Demystifying Financial KPIs for SaaS Companies: Measure What Matters

Eleken’s clients are very, very different. We’ve designed for all SaaS industries you can imagine, from agriculture to data analytics. And even though the companies are very different, their design references are often the same. Our clients want their apps and websites to mimic Intercom, Apple, and, most frequently — Stripe.

When someone asks us to “make it like Stripe,” we explain to our clients why mirroring even the best design is a trap. But if you browse Dribbble for a couple of minutes, you’ll see how many companies walk straight into this trap.

In this article, we’ll figure out:

• Why we all like Stripe’s design so much;
• Why imitation is the sincerest form of failure;
• What really makes Stripe’s design so attractive;
• And how to learn from Stripe in a healthy way.

Why do we all like Stripe’s design so much

Stripe has built a cult around a piece of code. It has turned its users into fans. It has made gradients that look so good you want to lick them. Stripe is the rock star in the world of SaaS, so you’d hardly find a startup owner who has never thought “I want my startup to be like Stripe when it grows up.”

Pretty understandable. You just look at Stripe’s website next to its competitor, Braintree.

Both websites offer a suite of payment APIs for online companies of all sizes. Is it anything more boring to sell than fintech rails for online commerce? Yet Stripe’s site manages to push its boring rails in a very clear, very professional, and somehow even inspiring way. 

As designers, we confirm that Stripe’s website is an example of good design.

Our UI/UX designer Maksym compliments Stripe for its clarity. Even though the company offers dozens of products, you can always find what you need. All options are conveniently grouped in a dropdown list and differentiated thanks to their unique icons and color schemes. 

Stripe’s copy is sharp and clear, illustrated by telling animations. Animations tell so much that you don’t even need to read the copy to understand how the product works.

Dasha, another designer at Eleken, notes that Stripe presents a unique case when a website is restrained, with no irritating frills, yet it feels fresh and playful.

As you can tell, we at Eleken don’t mind when startups choose Stripe design as a reference. Problems start when inspiration turns into imitation, and clients say something like “make my startup’s website look like Stripe’s.”

Why imitation is the sincerest form of failure

Making your website look like Stripe’s would work if UI/UX design was about making things pretty. But it’s a bit more difficult than that. 

Design is a relationship between form and content, so as soon as you separate the form (Stripe’s design) from its content (Stripe itself) to put this form on top of your product, Stripe’s magic turns into a pumpkin.

Think of content as candy and design as its wrapper. The wrapper makes eating candies a better experience — it prevents the sugar from melting in our hands. It also draws customers’ attention.

But if we rip the cover off the best-selling chocolates and pull it on our lollypop, we won’t get a best-selling lollypop. Because it’s not the wrapping that makes candies popular, but a mix of the product and the wrapping. Not to mention the packaging simply won’t fit.

To learn from Stripe’s success it’s not enough to imitate its web design. We need to figure out what’s behind colorful gradients and dynamic diagonals. 

What really makes Stripe’s design so attractive?

That’s a good question to ask yourself right after you’ve chosen Stripe as your role model. We believe Stripe’s success is based on three pillars: a valuable product, a human-centered approach to design, and a hard-working approach to the business.

Let’s break them down one by one.

Stripe made a product that relieved users’ pain better than any competitor

Payment processing is complex as hell. Before Stripe, businesses needed to sort things out on their own building compliant payment systems for their sites. That was a risky, expensive and unbearable process. For small businesses, it was often impossible.

Stripe recognized the window of opportunity and enabled people to process payments by copying and pasting seven lines of code. What a delight it was for developers! 

Stripe made users’ lives better and earned their love.

Stripe is obsessed with their customers

Customer obsession is like good posture. Everyone knows it’s important but only a few stick with it. Stripe belongs to the minority that builds the business around their customers.

When Stripe had just launched, its CEO, Patrick Collison, went to customers’ houses to see how they installed Stripe. And ten years later, he’s still interested in listening to peoples’ preferences.

Stripe uses gathered insights to constantly improve user experience. 

For example, many API products suffer from poor and confusing documentation. Stripe’s documentation, by contrast, is so clear and well-written that it’s easy for developers to get things up and running. What is more, if developers are digging through documents while being logged into their Stripe accounts, they can see personalized code snippets. 

Such a user-centered approach earns more love for Stripe.

Stripe always runs an extra mile

If you ask somebody from Stripe’s design team about how they make amazing products and sites, they’d reply they simply spend 20x more time on this than anyone else would. And refuse to cut corners along the way. 

Here’s a telling example of this from one of Stripe’s designers. Once he was working on a website animation that showed a payment form being filled and submitted. To fake the typing, he made a new character appear every 100 milliseconds and called it a day. 

But the CEO didn’t like the result because typing felt too automatic. He not only suggested making the delay before each new character random but also wrote the needed code by himself. Such serious attention to the smallest detail makes an impression. It inspires all the team to push until the result is not just good or great, but exceptional.

For little details that show that Stripe really cares, users love the company even more. 

How to learn from Stripe in a healthy way

The wise lorry from the picture below formulates the moral of our story beautifully: on the road to success, there are no shortcuts.

Maksym from Eleken extends the moral a bit: “People visit Stripe’s site not to enjoy its gradients, but to get their job done. Thus, not an appearance makes a good site, but its ability to give people what they came for in a comfortable and cozy way.”

You can imitate gradients, but that comfortable and cozy assistance is inimitable. To replicate it, you need to figure out who your users are, what their goals are, and how they interact with your product. The deeper you understand it all, the better.

Learning your customers is a great deal of work. If you are ready to get started, our UX maturity article will come in handy. It provides a 6-step algorithm of how an organization can improve their UX processes.

And by the way, did you know that ten years ago Stripe’s CEO wanted his little startup to be like Amazon? He researched things like, what Amazon was doing in 1999, and how  they thought about their software and services. That’s a nice little twist of fate, isn’t it?

So if in ten years you’ll be a new SaaS star, recall this article and send some kudos to Eleken design agency.

People often misunderstand design. “Design is what it looks like”, they say, and design professionals feel deeply insulted. 

But when you think about it, how could it be otherwise? People have eyes to see the results of the design process that sticks out of the water. But they can’t read minds to appreciate your 90%-hidden discovery and research unless you explain how the design process works. 

We at Eleken UI/UX agency have years of experience in clarifying on family dinners what is this major new product design thing that we do. If you feel like joining us at the imaginary dinner table to listen about what design actually is, you are welcome.

Napkin drawings included.

What is design?

Here’s the definition by a UX guru Don Norman:

“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”

That may sound confusing, but only until you see an example of miscommunication. Just like the one on the GIF below.

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This door opening phenomenon is called “ the Norman door” after Don Norman described it in his iconic book “The Design of Everyday Things”.

The Norman door is basically any door that's confusing or difficult to use because it communicates “push” instead of “pull” and vice versa. If designers had understood the door users deeply enough, they’d have always made intuitive handles. But since they don’t, we have an intuitive explanation of what bad design is.

The Norman doors story brings us to the idea once formulated by Steve Jobs:

“Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like — design is how it works.”

Now, what about product design?

When we know that “design” means figuring out how something is supposed to work, then we can apply this definition to other forms of design.  For example:

• Interior design is responsible for figuring out how home or office spaces should work.
• Logo design means determining what messages should a logotype convey, and what colors and shapes would help achieve that.
• Product design, as we can logically conclude, takes care of how products are supposed to work. Sometimes “products” refer to material objects, such as furniture, electronics, or cars. But when IT guys say “product design” they typically speak about software products. 

But product design, actually, goes a bit deeper than that.

In Eleken, we define product design as a user-centered, complex and never-ending process of creating meaningful experiences for users by defining the users' problems and finding solutions for these problems. 

Let’s decode the three main characteristics of product design.

Product design is a user-centered process

In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. 

Trying to figure out what wasn’t working in the product, the team understood that all the listed photos of rooms sucked. They traveled to New York, rented a camera, spent some time with customers listing properties, and replaced amateur pictures with high-resolution images.

Improving the pictures was a product design decision. And this decision doubled the weekly revenue to $400 per week and allowed Airbnb to climb out of what they called the ‘trough of sorrow.’ 

The Airbnb story is here to illustrate that product design is not about making beautiful interfaces, it’s not necessarily about interfaces at all. But it’s always about users, and the touchpoints users have with a product. Only sometimes those touchpoints are within the interface.

Product design makes teams responsible for business and technology look at their product through the lens of users’ needs. Taking users into account helps both business and technology to solve the right problem in the right way and produce the true value.

Product design is a complex process 

Eleken designers spend about 80% of their time on things other than pushing pixels in Figma.

Just let that sink in: Designers spend 80% of their time on things other than design. What are they doing then?

If you ever read anything about design, you are probably familiar with at least one design process model — a diamond, a double diamond, a triple diamond, a spiral, a loop, whatever. The design process usually starts with understanding the problem. Then you proceed by searching for ideas of how to solve the problem. That ultimately leads to solution discovery and implementation. Voila! 

All those frameworks aim to explain designers’ tasks beyond pushing pixels in Figma, all of them are right, and they all equally frustrate designers with their oversimplifications. The frameworks explain the design process no better than a view from space helps to plan a road trip in Greece. The general direction would be clear, but serpentine roads snaking between mountains would be a surprise.

Product design is a complex process that doesn’t always pan out smoothly as you turn plans into reality. The time and effort required in each particular case are unpredictable, and the road to success is anything but a direct route between points A and B.

One model that seems to accurately convey the value of the creative process is the Design Squiggle by Damien Newman.

Product design is a never-ending process

Treat product design like a garden that needs constant care and attention — grass trimming, nurturing and pruning. As soon as you decide you are done with user experience, it starts getting overrun with weeds.

Without designers’ care, new features stack on top of each other, adding complexity to the design and decreasing the quality of the experience. In a couple of years, apps that turned into piles of features require urgent redesign, otherwise, they risk burying all the business under their rubble.

To build great products, designers constantly revise what has been already done. They build, measure and learn to create a better user experience and then measure again to find what can be improved. Closing a design process into a loop is the only possible way of creating a more meaningful, usable and stable product on a daily basis.

Wrapping up

Product design is a process that is human-centered, complex and never-ending. It’s not about making things pretty, but about making things work:

• Product design is about how users would discover a new product and its features.
• It’s about showing the product’s value in the most convincing way. 
• Product design determines how a product is going to react to users’ actions.
• It’s about how a product is going to compete for users’ attention with similar products.
• And about motivating customers to use the product more actively.
• Product design can figure out how to remove pain points from users’ journeys inside the product.
• And to turn those journeys into a pleasure.

If you like the product design explanation you’ve just read, you are going to like what we do in Eleken. Here are our case studies, if you want to verify this claim.