makes the user retain on the SaaS product.
- Using UI/UX for Data-Driven decision making: UI/UX is conventionally thought of as designing the interface and structure of the application while it is much more than that. The first step of UI/UX is to research about the user need and present it to the business team. Researching about the customers gives valuable insights about the product/service and what things should be improved.
- Communicating with the user: The visual elements along with the copywriting will take the majority part of your communication for the SaaS product and also the brand. Customer will only buy in your vision through effective communication and for that a communicative, visually rich UI of the SaaS product is very important. Here good copywriting along with great UI can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user.
- Converting the first time users into higher life time value customers: The aim of UX principles is to turn visitors into customers by providing a positive experience to them. A good user experience might not improve the number of users visiting to use your SaaS product but will surely improve the conversion rate of these visitors coming again and again.
- Removing Glitches and bugs that might hinder user’s trust: It really becomes difficult to make user buy a product if the application interface itself is full of bugs. Even a single bug in the interface can break the users fragile trust and they might end up not using your SaaS product, irrespective of how good the product is.
- Improving UI/UX for scalability: The more your SaaS product reaches the masses, it has to be scaled to that magnitude. And upon scaling a buggy UI starts breaking, while a well-designed SaaS product can handle new functionalities been added and scaling up and down of the application.
- Saves resources in longer run: While for a small SaaS startup, designing UI/UX looks like the burning the limited money they have. But in the longer run, a SaaS product might not survive or thrive without a good UI/UX design. Investing in UI/UX design is longer term, so instead of getting the UI changed every time a new feature is added, its better to come up with a good UI/UX design.
UI/UX Design Best Practices for SaaS Product
- Hierarchy and Organization: When building UI/UX design for a SaaS company/product, one thing that we must take care of is the fact that every SaaS product has a Unique Selling Proposition. And as a good UI/UX designer you will be expected to provide a clear hierarchy of that Unique Selling Proposition and what you want to communicate with the user coming to the product app or website.
- Consistent website/app and product experience: It is often seen that the user experience of the website/app and the SaaS product defers from one another. It might depend upon the stage of the company/startup or the market but the user should not find the product to be completely different from the branding website.
- User feedback: Taking feedback from the users can provide valuable insights about the product/service and what things should be improved. It is a must part of process of UX design of a SaaS product.
- No replacement of a good SaaS product: Even after the best UI/UX design and branding as well as marketing, if the SaaS product is not good enough, users might come once but will not repeat. Therefore, you should ensure a good SaaS product along with good UI/UX of the product and the website.
Practices to avoid
- Don’t just test users, observe them: You can understand a user better by observing a user on what they are doing by file following them in their environment, instead of just giving them a test or a prompt that leads them to a result. Do test the user on how the size and color of a button or size of text is, but also provide some flexibility to the user.
- Not Customizing: Often we forget the fact that every user group or team design can have different requirement and can need a different customization based on their workflow. We have to make sure to balance between streamlining the end to end flow and customization required for the user or as requested by the design team.
- Never underestimate the user’s intellect: Never consider your user to be dumb and waste energy in super simplifying your SaaS product keeping in mind that the user is stupid. Because they are not, your users mostly will be very professional. Your users might be using the product every day.
Conclusion
By all the arguments presented above, we think UI/UX design is critical for success or failure of a SaaS product and it should be a priority for any SaaS company or a startup. UI/UX not just improves the interface and the experience, but the user research if done extensively can give great insights for building new features or editing the current features in the product. We can conclude that the user interface and the experience should be given equal importance as the codebase itself.
We hope that this article helped you understand the importance of UI/UX design for a SaaS product and you gained valuable insights from the article that will help you in building your SaaS product.