The SaaS industry has become one of the fastest-growing ones in recent years. Just imagine, in the USA alone, there are about 17,000 SaaS companies serving up to 59 billion customers across the world. So it’s no wonder that many SaaS startups seek ways to survive and thrive in such a competitive environment. But what can help them stand out?
As a SaaS design company, Eleken has worked on numerous SaaS projects, from agriculture to data analytics, and gained a lot of valuable experience. From our standpoint, it is a well-thought-out SaaS web design that can help young startups gain a competitive edge. In one of our recent videos, Ilya Dmytruk, the founder and CEO at Eleken, shares some insights into what is so special about SaaS UX design that requires a narrow specialist.
When some of our clients come to us, they request to “make it like Stripe” or some other popular SaaS solution. But creating an impressive SaaS web design is not about mimicking the best companies and copycatting their user interface. It is, first and foremost, about creating simple, easy-to-navigate, and user-friendly designs that combine functionality and aesthetics. Still, we can always learn from the best, so let’s see what helps successful SaaS businesses deliver exceptional web designs launch after launch.
What tactics do reputable SaaS websites employ?
In the recent McKinsey report, researchers uncovered that design-driven companies outperform industry benchmark growth by as much as two to one. The report highlights that user-centric design provides businesses with more opportunities than ever today. Leading companies appear to excel in these four areas:
- More than a product: embrace the power of user experience.
- More than a feeling: employ design metrics.
- More than a phase: follow an iterative process.
- More than a department: hire cross-functional talent.
Eleken designers agree that the above four clusters of design actions work well and are ready to share some SaaS web design practices to help every business become a top performer.
More than a product: embrace the power of user experience
SaaS websites' goal is to sell software to the user. Therefore, the designer's task here is to present the product in the most favorable light, namely to showcase all the advantages, highlight all the features, and show that your application is better than competitors.
As we mentioned, many of our clients are asking us to make their solution look like Stripe. But why do so many SaaS businesses look up to Stripe? The answer is clear: Stripe has a good combination of a user-friendly interface with consistent design elements like color schemes, font styles, and layouts across all solutions, as well as a professional team that promotes customer feedback.
In one of the interviews, Michael Siliski, the Business Lead at Stripe, said that one of the major principles in their design process is that they “really, really care” about user experience and put customers' needs first. This user-first approach encourages their team to search for the right balance between function, craft, and joy. One of Stripe’s designers shares an example of how everybody is involved with the product at all levels. The designer mentioned the case when the CEO didn’t like the result and wrote the needed code by himself.
Yes, most SaaS companies do acknowledge the value of user experience, but just like Stripe, it’s also important to know how you differentiate yourself through your UX.
Eleken use cases
Our UI/UX designer Dasha notes that the first step to differentiating yourself through UX is to maintain the same style across all visual components of the company. This means that the design of both your website and the SaaS product should be created by the same designer or agency. Such practice ensures that everything looks, feels, and sounds the same. As an example, let’s look at the case of SEOcrawl.
Aside from doing the platform overhaul, our designers helped the SEOcrawl team to create designs for various marketing campaigns aimed at attracting audiences.
When talking about designs for marketing purposes, we believe that they should not only include authentic visuals but also convey brand identity, emotion, persuasion, and, most importantly - trust. Let’s look at a sign-up landing page. It has it all: a contrasting headline, relevant visuals, social proof, as well as a clearly visible call-to-action button.
It’s great if designs for social media with headers and icons align with the overall style, so we did for SEOcrawl:
Also, we designed numerous easy-to-read email notifications and newsletters for different purposes, including a free trial activation newsletter or new comment notification.
Tamara, another designer at Eleken, also shared her insights with us. When she was designing Кірsi’s platform for accounting, consulting, and specialty law firms, she also created marketing materials for participating in the exhibition and creating a pitch deck.
The standard colors used in the accounting and financial fields are dark, restrained colors, usually blue shades. But Kipsi is a dynamic and young startup that is developing rapidly and introducing innovative ideas. To stand out from competitors, the client wanted to express this freshness in their style visually. So we used bright, vibrant, and youthful color palettes, such as fresh blue and purple. Here are some post examples Tamara created for LinkedIn:
This ensured consistency of the project's visual style in all communications, making a positive impression.
More than a feeling: employ design metrics
Successful SaaS companies don’t rely on opinions and personal preferences. The design is more than a feeling for them. They implement design metrics and measure the design in the same way as cost, quality, or time.
Design-driven companies link design to value, considering the entire customer journey and using the UX design metrics, like satisfaction ratings, usability assessments, field studies, A/B testing, and so on, to understand their user needs better.
Stripe is a master in user testing, empowering every employee to connect with users. For example, the company recommends following the “Make surveys about users, not about you” principle. This means UX researchers should avoid general requests, asking to help users to take the survey. Instead, it is better to explain to people why their answers will benefit them. For example, it will help fix a bug, improve the quality of service, or make the page more useful. Stripe offers this example of Rocket Rides, a demo for Stripe Connect, to illustrate this point:
As Eleken designers always want to remain user-focused, we constantly monitor user behavior and conduct usability testing. For example, while working on Kipsi, we measured the time users spend on the platform (Time on task metrics) and tracked the functions and tasks they use most often (Success Score). As a result of our effort, we extended functionality, adding a Product Tour function that helped new users navigate the interface.
Design metrics play an important role when talking about product redesign. For example, our clients from Refera, a web platform that allows doctors to create and send referrals, came to us to redesign a product’s landing page. They wanted to convey the feeling of trust and confidence, urging leads to leave an email address and book a demo. To achieve this goal, we conducted the user research. We found out that users have more trust when they see people with whom they will interact. So we placed a real doctor’s picture instead of illustrations to evoke trust. Our designer also suggested changing the blue color, often overused in medical design, to a calm green palette, as well as replacing outdated flat-style illustrations with more classical 3D images.
More than a phase: follow an iterative process
Many companies still consider the design phase as just one of the product development stages. Yet, design works best in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users. This is especially true for SaaS projects. When companies rely too much on one iteration, this can result in losing the customer's voice.
The Stripe designers follow a rapid iterative loop when they start their work by analyzing actual users’ needs and understanding their problems, and then designing the right product to solve them. The company calls this process “product shaping”, which means building “a rough solution to a concrete user problem” when it is strictly planned what to build and why.
At Eleken, we follow a similar process. Ilya, our CEO, explains that design is a process, not an event. Users’ needs and market expectations often change, so adjusting to the time and changing design is important.
For Eleken, the iterative process is quite effective because of its simplicity. The team follows a series of repetitive steps, improving and refining the product with each new cycle. Here are three stages of Eleken’s design process:
- Creation: Once the initial observation, research, and requirements have been gathered, Eleken designers analyze the first screens and discuss how they may work. Then, we create raw mockups and send them to the clients for approval.
- Testing: The clients share their ideas about what they like and what could be improved. Eleken designers gather the feedback and make the needed changes.
- Evaluation: We think of ways how to improve the mockups. Once the first iteration ends, the second starts. This process repeats until we get the result that satisfies everyone.
Let’s look at Kipsi’s design of documentation requests. The section navigation is simple and intuitive. But before it evolved to the version you see, it went through a number of approval cycles.
The first iteration of the flow for document requests did not include the ability to indicate that the request is not relevant or the document does not exist. During this iteration, we collected our client’s feedback and understood that this option was necessary. The second iteration already included this functionality.
More than a department: hire cross-functional talent
In a truly collaborative environment, there are no departments, titles, or assigned offices. Instead, there are cross-functional teams that work in tandem. All of them are focused on making a great product together to meet users’ needs.
Even though Stripe early invested in design, they were not immune to scaling up. In the beginning, they had a product-focused team. But for efficient scaling, they needed more cross-functional specialists to assist Stripe with storytelling, design research, content strategists, and so on. To address these challenges, Stripe built five teams with over 100 designers that focus on cohesion across all design disciplines, product design, operations of UX research, and many more.
In the current space, setting up central design departments or smaller independent design teams is no longer effective. McKinsey researchers found that the distributed teams are much more successful, as they have a clearer focus on their customers and can build better cross-functional partnerships. As a result, they are 10% faster to launch a product and have a 30% higher success rate when getting concepts to market.
But sometimes, companies struggle with having the right talent on board. TextMagic, a Nasdaq-listed SaaS company, managed to overcome this challenge by extending its team with our designers. They hired Eleken to design a platform, including designing marketing campaigns, CRM, and desk services functionality.
Eleken designers were always in touch with the TextMagic team. We had video calls with the product manager every other day and arranged demos to present the results of our work every one or two weeks as if our designers were in-house employees. Here is what Irene Avdus, PM at TextMagic, shared on Clutch:
The takeaway
Delivering excellent web designs has never been an easy task for SaaS companies. It remains especially difficult for companies that raise the bar on consumer expectations like Stripe.
But no matter the case, having a design team who deeply understands your product and the target customers is important. Eleken can provide you with the right SaaS design talent for your product, even if you have a narrowly-focused project that requires niche expertise. Jamie Conklin, VP of Product at Astraea, commented, “It is unusual to find a designer who has experience building applications with geospatial data - especially imagery data. We found that in Eleken.”
So if you want to develop your SaaS web design with a team who enjoys solving problems and has a high degree of autonomy, drop us a line.
Top Stories
Trickster Secrets to MVP Product Management
Once upon a time a young developer Marty spent nine months with his team building a product for IBM. Everything was going well, the product was looking stunning and the team received many praising comments on their hard work from stakeholders. However, when the team launched a product, they realized that customers weren’t rushing to use it. The reason was simple: no one actually needed this solution in the first place. Marty Cagan, now known as a guru of product management and the young developer we’re talking about, promised himself not to work ever again on products people do not need.
In his book Inspired, Cagan says the minimum viable product (or MVP) is one of the most important concepts in the product world. At the same time, he criticizes companies for dramatically misunderstanding what MVP is and spending too much time on it.
Okay, seems like there's some confusion around MVP. But for product managers working with MVP it's crucial to get it right and successully manage its development.
Eleken is a product design company focusing on SaaS. We have built several successful MVPs and worked along with talented product managers. In this article, we will talk on how you should manage your MVP and share some tips for product managers.
What is an MVP?
As you already know, MVP stands for a minimum viable product. MVP is a product with just enough functionality to satisfy early customers and provide feedback for future development.
The MVP methodology is closely tied to the Lean startup movement. The basic idea is that startups should build only what is needed to learn about their target audience and make it as quickly as possible. This helps avoid wasting extra resources while ensuring that the product meets real customer needs before further investment is made.
According to Eric Ries, the author ofThe Lean Startup book, a simple formula for an MVP is as follows:
"The minimum viable product (MVP) is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort."
MVP is an approach used by startups and entrepreneurs to determine if there's a market for their idea. It's also used by large companies as a way to test out new products before committing big dollars and resources to them.
When you want to define MVP, you may also bump into MLP or MMP terms.
As a product manager, you should distinguish these terms and we will quickly explain them below.
MLP stands for minimum lovable product and MMP - minimum marketable product. Both describe an MVP that you can take to the market and win your first customers while improving and developing your product.
For simplicity many people just say MVP and we will stick to it too in this article.
MVP in product management
MVP is not new, but it has become much more popular in recent years. It's easy to see why: an MVP helps you to test assumptions about your product quickly, cheaply, and with minimal risk, while simultaneously improving quality. So, less time spent, more nerves saved, customers are happy - great, right?
MVP management is a term that describes the process of building an MVP and managing the evolution of the product after its initial release. The MVP is built based on customer feedback and data analysis, instead of intuition or assumptions, so the product manager’s role is extremely important for companies building MVPs.
As a product manager, you can use the benefits of MVP we briefly mentioned above to test the following:
- The problem you're trying to solve for customers
- The features that will solve the problem
- How customers will respond to different features
- Your boldest assumptions about your product
Of course, it’s all fantastic and stuff, but without proper MVP product management, we won’t be able to achieve anything. But don’t worry and keep reading, as we are about to talk about some tips that will definitely come in handy.
Tips for MVP product management
Here’s what you, as a product manager, should do when working on a minimum viable product:
1. Learn the market
Before you start work on MVP with your team, learn your market. Good product managers are experts in their product niche. It gives them a thorough understanding of the field they work in and enables better product decisions and results.
2. Define your target audience
The first step in creating an MVP is defining your audience. This means identifying who will be using your product and what they want from it. It also means finding out what problems users are trying to solve with products or services similar to your future solution and how many users there are.
For example, if you're thinking about building an app for fitness enthusiasts, ask yourself these questions: What do fitness enthusiasts want from this app? How do they want their data tracked? What kind of workout routine do they need? And then get in touch with your audience and ask them these questions!
3. Listen to your users
When managing a minimum viable product, it is very important to hear real users’ feedback. Find out what users want rather than playing a guessing game regarding what they might need.
Get feedback from users on a specific product feature or usage scenario (for example, what they would like to see in your new mobile app). This can help you prioritize features based on user interest and needs rather than just what you think they'll want.
You can survey your potential customers to get more information about their needs and problems. If you already have some materials, run A/B tests where you compare two variants of design or features to see what your users respond better to.
4. Start with the MVP roadmap
To reach your goal painlessly, it’s the essential to plan all the milestones. It makes your MVP management less chaotic and reduces the risk of going off the road. Create a project plan, define what you are trying to achieve with your MVP, and write it down in your product roadmap.
5. Don’t forget about the value proposition
One of the important responsibilities of product managers is value proposition. Value proposition is a statement that communicates to the customer why they have to choose your product. The value proposition is the basis of your marketing and business development strategy. You may think it’s too early to shape the value proposition in the MVP stage, but we recommend starting early.
6. Keep the main thing the main thing
Stephen Covey, the author of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, coined the phrase “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. This is totally applicable to MVP management, where keeping the focus is crucial.
One of the biggest mistakes in MVP management is spending too much time and resources on things that don’t matter. A lot of product managers become obsessed with making a “perfect MVP” and end up missing their goals. As we said, MVP is a set of core features, so build only what’s necessary to prove your solution’s viability - this is your “main thing”.
Remember, your goal is not to create perfection, but to collect feedback and test your assumptions. So always keep your and your team’s focus on what’s the most important and resist the temptation to add extra features or overpolish your solution at the MVP stage.
7. MVP is a ready-made product, not a sketch
Here, everything is simple: MVP is not an idea of a product that will be released in the future, it’s a fully-functioning solution that customers can try and express their opinions. That leads us to the next tip.
8. Learn from users - share with the team
For any MVP one of the main goals is always to collect feedback from the users, analyze it, make conclusions and share it with the team. So the product you build would serve users’ needs and exceed their expectations.
In that sense, a product manager of MVP is kind of like a trickster, a mythological character, who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to challenge conventional behavior.
Trickster is also known as a “boundary-crosser” because he is multifunctional, travels between worlds of people and gods, and passes their messages to each other.
It is of course a joke. But modern product managers who need to be extremely creative, connect users and the product team, and be able to see the big picture, could learn a lot from folklore tricksters.
9. Brainstorm and collaborate to find the best solutions
We recommend trying the Double Diamond technique like we did to build an MVP for Cylynx, a no-code visualization platform. The client’s goal was to improve the existing demo’s interface and turn it into a full-fledged MVP so that individual users and corporations could start subscribing.
Technically, this MVP project wasn’t too hard to implement. But we wanted to provide intuitive and consistent UX, as well as effectively solve user problems. Close collaboration with the Cylynx team helped our designers create this amazing minimum viable product. You can find the whole story of this MVP design in the case study
10. Be flexible
Building MVP and being stubborn is not the best combination. Learn from your mistakes instead of trying again and again. Adapt, improve your product according to market needs, and don’t be afraid to pivot. The quicker you can find out something doesn't work, the less time wasted - both for you and your users!
11. Speed is the key
The startup world is rocket fast, so there’s no time for sleep. Most successful teams launch minimum viable products in weeks. It is often the case that teams build an “advanced” MVP for ages, and in the meantime competitors deliver a similar solution faster. Product managers should realize this risk and make sure the minimum viable product is deployed as soon as it is usable and all the crucial features are in place. The further improvements your team will do in future, no need to make things harder from the very beginning.
12. Acknowledge the power of product design
MVP should be minimalistic. But it doesn’t mean it can be poorly designed in the hope you improve it someday. Such an approach only leads to UX debt or even can influence how the market will see your product.
Check out the design we made for our client Habstash, MVP of a platform that helps people navigate their savings for new homes.
We worked together with Habstash product managers and started our design process by discussing the objectives of the project, both from a user and business perspective. Habstash team shared with us their user personas and materials for prototype. Our designers conducted their own user research as well. Based on all materials, we created MVP functionality with fresh user interface and intuitive user experience for desktop and mobile screens.
With this MVP Habstash will enter the market to validate their idea and collect feedback for the next iterations. What we can say about the Habstash team that they took their MVP design very seriously and it resonated with our approach.
Collaborate with designers closely to make sure your MVP highlights the features to end-users, and also has great UI/UX design. We guarantee that well-designed products have better performance metrics and have more chances to survive on the market. Looking for an experienced product designer to build your MVP? Don’t hesitate to contact Eleken!
10 Reasons Why Products Fail (So You Can Prevent It)
… really good teams assume that at least three quarters of the ideas won’t perform like they hope.
Marty Cagan
In articles on project management, you can find scary (and somewhat overused) statistics: 70% of projects fail “scary sounds”. When I saw it for the first time, I had many questions. What do they consider a failed project? Moreover, how do they define a project?
So, I started looking for the source. It turned out to be a research from 2010 by KPMG New Zealand, an accounting advisory company. They made a survey of “100 businesses across a broad cross section of industries”, and 70% of organizations reported that they have suffered at least one project failure in the prior 12 months.
Well, 100 businesses is not the most representative sample. And the research is a bit old. Does it mean that we shouldn’t worry about projects failing en masse? No, because believing that the situation has changed drastically since then would be too optimistic.
We are the Eleken design agency and we help businesses succeed. But in this article we’ll talk about how to survive the step that preceeds success, or in other words how not to fail (and show some examples of projects that failed).
How big is the probability of failure
Let’s get back to the infamous 70%. Why is this result so shocking? First reason: we had no idea about the success rate of projects. Second reason: the survivor bias.
We think that “people reach success when they work hard enough” because that’s what Hollywood tells us. At the same time, failure stories are much less popular genre because new products that failed don’t become famous and don’t have that voice. We see the survivors, while the non-survivors remain invisible.
Even when you think of failure stories, the most known ones are from famous people who reached success and then tell a story of their old failures, proving the rule of “working hard enough”.
To get away from the biases, let’s take a look at the statistics.
A more recent study from PwC (2014) overlooked 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries. The result showed that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects.
But the projects that don’t fail still often get the results that are far from the plan. A research by McKinsey and the University of Oxford found that “large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted”. All of the 5,400 IT projects in the study had initial budgets over $15 million, so imagine how big these 45% were.
These numbers prove that the problem with failures is real. Whether it already happened to you or not, it’s time to understand why products fail and how to prevent it.
What are the reasons of product failure?
When looking through PwC research, I stumbled upon this picture showing cases of expensive project management mistakes. It shows the reasons like “failure to apply AML procedures” and IT “glitch”. Among them, there are even the wrong trains purchase.
It’s a story about how SCNF, French state train company, purchased new trains worth 15 billion euros and then found out that they are too wide for some old stations and simply can’t fit there. To fix this, they had to invest in renovation of these stations, spending over €50 million.
What does this failure story teach us?
Everybody fails sometimes. And the reason to that can be anything.
However, it makes sense to go through the most common reasons of IT products failure. These are the ones we can learn from and increase the chances of success.
Marty Cagan wrote a book Inspired. How to create tech products customers love, where, among other, he described ten root causes of product failure. Each of them is related to a phase in product development, as seen on this picture.
- Idea. The product starts with an idea, and the failure can start with an idea, too. When it is sourced from top to down, without team participation, it is likely to miss this initial validation phase.
- Business case. It’s made to plan the financial questions and prevent failures, right? The problem with business case at this stage, however, is that nobody knows how long will it take, how much will it cost, and how much money it will bring. That’s why making a business case without any real data is worse than not making one.
- Product roadmap. Similar to the previous one, the roadmap at this stage is an overestimating of one’s ability to see the future. What most product managers don’t want to see in the future is that half of their ideas won’t work and even those that work will need some iterations to get to the point that we can call success.
- Gathering and documenting requirements is a job of product managers. The root of failure here is that many don’t understand that product manager’s role is much more than that (read our article on product management to find out more).
- Role of design is another thing that is underestimated and misunderstood often. When designers are given a ready solution to create an interface for it, there is little they can do to make the product itself better. To make sure that design works on the success of the product, read our article on product designer role.
- Engineers are involved too late. To create a product that is truly innovative and user-oriented, both designers and engineers have to be involved in the process at the early stages.
- Agile… is also involved too late. As it is often believed to be a framework for developers team mainly, the development stage is when it starts to work. But when introduced only at the stage of development, it brings only 20% of potential value it could bring if started earlier.
- Project-centricity. It’s a logical and comfortable situation for companies to think of their work in terms of projects. The problem here is that projects are outputs, while products need outcomes. As was said earlier, a finished project doesn’t equal success.
- Customer validation happens in the end of the process. Which means that after all the design and development, the project might come to a conclusion that… the idea doesn’t work and customers don’t like it. And they have to start all over again. That’s why testing and validation should happen as early as possible — to decrease the sunk cost.
- Where did the time go? Wasted. As well as all the wonderful things that could have been done during this time. That’s what is called opportunity cost: the time spent on the projects that were likely to fail. When tested earlier and changed earlier, there would have been less time spent in vain.
Product failure examples
Let’s see some real-life examples of product failures. And who do you think have many stories of failures to tell? Industry giants! If you want to learn from successful companies, it’s good to learn from their failures, too.
Tesla Motors
This company has a long track of failures. Tesla’s history was constantly accompanied by huge delays and overruns, worsened by the crisis of 2008, and recalling the cars twice for errors in engineering. A cherry on top was when Tesla’s new car, which claimed to have armoured glass, had this very glass broken during the presentation, when the head of design hit it with a metal ball.
This story is about how tech challenges paired with errors in project management can cause problems for a company (and how state loans can solve them, but that’s a story for another day).
Facebook Home
A new app from Facebook appeared when the company was already leading the world of social media. The app was supposed to make Facebook feed more accessible (as if it was too hard to get before). It was placed literally on the main screen when it was blocked.
The app immediately received lots of negative feedback. The addictive nature of social media was already a problem for many, and Facebook Home app could only worsen the situation. I never had a chance to use it, but can imagine the constant “doorway effect” that it must have produced. The product failed because it wasn’t properly validated with customers.
MoviePass
A story of how gaining millions of customers can cause harm to business when the pricing is wrong. MoviePass, a movie subscription service (real movies in real cinema theaters), decided to make a flat rate subscription of $9,95 per month.
As a consequence, the number of users rised to three millions, but soon the company realized that the business case was not viable. They tried to fix it by limiting movies and rising the price, but the subscribers just dropped the service and it had to shut down later.
Google Glass
When Google Glass appeared in 2013, it was a huge innovation and nobody could predict that it wouldn’t be successful. Yet, for a number of reasons, it wasn’t a success on the market. There were a few reasons for that: high price, privacy issues, wrong positioning, and simple failures in performance.
In the end, the product failed in mass usage, but worked for enterprises. Correcting the positioning and improving the product was helpful.
How to avoid product failure
Facebook, Google, Tesla… Examples of product failures include many famous names. It can be somehow comforting to know that world’s biggest enterprises fail just like the others. Occasional failures are something that all people and companies have in common.
The difference is the cost of failure. For such giants as Facebook and Google, a failed product is a sad case, but it’s just a drop in the ocean. For a newly established company, a failure can be fatal. When you don’t have spare millions of investment money, you have to be careful and learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid the most common pitfalls.
And if you want to get a failure-proof design, get in touch with our product design experts.
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