Struggling to get your users to adopt your SaaS digital product? It’s more than likely that your design isn’t giving the best user experience.
User experience design (UX design) is a specialism focussing on the intuitive and valuable interaction between your app user and the interface itself. This blog will look at the key areas UX design can inform and improve your digital product.
So let’s get into the 6 Reasons why UX Design is crucial for digital product success…
1. UX design makes the onboarding process easy
Let’s imagine your website has done its job and encouraged a lead to subscribe to your SaaS application. The first real experience of UX design in your digital product is the onboarding process. Success here will increase your onboarding engagement rates.
If you build this process out well, your user will quickly find what we like to call the “aha moment”. In more technical terms this is called first contact resolution; the moment when your user sees something of value in your product for the first time.
Read more: What does SaaS stand for?
During onboarding, your user needs to get set up and action first tasks intuitively. We use Slack here at Strafe for this very reason. New team members can onboard quickly and easily, with access to everything they need to get started.
You will find people are pretty cut-throat about their buying decisions at this point of trialling your digital product, often onboarding with several competitors to work out which fits their purpose. The more consideration you put into this step, the more likely you are to win that user.
2. Good UX wins the daily use challenge
Clever UX design considers your recurring daily active users (DAU).
One of the biggest reasons why users stop using your digital product is that they fall out of love with it. If you make your SaaS design intuitive, easy and compelling to use, then users are much more likely to stick with it.
One of my favourite examples of a company doing this really well is Twitter. Through regular research, Twitter concluded that by ensuring new users followed 25 people during onboarding they were 100x more likely to continue to use the app.
This ensured enough fresh content appeared on a user’s feed to keep them engaged each time they logged on, but not so much that they were overwhelmed and turned off. From then on, AI then learns about a user’s habits and interests to entice them to follow others throughout their daily use helping to form a habitual routine.
3. Good UX design reduces tickets
If your user cannot find the answers to questions quickly then they may open tickets with customer services. This will stop them from completing simple tasks in a timely fashion and leave a negative impression of your brand.
Incorporating a full UX design service at the beginning of your creative process, often means that answers are incorporated into your digital offering.
4. Good UX increases paid plan opt-in
Most SaaS products have tiered payment options, sometimes including a free plan. Good use of UX design skills will create a system that promotes the benefits and features of the next level tier increasing the opportunity for expansion revenue.
Hubspot* is a great example. Each lower tier shows you how much more value you can get if you upgrade to the next plan.
Read more: What is UX design? Your Definitive Guide
5. Good UX design increases the trial-to-customer rate
Where digital products do not offer free plans, you will find that they offer trial plans for users to test their SaaS products. That conversion is key to business revenues and this is where exceptional UX design creates an experience that persuades users to keep using your product through great onboarding and the value of daily use.
6. Good UX gets your new features used!
Often development teams of SaaS products will code new features into the part of a system that makes sense technically. This doesn’t always mean that the feature is intuitive or easy to find for the user. Using UX design at the start of this additional design process, long before the coding, ensures you understand user intent and therefore where and how to present this vital new feature giving you better adoption rates.
In conclusion: UX design is both user-centred and profit-building
There’s a myth that UX design is a meticulous process start-ups go through ONLY at the beginning of their development journey. This simply isn’t true, it’s actually all about continuous improvement.
Everything your user does within your software is trackable, which means you have all the data you need to review and adjust based on user intent. You can work with user testing organisations to understand exactly how you could improve your product.
The great news is if you start with strong UX you can use that data to understand exactly where and how to improve your digital product continuously and therefore increase its revenue opportunities.
Need some help improving the performance of your SaaS? Get in touch today using the Project Planner below!
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