For SaaS Businesses: 8 Sure-fire Ways to Optimize your UX/UI Design

For any successful start-up, high-quality SaaS user interface and experience (UI/UX) design is non-negotiable. You can develop a killer product that can be a money-making machine per se that doesn’t require the bells and whistles of a carefully thought UI/UX. But if your customers can’t understand how to utilize it correctly or are always irked whenever they do, they’ll leave.

An impeccable UI/UX design influences customers both consciously and subconsciously. Your audience remembers the SaaS product thanks to the first visual impressions. And what subconsciously drives users’ decision-making is the usage experience – buttons, navigation, and speed of processing requests. As far as no info is annoying, the design does fit the bill and makes your SaaS product visible to the focused group.

With that considered, various trends come and go for UI and UX design, but what makes for best practices? Read on to know.

1. Keep it Simple but be Mindful

Minimalism is gaining steam in UI/UX design and product development for a reason. The world is heading back to simple form and minimum consumption. This trend is truer than ever for SaaS products, which boast multiple functionalities and features that must be offered to users in a simple fashion.

One of the most crucial tasks of UI/UX designers is to streamline the user experience and interface as much as possible. This doesn’t mean compromising on the key features but focusing more on the interaction of users. So, develop a familiar experience by adding easy-to-use gestures, buttons, and text/media content to keep things clear and concise.?

If your customers need to learn a totally new skill to leverage your SaaS product, maybe you have made your UI more complicated rather than simpler. They’re going to have a hard time and, consequently, will walk away from you. Or maybe the most tech-savvy customers who know how to solve their queries alone will stay, but not entirely happily.

As such, think of a UI/UX design for your SaaS product that covers all its architectural subtleties and serves users with various tech comfort levels.

2. Smooth Sign-ups

Sign-up or registration forms shape a user’s first impression. No one likes jumping through dozens of pages of forms to finally get registered with your SaaS product/service. People sign up when they’re interested in your product. But that doesn’t guarantee long-term customer stickiness. There’s a long march with many potential early exits. As such, the first step should never be a hurdle.

While creating a sign-up form, avoid asking for lots of details. Instead, ask just what is necessary to set the account and spare the extras for later. If you still feel the urge to add some additional steps, make them optional. As a sweetener, allow users to register with third parties, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and e-mail. Every extra phase between the first click on the sign-up button and the holistic experience of your SaaS product can be viewed as a hindrance by customers.

Lastly, design a simple yet compelling call to action (CTA). Users want to know exactly what they’re registering for and why. Also, they want to see a clear path for doing so. Hence, your CTAs must be contextual and convey all key information.

Remember, the simpler and comfier to register, the better the odds of improving customer loyalty.

3. Effortless Onboarding

Learning to use a SaaS product can overwhelm users, especially tech rookies. Similar to easy registration, customer onboarding must be simple and fluid.

So, immediately after the sign-up process, flesh out the details about your offering to customers but don’t overload them with all the information. Your users might get confused, leading to quickened unsubscribing. Better explain your SaaS product’s proposed value and how it can meet their needs and manage pains. Add explanatory tooltips, virtual tours, tutorial recommendations, or quick video illustrations.

But if you feel burdened managing these nuances, better shell out money on a foolproof product tour platform. Not only does it relieve you from the heavy lifting, but it also lets you offer a bespoke onboarding experience to customers based on the details they recently shared. For instance, build multiple onboarding pathways, call customers by their names, or underline various features per the user.

The more straightforward the onboarding process, the better and faster the customers will understand your product’s functionality. Customer onboarding lays the groundwork for your entire relationship. If done correctly, your users will bet on your expertise and feel excited about the future. What’s more, you could attract new audiences to your SaaS product. Else, that customer you toiled hard to get might approach your competitors.

4. Make it a Device and Browser Friendly

Another crucial aspect when designing any SaaS app’s UI/UX is its flexibility and adaptability. As multiple end-users will use your SaaS product for various purposes, make sure the design is not limited to one device or platform. Case in point, a SaaS app designed only for iOS devices leaves a sizable proportion of the potential audience out of the design. This could be disastrous to the overall performance of the SaaS offering.

Not only for devices, but this applies to web browsers too. Your web designer needs to ensure that the SaaS app is compatible with every major web browser. No matter how well your application looks in Google Chrome if customers use it from a different browser, that’s not a good sign for your SaaS product.

5. Don’t Let Users Get Lost Looking for Needed Info

As SaaS applications have a lot to offer, there are chances that users could get nowhere when looking for desired information. Pointless browsing is something really annoying. So, make sure a smart search filter is always included in the UI/UX design of your SaaS product.

Place the search option on the website where it’s easily visible to users. Also, this feature must be on every page to increase usability. In addition, ensure that the search widget is robust enough to answer almost every query of your audience in a few clicks.

6. Seamless Navigation

Design your SaaS UX and UI design in a way that’s intuitive and easy to navigate. As discussed earlier, a SaaS product with a complex UI/UX design will scare away users as they’ll have to invest a lot of time understanding how to navigate. And since you don’t have consultants, ads, or conferences to market your services, you’ll need a well-designed and visitor-friendly website.

The landing page of your SaaS product should brim with the links to navigate to the essential tools or features, and the menu should be visible on every web page. Visitors will use the menu bar to jump to other pages from any page without returning to the previous page each time. Therefore, they should know where to browse just by seeing the menu, even if it’s their first time.

7. Continuously Upgrade your Product Design

You can’t achieve a good user experience all at once or in a single shot. Just as your SaaS product will change and update with time, you need to constantly improve and tweak the UX/UI so that your website’s class matches the business’s scale.

So, to better understand user experience, listen to your real user’s experiences. Routine surveys and social media (comments, reactions, likes, and views) can be your buddies in this regard. Measure your users’ frustrations and demands and offer them the value they deserve.

8. Customer Assistance Availability

While designers can’t do much to step up the user support domain, they can include customer aid as a critical element of SaaS UI/UX design. That way, customers can reach out for help and get their queries solved while using the tool rather than turning to third-party resources and other search engines.

Add an online chat window (with either a bot or a human) to your website as a means to easily contact corporate officials. This will help you gather ideas for improving your SaaS product. For those who prefer self-service to direct interaction, a comprehensive set of FAQs is crucial.

Stitching the Dots

Cracking the UI/UX code is tremendously crucial if you want users to start using your SaaS product and continue doing so for long. The best practices discussed above can help you engineer the winning SaaS design. You can fine-tune these guidelines based on users’ needs, the product’s nature, and corporate goals. That said, the underlying idea must be to slash friction for customers by any means and ensure their demands are being directly met.