5 UX mistakes to avoid while building your B2B SaaS product

So you start your own venture, or you take the lead in creating a brand new product in the digital world. The spark of an idea ignited it, and now you are to bring it to life.

by Alec Vishmidt Design

Right now, we see a massive surge in demand for Software-as-a-Service products (or simply SaaS). "Thanks" to the year 2020 global health conditions and shutdowns around the world, businesses face the next challenge:

How to increase efficiency and maintain growth amidst the global recession?

There is no immediate answer to it. But history tells us what would be the outcome in a year or two—only companies that would succeed in transformation would survive and grow.

But sadly, many companies have failed with the transformation, and many would vanish. One of the main reasons is… Poor user experience. Today, we will emphasize typical UX mistakes that generally come up during the building process of SaaS products for business customers.

The ideas below apply to customer experience, or user experience, mainly in the B2B segment.

Misinterpreting your previous user experience

First of all, you must pay attention to users' previous experiences. Why? Because people are lazy on the biological level. To create a new neural circuit or to learn something new, in other words, we all need to spend some time and effort. And we have thousands of better ways of spending our time rather than learning a new tool. If customers have used some apps before to solve some kind of an issue, then they would expect to operate with similar features, patterns, workarounds, and shortcuts.

That is why a complete UX overhaul or moving to another system meets serious pushback and negative feedback in most cases. No matter if the new user experience boosts your productivity several times or allows you to do unimaginable things, you still need to make an effort and learn it.

So, should you just stop enhancing or inventing something new? Of course not. But instead of a revolutionary stage, think about several evolutionary ones. Ones that would enhance, and then replace current experience piece by piece. For emerging apps and products, you need to consider how people do their daily routine now and try to mimic their current behavior.

However, it is also vital to clarify for users that they are going to use something new and more advanced than they did before. In other words, you have to reorganize their extensive experience and knowledge by explaining the benefits of each new feature and pattern. In addition, try presenting the change as something exciting and joyful, rather than something necessary and inevitable. People like the ability to choose, even if there is no significant difference between choices.

What to do

• Do extensive user research, understand current customer applications and tools eco-system;
• Think about evolutionary enhancements and create a plan of phased implementation;
• Implement behavior change as a "joyful gain" rather than a "necessity to go forward."

Treating your customers as "dumb"

I know you don't do that, but I met so many people trying to follow the rule of "Your app should be so simple, a drunk person could use it." Sometimes that works this exact way, but this approach oversimplifies the reality, and it does not come with most SaaS products. Nothing is wrong with keeping things simple and obvious, but users are generally smart. And instead of designing the experience for "drunk and dumb ones," we need to focus on people that "want to spend their time and attention span effectively."

How would you understand that you oversimplify things? Just ask your colleague to see the screen over your shoulder. If that person understands what happens in general—you are not oversimplifying. This method works for most of us in the team in 80% of cases, given your colleague understands the basics of the industry and the system's purpose.

On the contrary, don't treat anything as obvious too. Given users are smart, but they would see the system for the first time. As they all have unique experiences, they would see a bit different picture. To avoid any frictions, think about the fallback and remove ambiguity if possible.

The same applies to your nomenclature. Favorite, fav, or starred? Even if all those words represent the same, it is hard to connect the dots for anyone new. So, just keep it "favorite" everywhere.

What to do

• Treat your users as smart, but think about "what colleague understands if he looks at your screen over your shoulder?"
• Double-check your hypothesis, and think about fallbacks. Keep your nomenclature consistent, always write captions below icons, etc.
• Test your results, and give it another pair of eyes.

Messing with the onboarding and learning process

By all means, onboarding is important and crucial. Onboarding is the progression that takes users from being novices and brings them to become real pros, advocates, and teachers of the product.

But we see so many product owners and entrepreneurs following the wrong way here. Instead of providing customers with what they need and expect, onboarding usually is focused on what product owners want to share.

Here is our top list of onboarding mistakes

• Putting too many texts upfront. Even if your idea is complex, your business has its own specifics, and there is no reason to force users to read a manual upfront, even in the form of 5 onboarding screens with beautiful illustrations and animations.
• Showing screenshots of the app inside the app. Why should you use a static image, while you have an interactive system up and running? The satisfaction rate of this approach is the lowest we have measured so far.
• Blocking users to attract attention. This seems to be a good idea, as this is a way to focus users' attention span on important things. Unfortunately, this does not work, as people are mostly irritated with their inability to do other things.

Instead of blocking users with meddling popups with vast descriptions of "how-to," try making the whole interface intuitive and support customers to get success with your feature at the moment of a struggle. And before that, rely on previous experience and common sense. Most people know how to edit a cell in a spreadsheet, how to submit a form, and what happens if you press the "Save" icon.

Don't trust people that say that a sleek and super-intuitive user interface would solve all of your issues. Yes, professionally done UI will remove friction, improve retention rate, and decrease the number of support tickets, but still, your customers would need a place to learn more and master their skills with your SaaS platform. We found that the best practice we observe is a context-based wiki-style community-driven knowledge center.

What to do

• Help your customers at the moment of a struggle, and never block them (or at least provide the ability to skip and do their work).
• Try making most things obvious and straightforward.
• Provide easy access to a knowledge base and to the community.

Building one-size-fits-all application

This is a natural intent to bring value to as many customers as possible. But in most cases, this intent leads to an inability to prioritize features, focus loss, and issues with resource allocation for the product owner. And how do customers perceive those one-size-fits-all platforms?

The truth is — if you focus on everyone, you focus on no one. Your customers understand that better than you. And if you think that you can add another feature or button and only people who need it would be using it — you are wrong.

• First, each feature, even the most usable, increases overall complexity. With each small thing you add, the tool becomes harder to understand, harder to use, and harder to maintain.
• Second, the overpopulation of functions creates the feeling for customers that they overpay for things they don't use. Even it is something that happens unconsciously, and we need to be aware that people make decisions based on reason and emotion.
• Third, additional possibilities blur the exact value that you bring to the customer. Try thinking about the application as "hired to do something" — if you have a hard time explaining what your app is designed to be hired for, then it will be hard to sell it.

You could read more about the impact of emotions in decision-making in a comprehensive manuscript by Jennifer S. Lerner, Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karim Kassam published in 2014.

Nota bene. This is true for most cultures, but not for all of them. For instance, Chinese customers are used to using multi-functional applications that have tons of features inside, and they are more comfortable with the all-in-one solution. We are not fans of generalizations, but the Pareto rule works for a majority of businesses:

20% of your customers would generate 80% of profits

And trying to cover all 100% of precise needs and requests would lead to a situation when 100% of your customers are not fully satisfied, as they got an in-between solution.

What to do

• Focus your SaaS solution on the one exact business need, one pain, or one opportunity. Have more than one solution to bring to your customers? Build applications eco-system instead with a clearly stated purpose of each solution.
• Try finding your core audience that would love using your SaaS system. Prioritize your core customers above others.
• Do not be afraid to start walking before running. Try fitting a niche before conquering global markets (but stay ambitious!)

Underestimating integrations

There are more than 100 million repositories on GitHub — this means we have myriads of apps, tools, and solutions of any kind. According to https://www.g2.com, a mid-size company has around 18 active subscriptions running, up to 500+ for large enterprises. At the same time, employees had 9.39 job-related apps and "43 percent [of employees] believe that they have to switch between too many apps just to get basic work done".

Why is this so important? Because when you create a new tool (especially in the B2B segment), not only do you enhance something or add value somewhere, but you also add another entry point, another complexity, and another thing to keep in mind.

So please, s-t-o-p creating yet another stand-alone tool. Instead, think about how you could bring value using an existing solution.

What to do

• Research and learn about other apps' eco-system. Think about it as a family that your B2B product will leave with, as a group that should synergize.
• Consider other product formats rather than a stand-alone app. Keep messaging bots, modules, and add-ons on your radar.
• Try integrating as deeper as it is technically feasible, making the overall user experience as smooth as possible.

Wait for a second…

So, we say that people hate roaming among dozens of browser tabs, but a one-fits-all solution is a bad decision too. Aren't those statements in conflict? The answer is — no, they are not.

Concentrating on the exact business process is great, but oversimplifying or over-restricting leads to an unusable product. Restricting business processes due to tech restrictions. You will not make anything exciting if you think about technologies first.

Creating unnecessary rules or following documentation too narrowly. Could processes be parallel / optimized, postponed or removed?

What to do

• Deeply analyze business processes, build process diagrams
• Use leading UX techniques: asynchronous actions, delayed verifications, predictive input

Underestimating existing and emerging technologies

New technologies are always exciting. They help SaaS platforms go mobile, and actively use AI, big data, and location services. Right now, it has become standard.

50+% of users use mobile and expect your solution to work anywhere. Surprisingly, in the data-heavy systems, we see a dramatic surge of mobile users. AI, big data, machine learning. While being hyped buzzwords, using them is always beneficial.

What to do

• Create a mobile version of your SaaS product.
• Consider the following features that could significantly improve UX: predictive input to speed up data entry, generating insights…

Not caring about specific motifs

Answer the question "why." Why do they open, and why do they return? What do they struggle with? Why do they be hiring your platform for? Don't ask questions you know the answers for.

Do not rely solely on gamification. Gamification works as an additional motivation factor, based on a top of core motivation. If core = gamification, then you create a game.

What to do

• Use the Jobs-to-be-done approach.
• Build informational architecture.
• Build core motivation incentives, then proceed with adding gamification experiences.

Try not to do your product

Yes, you are reading this correctly. What happens if you don't do that? Nothing important? Would anybody care? Then stop it right now. 60% (optimistically) of startups are not worth developing. Because they would bring worse UX, no matter do they contain superb features.

Always remember that just the existence of yet another tool makes UX worse. The new user interface requires newcomers to spend time transitioning. What are indicators of the situation when things could go wrong?

• "We build X the same as Y, but with whole new, better UX;"
• "We build super-scalable X, and we expect 1M users at launch;"
• "We build X because I can't achieve Y with my previous tool."

Conclusion

The SaaS market is underestimated and will grow further.

I frequently meet entrepreneurs that believe that their next-gen SaaS has no competitors. But frankly, in most cases, they are wrong. They treat other apps as competitors and features as competitive items, but this approach is limited. The truth is — you compete with other ways users relieve their pains or get advantages. And, you compete with human laziness.

Let us say you invented a brand new way of crowdsourced blockchain-based investment platform with tons of marvellous features like smart insights, easy risk management, etc. And there are no such apps on the market. Still, people somehow invest their money without your app, right? They use banks, financial companies, brokers, and they buy real estate for the investments. Or they simply accumulate money in their accounts. So, those ways, sometimes completely non-digital, are your SaaS competitors. And they are mostly stronger than other apps.