category: UIUX Design
How UI UX designers can improve the user engagement of SaaS products?
Posted by: Prince Pal Singh | Posted date: 19-September-2022
In this article, we will discuss how to Improve Engagement with These SaaS UX Design Best Practices.
Let’s begin!
What is a SaaS company and how a UX designer improve SAAS digital products?
Saas is a software licensing and deployment model in which companies license and deliver software to customers on a monthly subscription basis rather than for an upfront fee. SaaS applications can also be referred to as on-demand software or web-based or web-hosted software. Saas is also part of cloud technology. Spotify, Dropbox, Adobe, and Slack are the top examples of modern saas companies.
SaaS (Software as a Service) products are becoming increasingly popular and are used by millions of people around the world. Improving user engagement is essential for the success of these products, as it can help to increase customer loyalty, reduce churn, and drive revenue growth. Here are some ways that UI/UX designers can improve user engagement of SaaS products:
User-centered Design: Designing the user interface and user experience with the needs and goals of the target users in mind can improve engagement by making the product more usable and relevant to the user.
Onboarding: A well-designed onboarding process can help new users quickly understand the value of the product and how to use it effectively. This can increase engagement by reducing frustration and providing a positive first impression.
Personalization: Allowing users to customize their experiences, such as by choosing their preferred layout, language, or theme, can improve engagement by making the product feel more relevant and personal to the user.
Feedback and Interaction: Incorporating opportunities for user feedback, such as through in-app surveys or feedback forms, and encouraging interaction with other users, can improve engagement by making the user feel heard and connected to the product.
Gamification: Incorporating game design elements, such as points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards, can improve engagement by providing a sense of motivation and progress.
Accessibility: Making the product accessible to users with disabilities, such as by using clear and concise language, providing alternative text for images, and supporting keyboard navigation, can improve engagement by making the product usable and inclusive to a wider range of users.
Continuous Improvement: Regularly reviewing and improving the user interface and user experience can help to keep users engaged and satisfied over time, by ensuring that the product remains relevant and usable to their needs and goals.
By combining these techniques and considering the needs and goals of the target users, UI/UX designers can create a user-centered and engaging SaaS product that provides value and satisfaction to its users.
How to design SaaS products?
Designing a successful SaaS (Software as a Service) product requires a user-centered approach that considers the needs and goals of the target users, as well as the business objectives of the product. Here are some steps to help guide the design process for SaaS products:
Conduct User Research: Start by understanding the target users and their needs, goals, and pain points. This can be done through surveys, interviews, focus groups, or other research methods.
Define the Problem: Based on the user research, define the problem that the SaaS product will solve for the target users. This will help to guide the design decisions and ensure that the product provides value to the users.
Define the Value Proposition: Clearly articulate the value that the SaaS product will provide to the target users, and how it will solve their problem. This will help to guide the design of the user experience and ensure that the product meets the needs of the users.
Create Personas: Develop personas, which are fictional characters that represent the target users and their needs, goals, and pain points. Personas can help to keep the user perspective in mind throughout the design process.
Sketch and Prototype: Start by sketching out rough ideas and concepts for the user interface and user experience. Use wireframes, prototypes, or other low-fidelity tools to quickly test and iterate on the designs.
Test and Validate: Regularly test the designs with real users to validate the assumptions and gather feedback. Use this feedback to improve and iterate on the designs.
Launch and Refine: Launch the SaaS product and gather feedback from real users in the market. Use this feedback to continuously improve and refine the user interface and user experience over time.
By following these steps and using a user-centered approach, designers can create a successful SaaS product that provides value and satisfaction to its users. It is important to remember that the design process is iterative and that designs should be regularly reviewed, tested, and refined based on user feedback and data.
How to Improve SaaS UX Design? Examples and Best Practices
UX design in SaaS application development ensures an increment in customer engagement. When viewers are presented with a simple and easy-to-use user interface, they are more likely to perform their tasks efficiently.
Since, the audience for SaaS is particular about efficiency and convenience they want solutions that are useful, usable, and also valuable to their organizations.
The UI UX design of SaaS applications requires that the target audience is prioritized and their needs are in the design process. As modern users expect SaaS solutions to make their lives easier, it is essential to deliver such applications, or users can move on to other options. Therefore, new products and new features of an existing product must be built with a user-centered approach.
#1 Customer Retention
Customer retention in SaaS is all about respecting users' time and problems and making it worth their time through the experience you provide. People will always be happy to get paid to have their problems solved by someone who understands them.
The better you understand your users, the longer you'll be able to stay with them. Customer Retention is one of the most significant and cost-effective SaaS design strategies.
It’s always better to retain your customer than acquire your audience, hence monitoring your SaaS retention should be a high priority for customer retention. Customer retention is to get your customer to stay and engage with your product for a long time until it becomes a habit/ part of their daily life.
As they become long-term users, this will give you more opportunities to upsell, increasing their LTV or lifetime value. Loyal users are also more likely to become promoters of your product, which helps in bringing more users through their feedback and referrals. Customer retention leads to increased customer value over time.
#2 Engage and Inform with Dashboards
Spending time on the dashboard user experience will almost always result in a larger ROI because a dashboard is frequently the first thing a user sees when logging into a SaaS product. A successful dashboard experience provides users with the following responses:
- How am I doing, or what is my current state?
- What recent activity has been happening?
- What problems should I be aware of?
- What items are on my “To Do” list?
- How can I easily start important tasks?
It's a good idea to report on any key performance indicators (KPIs) that are essential to the user's function so that users may comprehend their present situation.
The dashboards from the Fantasy gaming dashboard are an excellent illustration of how to gather several KPIs (such as activity, earnings, users monetization, etc.) together for quick scanning. Maps, bars, and charts, among other visual cues, aid in segmenting the text and facilitating quicker browsing.
As was already noted, well-designed dashboards act as a launchpad for crucial features. To-do lists and other contextual links are particularly helpful in this situation because they give consumers new skills that are pertinent to their current needs. This is well utilized by Teledentix's redesigned "Action Items" list.
#3 Conversion Rate Improvement
Improving the conversion rate for SaaS apps takes time and expertise to make your product/services more reliable, user-oriented, and informative. Customer service is essential to the success of a company as it ensures brand loyalty to one customer at a time.
Every customer should be given the right to information, service, product, and communication. These are the factors that a customer looks for when buying your products or experiencing your brand value.
Nowadays, time SaaS companies are providing free trials and more offerings of their services, so that they can get an idea of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization ) for their products.
Free trials have a 70% success rate for business growth and CRO can convert a "trial or free" subscriber into paying and loyal customer, that is how CRO is a highlighted element in user engagements for SaaS apps.
#4 Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty or customer loyalty is a term used as the customer's commitment to using your product consistently. Loyal customers choose your brand to buy a product or solution over your competitors. Because of their pleasant UX design experience with your brand in the past, also they don't mind seeing changes in your pricing or product features.
Brand loyalty and loyal customer are important assets of your business. They continue to generate revenue without spending any amount on acquiring a new customer for your company.
A group of loyal customers can keep your business running even when you don't get new ones. They make up a large percentage of a successful brand's revenue.
There are four main benefits of Brand loyalty as listed below:
- Brand Advocacy: When customers are happy with your brand, they will attract more business to your company. Loyal customer spread awareness of your products their experiences, feedback, and verbal marketing, they will attract more customers to your business.
- Customer Retention: Through customer loyalty, you can ensure that customers subscribe to your business for a longer time. This will increase their Lifetime Value (LTV) and will bring many benefits to your business.
- Attract Investors: customer loyalty is a key parameter for investors to invest further in your brand. Investors often consider LTV to evaluate the strength of any business. A higher LTV gives you more confidence to invest further in your business and allows you to expand your business operations.
- Business Expansion: You get many opportunities to expand your business through your existing customer base. For your loyal customers and brand loyalty, you can approach upselling and cross-selling. It helps to generate additional revenue for your business.
#5 Gamification
Gamification is the process of applying gaming elements in non-sporting environments; the workplace. Game elements like competition, leaderboards, prizes, and points have helped transform businesses worldwide when properly implemented in any work environment. Gamification in SaaS platforms plays a key role in boosting business growth.
Gamification is the introduction of games, fun, and other design elements into UX design to analyze user behavior, and encourage user engagement. The competition for mobile user engagement is high and the gamification market size is projected to grow from USD 9.1 billion in 2020 to USD 30.7 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 27.4% during the forecast period.
Let's take a look at the benefits gamification can bring to a business model:
- Increases customer retention; it works as a powerful tool to connect users and promotes regular app usage.
- Increases brand loyalty and awareness and keeps users interested in the brand through positive app experience, brand acceptance, and app improvements.
- Increase user acquisition through verbal and social sharing.
- Relatively cheap to implement and Implementing gamification makes the user experience more enjoyable.
- Makes it easy to collect accurate user data, and helps in supplying businesses with high-quality insights.
#6 Use microcopy to keep users engaged.
Microcopy is the copy that appears on the screen when interacting with a product. It guides users through the steps needed to complete a task. Microcopy should be clear and concise. It should tell users exactly what they need to do next.
When writing microcopy, keep in mind that users may be reading it out loud. They may be speaking to someone else about the product. They may be trying to figure out how to use the product themselves. Make sure that the copy is easy to understand and doesn't require too much explanation.
LinkedIn does an excellent job with microcopy when telling users why they need a credit card. It clears up any concerns users might have and increases their confidence in using the product.
Other tips for attracting users and retaining regular customers -
UX best practices for any SaaS platform are useful practices that can bring valuable rewards. SaaS apps are the most complex software written, but there are principles for UX designing that can make any SaaS product successful.
Streamline Information Architecture
Users typically use information architecture and navigation to find what they need from an application. They ought to be simple and logical as a result. Hootsuite offers hidden global side navigation that may be extended to display labels if the user becomes disoriented or forgets what an icon represents.
Reduce customer churn.
Customer churn is the percentage of users that stopped using your product or service in a certain time frame. Customer churn is a performance metrics factor used by SaaS applications.
Keep adding upgrades and releasing new versions.
Sometimes customer churn is also caused by boring UI design with a similar platform over time, therefore keep improving your product through upgrades and new features. As users see more value over time, customer retention rates will continue to increase.
Optimize your onboarding process.
Successful SaaS companies have unique ways of rewarding their users.
Initially send instructional material to introduce users to the service and its features. If your service is more complex, it makes sense to offer users free training - people interested in your product will want to learn how it works, and by training them you're guiding them into the "aha" moment.
Set Customer Expectations.
It is essential to be clear in your messages about how you add value to your users. They should know what they’ll get when they sign up.
Ensure That “Help” Is Useful and Always Available
Successful SaaS programs offer user-friendly to support and help mechanisms in case users run into problems. Modern people anticipate being able to acquire answers to their questions without having to spend time on the phone. There are a few crucial methods for achieving this.
First, the help system needs to be simple to access throughout the program. There is a considerable chance that when a user realizes they need assistance, they are already frustrated. Making them search for help content is a surefire way to make the experience unpleasant.
FAQs aid users in finding common queries and answers quickly, but they can also be enhanced.
Highlight Your Value Proposition.
Your value proposition makes your product unique. A good value proposition is simple, gives users the concrete results they want, and can understand quickly. Also, avoid promotional words.
Consistent delivery is essential to the value proposition.
That's why your users signed up for it and it will motivate them to stay. It is a very good practice to remind them about your value proposition from time to time and showing them what they are doing will encourage them to continue their membership.
Upselling is a win-win, user engagement service, and you can get more revenue.
This practice has a dual effect. Dealing with multiple pain points for a user, your relationship grows deeper, and with a higher billing amount, the user's commitment increases, making them more likely to stick around.
Over the Top Customer Service.
67% of users cite a poor customer service experience as the primary reason for churn. Customer service is a key element for an organization. Users may notice a bug in your UI if you can fix their problem right away, but a poor customer service experience will put most of them off.
These UX design practices add value to customers' efforts and combine and retain them.
Award-winning SaaS apps designed by me -
1. Teledentix (SaaS application for dentists and patients)
Brief - A mobile and teledentistry app for doctors and patients. We have worked on UI/UX design and data security systems to provide secure and easy-to-use solutions for a better user experience. The app is the best fit For - Dental Offices, Mobile Dentistry, and Insurances Companies.
Features - Scheduling the Appointments, On-Demand Virtual Visits Real-Time Eligibility Checks, Personalized Demos, and Much More.
2. KIT (SaaS + Marketplace)
Kit - SaaS Solutions for wellness industry
2. Brief - Australia-based Salon marketplace; we defined UI/UX Saas application solutions for salon owners. The SaaS app is convenient and easy to handle, which comes with an on-the-go appointment checking feature and online syncing so that one can check your schedule from home.
Features:
User - Book Appointment, Location Finder, Skincare Service List, Haircut & Hairstyle, User Ratings, Select Your Favorite Stylist.
Seller Account Dashboard - Insights on Sales and Growth, One-View for Available/Booked Staff, Services, Payments, Gift Vouchers, and Other Features.
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