4 Big SaaS UX Mistakes Beginners ALWAYS Make 🚫

0:00in working with hundreds of startups at Tiny Seed I've noticed a pattern their ass SAS apps will have great conversions with their sales funnels but their monthly churn stops them from Gaining real traction so they don't see the grow at the rate they ought to so I sat down with a few and I started looking at their apps and I discovered that quite simply their user experience was rough in this video I'm going to show you the four user experience mistakes otherwise known as ux that I often see an early stage SAS and the ways you can fix each of them and if you stick around to the

0:29end I'll give you the one key to finding out which parts of your app are frustrating your customer before we dive into the four mistakes I think it's worth distinguishing the difference between user experience and user interface design simply your user interface is how your app looks and your user experience is how your app works they often go hand inand as your interface is going to dictate how your app works but the user experience is specifically working on the steps your customer is using to go through your app and making that experience better all right let's dive in mistake number one delaying customer activation you want to

1:02help any brand new customer feel successful with your product as fast as possible and the two ways you can screw this up is by either having no onboarding just throwing your customer straight into the product without any help or having too many onboarding steps which can add friction into the process identify the simplest thing that your customer could do to use your product end so they can feel successful and have simple onboarding when they use the product for the first time to guide them to that activation moment for example if your app requires someone to add information first so it can be useful like customer information and addresses

1:33you want to guide folks to that step you don't want your customers to sign into your app log into their dashboard and think what am I supposed to do here if they think that they're far more likely to turn you can use things like a progress bar welcome messages product tours and Tool tips but again you can overdo this make sure the steps aren't too complicated think to yourself what are the minimum things that you can do to help your customer feel some sort of success and usefulness from your app and emphasis on minimum we don't want our c customers that feel like they have a

2:00thousand steps to do as they'll also increase turn since your customers will be just overwhelmed so to fix this create a customer activation strategy identify the minimum effort needed by your customer to feel successful and use that to create helpful onboarding that your customer will see when they enter the app this leads to my next user experience mistake your app lacks Clarity once your customer is in and activated and you have them doing that one thing you want them to do you want to make sure your your customer can continue to use your app I worked with so many Founders who have a really great app with a ton of features but if those

2:32features are all equally shown it can be overwhelming yes your app can do this it can do this and it could do this but maybe only 10% of your users use a certain feature for the other 90% that feature is useless and it's cluttering things up can you simplify your interface to hide that feature for most customers but still have to be found and used by those who need it you want to clarify the purpose of your app not complicated while it's attempting to show everything your app can do an overcrowded UI will be overwhelming so prioritize and highlight the most essential features a good amount of your

3:03time or the time of your designer should be spent on figuring how to add visual hierarchy to your app so the things that are used by the most folks is are prominently shown and the things that are used by power users are perhaps less prominently shown but still findable this might look like sections some that are shown by default and some that are collapsed or maybe a setting that power users can toggle to show more advanced features in essence prioritize showing things are used most often and find clever ways to move Advanced features to their own section so folks don't get overwhelmed by options a cleaner app is

3:35easier to use and that leads to my next user experience mistake you've created ways to move information around your app but in doing that you have broken established user experience patterns we all know that websites have certain patterns that are used to you know logo in the top left navigation in the top right maybe a sidebar going along the side if you want to be different and move information to a place where people don't expect it like navigation in a floating section that adars to the bottom of the page rather than the top you should expect that folks will not see it and will not use it so when

4:04you're looking to move features around perhaps doing some clever hiding of fan features to simplify your interface look at what other people are doing look at your competitor look at other apps look at things that are similar to yours see what they're doing and don't reinvent the wheel copy good user experience patterns while Innovation is good stick to established design patterns in the SAS world that users are familiar with you will hinder usability and likely increase your turn if you stray too far from these established patterns without a very good reason last but not least the biggest mistake I see that fat SAS Founders make is not taking in or

4:38ignoring feedback from their users you are the expert in your app you know where everything is and you know how to do everything your customers especially brand new customers do not collect their feedback track user experience issues watch someone use your app all this will give you valuable insight into how people are using your app it'll probably surprise you and it'll help you break out of the pre-established Notions and help you you build a better working product look at your support requests are people complaining they can't find a very important feature this might be because there's too many options in their way and you have to clarify the

5:08interface to make the feature easier to find are people signing up doing nothing and then canceling their account you probably need to work on your activation and help your customers through the interface find what they need and maybe add like a product tour or tool tips at the very least save your emails with user experiened feedback so that you can track how many times an issue comes up so let's talk about unlocking your customer frustrations with usability tests this can be really simple if you have a chance to be with a customer in person ask them to sign up and while going through onboarding and using your

5:39app have them speak out loud their thoughts and experiences leave your ego at the door don't say anything don't guide or influence them in any way or defend your decisions you need to have uninfluenced data to know where your problems are you could probably do this over Zoom or maybe have a customer do a loom recording for you but I would recommend to do this in person if possible so you can watch their cursor see where their eyes are going and get a feel for their body language as they're using your app do a few of these and after a few patterns will show up maybe

6:06everyone struggles when they get to your settings page and they don't know how to change something maybe they have a confusing moment after they upload customer information and they have to think about what to do next maybe that's a place where your app can guide them along to the next step in the process to wrap it all up all the hard work you put into build your app and draw customers in with sales and marketing is useless if your product is hard to use you can make your product easier to understand by simplifying your interface by not overwhelming your customers with features making sure that your new

6:34customers feel successful and by guiding them through their first experience of your app and creating that activation goal by using established user experience patterns so folks more naturally know how to find things and above all watching people use your app so you can truly see how people use it without your own biases as the Creator getting your user experience styed in is always an ongoing process but it's only one part of design you want to make sure you check out this next video to learn the user experience and interface mistakes I see all too often in SAS thank you for watching