S1E1 – UI/UX DESIGN, IMPORTANCE & BEST PRACTICES WITH PETER LOVING
UI/UX DESIGN, IMPORTANCE & BEST PRACTICES.
Welcome to growing a B2B Saas! This show is not like any of the other startup podcasts. On this show, you will get actionable and usable Advice; you will hear about all aspects of growing a business to a business software company, customer success, sales, funding, exits, scaling, and everything you need to know about growing a company with SaaS. You will get it from someone going through the same journey.
In this first episode, we will cover how to grow your B2B Saas no matter the stage you are in. If you want to grow your SaaS podcast in the long run, you will need a product that people love and, more importantly, know how to use. We start the show by talking about UX/UI, and the best person to dissect this subject matter with is Peter Loving. He knows everything about building intuitive, easy-to-use products and converting sign-ups into paying clients.
Our guest Peter clearly spells out his credentials and why you need to afford him a listening ear as he discusses all things UX/UI. Can you draw the border between these two tech words often used interchangeably? Peter helps us to decipher the meaning and difference between these two design slangs. He shares with us what he regards as the genesis point and ending of UX in SaaS. Appropriately, he illuminates the process of improving your UX/UI.
In this pilot episode, our guest shares free advice to both beginner and established B2B SaaS companies. Peter loops in the metrics to measure the success of design efforts in UX/UI as well as the best time for a company to seek the services of a B2B SaaS agency.
Towards the conclusion, Peter denotes the need to learn how UX/UI design can deliver more value for your company. In general, this first episode of the B2B Saas podcast is filled with helpful information pertaining to UX/UI. You can count on enriching your knowledge after listening. Enjoy.
Key Timecodes
- 1:41) Why you should listen to Peter
- (2:51) The difference between UX and UI (user experience and aesthetics)
- (5:21) What he loves about SaaS
- (7:10) Why he transitioned from traditional industrial product design to the virtual SaaS
- (8:45) What are the common mistakes most B2B SaaS companies make
- (14:08) What is a design system in B2B SaaS?
- (15:11) The starting and ending point of UX in SaaS
- (17:08) Steps for improving your UX
- (19:30) Metrics to measure the success of design efforts in B2B Saas
- (24:39) The best time for a company to seek a B2B SaaS agency
- (28:06) Advice to beginner B2B Saas companies pre-revenue
- (30:48) Advice to revenue-making SaaS companies
Transcription
00:00 – Joran Hofman
Welcome to the first episode of this podcast. In this podcast, we’ll cover all topics on how to grow your B2B SaaS, no matter in which state you are in, if you want to grow your SaaS stuff in the long term, you’ll definitely need a product people love and maybe more importantly, know how to use. This is why we’re going to start with our show. We’re talking about UX and UI. I personally don’t know a better person to do this than with Peter Loving. He knows everything about building products which are intuitive, and easy to use, and are converting sign-ups into paid clients. Currently living in Barcelona. Founder of User Active, a UX and UI design agency. And he’s organizing SaaSdarg local in Barcelona. His free time personally met him a couple of times last year and they were all on SaaS events we attended.
01:19 – Joran Hofman
So, without further ado, welcome to the show, Peter.
01:23 – Peter Loving
Thanks for having me yarn. Thanks for the intro. I’m excited to speak with you. Glad to be your first guest, too.
01:30 – Joran Hofman
Thank you. One thing I always ask myself, as in when I listen to a podcast, is why should I listen to this person? I’m just going to ask you a blunt question. Why should people listen to you today?
01:42 – Peter Loving
Yeah, sure. It’s a great question. I’ve worked within SaaS for 15 plus years and I’ve always been coming from the angle of product design. I studied product design in university and then I’ve also designed hundreds of SaaS products. I started consulting essentially as a product designer and over time decided to focus on delivering that service as an agency, growing an agency. What we do is consult with B2B SaaS companies every day on how to improve their products so that they can deliver the best customer experiences possible and design products that their users will love, basically. We spend all day, every day looking at SaaS, designing SaaS, and living and breathing SaaS products. I’ve seen a lot of challenges and problems that come up when designing and building SaaS. I’ve worked on resolving and solving these problems for a wide range of different companies in sectors, all within SaaS.
02:50 – Peter Loving
Hopefully, I am in a good position to help people that are on their journey to building their SaaS products.
The difference between UX and UI
02:55 – Joran Hofman
I know you are, but just for the listeners out there who don’t know you yet, let’s start today with the basics. So, UX and UI, what is the difference before we start digging in deeper?
03:08 – Peter Loving
Yeah, it’s a good question, an excellent place to start. UX stands for User Experience, and that’s related to everything around the experience. How the user experiences your product, how they use it, the functionality, how the product is structured, how features are presented, how they work, and how workflows operate through the product. It’s what makes the product intuitive. I like to do an analogy with physical construction between this. You can think of UX as a kind of architecture drawing out the blueprint of a building, the plans, where are the doors, and how do they relate to other areas in the building. Is the kitchen near other convenient spaces, like where you might be eating? For instance, our fire exits are conveniently located in a place where everybody can get to them. This is how people experience physical space. UI is really around the aesthetic, the look, and feel. It communicates personality, it communicates the brand of a company.
04:26 – Peter Loving
It also provides the aesthetic something that gives the product a certain finesse so that it gives it a good impression to new users. I liken this to say the construction and decoration phase of a building. If you’re thinking about UX as your architecture, then UI is like your interior designers and decorators coming in once the building is constructed and they’re making it look beautiful and feel beautiful for a place for people to spend their time living or working. That’s quite a fairly good analogy I like to use to explain that concept.
05:03 – Joran Hofman
Yeah. I think this is one people now understand. Like, if they listen to this, then they know what is going to be the difference. I like it.
05:10 – Peter Loving
Yeah. In terms of practical sense, I can go just one step more to give practical sense is that the actual tools we’re doing in UX are things like wireframing, scoping, thinking about the structure of navigation, and then also understanding users, interviewing them, doing different UX exercises to understand their requirements. In UI, what we’re working with is color palettes, space, typography interactions, what happens and what we present, and how we do that. Those are the kind of different tools that you’d be using in each of those stages.
05:54 – Joran Hofman
Nice.
05:55 – Peter Loving
Thanks.
05:56 – Joran Hofman
In the intro you gave, you mentioned a lot of SaaS. SaaS. You do everything in SaaS. You have experience in SaaS. You purely focus on BTB SaaS, if I’m not mistaken. Why? What do you love about SaaS?
06:10 – Peter Loving
Yeah, so I’ve always found the process of designing products very interesting. That comes from identifying a problem or something that you could do better or improve for a specific demographic or group of people. The process of creating something from scratch is a way to do something better and provide people with a functional product that improves their life or their workflow or an aspect of their day-to-day tasks. I’ve always found that process interesting, and stimulating. There’s a combination of problem-solving, creativity, and ingenuity, and often innovating, but there’s also a technical element to it, almost like engineering. We need to think about how these things are built and how to design so that they’re not only easy to build, but also the usability operates too. I’ve always seen this as a combination of your typical artistic side of design and then your engineering or technical side of design.
07:27 – Peter Loving
For me, that’s been a perfect balance and I was quite interested in that from a fairly early age. I was fortunate enough to know that was something I wanted to study. I study product design, and in university that was around consumer products. 3D products that we might have in the home, things like iPhones or MP3 players, but that translates really well to the web. As I was doing some web design in my early career, I became attracted to working on products because just the nature of the problems and the challenges that you have throughout that process are really stimulating.
08:10 – Joran Hofman
Yeah, but I guess with SaaS you can’t touch it, right? So you talk about physical products. With SaaS, we’re just creating something on the screen. I guess. One more question to dive a bit deeper. Why? I guess something you can’t touch versus something you can touch.
08:27 – Peter Loving
Yeah. Interesting. Well, I kind of transitioned because it was more a practical choice at the time, but also what was happening in the industry. So physical or industrial product design? A lot of times you’re working in an R and D center, research and design, or you’re working near manufacturing. Just for practical reasons, I studied in Cardiff, in Wales, and when I finished university, I went back to London, which is my hometown. A lot of the early-stage careers required you to relocate to somewhere in Europe or Asia where there’s a lot of manufacturing for consumer products. At that time, first of all, I wanted to be back home in London. I really enjoyed the lifestyle in London at the time when I finished university. Also, what was happening in tech was very fascinating because Facebook had just started to become famous and LinkedIn and these kinds of platforms were emerging and making the web a very interesting space to work.
09:38 – Peter Loving
Firstly, it was a practical reason, but secondly, my interest was piqued by digital tech and the innovation happening there. Once I realized that the skills are very transferable for a product designer, between the physical products and then obviously digital, I was really set to kind of make that transition. I was quite captivated by what was happening in the web.
What are the common mistakes most B2B SaaS companies make
10:05 – Joran Hofman
Nice. Well, let’s continue on the web. Purely focused on B2B SaaS, I guess, for people listening, and if they’re not going to listen to the entire show, what do they need to take away? What are the most common mistakes you see companies make with UX and UI?
10:22 – Peter Loving
Yeah, this is a really great question. I’ve seen quite a lot. For early stage B to B SaaS companies, one thing I see happening a lot is that the teams are predominantly technical. They might be a developer co-founders, that might be two developers or a developer and a marketer, something like this and they will start building a product without product designers or that expertise and it can be a good way to start. You have to start with your strengths and what resources you have available. What tends to happen is that if the product gains some traction and then you’re continuously building on this product when you have the resource to bring in a product. Designer a lot of the product needs reworking to make it more intuitive and to improve the way features are presented and the workflows that users take through the product.
11:25 – Peter Loving
It’s not necessarily a mistake in terms of something that people can change because you have to build what you have in the beginning, especially if you’re bootstrapping a startup but it just means that there’s some work that’s going to be coming down the line if you want to improve the UX and UI of your products. That’s one a very common place for issues to occur is in Onboarding. I like to focus onboarding quite a lot because it’s the first impression users have of a product and it has a lasting impact. Mistakes I see in SaaS onboarding is often not presenting your strongest features enough, also not giving the user some form of orientation so presenting the product, showing them around the product, how to use it, introducing all the features and this lends itself towards activation. Really what you’re trying to do is get your user to get activated and start using your features and benefiting from them.
12:29 – Peter Loving
Another mistake I’ve seen Onboarding is not enough focus leading the user on this journey towards activation. Sometimes there are too many choices for what they can do so it can be overwhelming and sometimes they aren’t given enough information so they’ll land in a product and they’re thinking oh what do I do next? Kind of thing. Onboarding is a big one where I see mistakes and then typical areas that can hurt a SaaS company are not having workflows around the product experience that help, firstly, the user get more value and secondly, the SaaS company to benefit from all the work that they put into acquisition. This might be something like having an upgrade flow. Quite often I see products without a good journey, without a good user journey to help users upgrade or add new seats or pay for more usage or even just the workflows of their day to day tasks.
13:38 – Peter Loving
Sometimes they’re not intuitive so that’s another common mistake I see and one more I could touch on is around it relates to both of these topics but it’s activation of features. One thing that we design for a lot for new users especially is empty states. Say you have a bunch of features in your product when a user signs up for the first time they don’t really have data in their account, it’s a common problem that they’re coming into an empty account. What we like to do is to design for empty states. We explain what the feature does, we explain how it would look like if it’s busy, we explain what it would help them with and we encourage and guide them through the process of getting started using that feature. We give them a call to action and a process to go step through step to get that feature activated.
14:34 – Peter Loving
Quite often you’ll see in early-stage SaaS that you’ll have blank screens and they’re not really populated with a good empty state for users. That’s quite a common mistake we see. It just means that you miss an opportunity to really guide a user through having success on your product.
14:54 – Joran Hofman
I can relate to a lot of these issues, I guess starting with the first one, as in firstly being bootstrapped. We indeed made the mistake that went with one code for front end and back end, and we’re now in this migration process where we have to separate both of them, which is a hassle. Went with what we got, which was a back-end developer who knew how to front-end a bit, but he did it in one code language where now we’re just two months migrating basically to two separate entities. That gets back in the front end.
What is a design system in B2B SaaS?
15:26 – Peter Loving
Yeah, these are the kind of challenges that occur. It means you’re going back sometimes and reworking something in order to, later on, have it more scalable or make more steps forward. This challenge that you encountered on the technical side of your two code bases for the front and back end we also have a similar issue that can occur with product design because relating to design systems. If we design a product without using a design system, sometimes inconsistencies in the UI can build up over time and then later on you might get to a point where you can introduce a design system and then that means you have to kind of go back and retrospectively update the UI with your new design system. It’s an analogy that can happen in design too and it’s something to be aware of. I mean, if you have product design and resources on your team from the beginning, it’s great to start by using a design system so that it enables you to scale and work more efficiently as you keep on building the product.
16:37 – Joran Hofman
Yeah, nice. And maybe really practical. When you say design system, what exactly do you mean? Meaning the typography, the fund, those kinds of things, right?
16:49 – Peter Loving
Yeah. A design system will be a whole set of rules around how to design components and really what you’re ending up with is a consistent set of rules that you can apply to every time you’re designing something. We work in Figma and we’ll often use design systems in Figma. They can be custom-built by product designers, but famous design systems might be something like Material UI which has a whole set of components that have been built based on the design guidelines and specs. The spec covers everything around the use of color, spacing between elements, what borders look like, all of the different hover states, the set of icons, and the typography. It really is a guideline for everything around the design, look and feel of the product.
17:49 – Joran Hofman
Nice. Yeah, great. Thank you. When you mentioned the common mistakes, where you talked about onboarding, you talked about activation, you talked about upgrading. You touch a lot of things within the app, right? Like, where, in your opinion, does UX start and where does it actually end?
18:12 – Peter Loving
Yeah, I think UX starts from the absolute beginning. Whether you are consciously working on it or not, you’re creating an experience for your users. If you’re applying skilled UX principles from the beginning, it’s like the very first interaction that your user has with your product. I think things need to start with UX. If you’re building a business from scratch, you have some work that comes before that, knowing the industry, understanding the problem, and understanding the addressable market for the product you’re building. There’s a lot of business theory and knowledge, but once you get moving on to designing solution, I think UX is stalling. There your very first wireframe of an MVP, your very first kind of sketches. This is already UX work. I think that’s where it starts. Really, if you’re working on a product, UX never ends. Because what happens in product design work is that you’re always iterating.
19:23 – Peter Loving
Products constantly are growing in SaaS. Over the lifetime of a product, new features are introduced, and features are upgraded. Sometimes features become obsolete and they are retired from a product. Even as products scale, you get this other thing. The largest SaaS companies in the world start to fragment their product up into different categories. You’ll see this with something like Salesforce and HubSpot. They’ll have a sales platform, a marketing platform, and they start to have packages for different use cases. Originally, the product was one thing, but it grew so big they could start segmenting it and marketing it to different audiences. Product evolution never really stops, and I think there’s always a very critical role for UX within SaaS.
20:18
Joran Hofman
Yeah, no, I 100% agree, and I think that goes really well into my next question. So UX never stopped, right? You always keep evolving, you always keep improving. Let’s say I want to start basically improving my UAX. Like, where do I start and is there, like, a certain process I should follow? Are there steps you would recommend for people to really start teaching the UX for the platform right now?
20:46
Peter Loving
Yeah. This is a really interesting error because it varies from case to case. Every company has a unique set of challenges, and they’re in a different situation or life cycle in their product. It’s really important to understand what your priorities are, what you’re trying to achieve, and what are the biggest pain points for you and your product. I get to speak with a company that’s interested in doing this, we always find out what is the highest priority, what is the thing that’s either preventing you from selling more or that’s causing pain and preventing your existing customers from getting more value? When we look at those biggest pain points, usually that’s a good place to start and address those. Examples I can give you might be a SaaS company that’s been operating for ten plus years, and the product is starting to look dated. They haven’t refreshed the UI for a long time, and now there are competitors in the space.
21:55
Peter Loving
As SaaS is getting to be a very competitive space, and they might have funding, they might have a new, cleaner, sexier UI. They’re more attractive to prospects and users that they’re selling to. For this company, one of their priorities is to upgrade the UI in order to provide a better representation of their product and convert more and sell more, have a better perception in the marketplace. In other cases, it can be that there’s some problem within the product. There’s some area that existing users are having problems with. A feature has been built and it’s advanced and it has a lot of capability, but maybe it’s not the most intuitive, even if the UI is modern. We’d go back and look at, okay, how do we make this product more intuitive and roll out a kind of update to the UX, keeping that same feature set, but just really improving it for existing users and making it easier to adopt.
23:06
Peter Loving
So that’s how I’d approach that. I always say you’re looking for the biggest pain points. You’re also looking for what makes most sense commercially. You’re trying to grow a SaaS business and provide as much value as you can to your users. Anything that’s going to immediately have an impact on that is a really strong place to start.
Metrics to measure the success of design efforts in B2B Saas
23:25
Joran Hofman
Yeah, and I really like that you look at it from that perspective. I mean, that’s, of course, the most important we do in sales, right? Generating money, recurring revenue, or annual recurring revenue. You talk about selling more, creating value, but one follow up question on this, let me rephrase. How do you measure, I guess, the success of your changes? What metrics do you follow?
23:51
Peter Loving
Yeah, good metrics do you follow on this can be revenue based, but it can sometimes be difficult to derive monetary value on design work. Sometimes it’s not as tangible as that. If you’re doing things like improvements to onboarding or upgrade flows or features that can be considered premium or paid for, then you might be looking at conversion metrics. How many users upgraded from free trial to a paid plan. Did that conversion increase during the free trial period? That’s a really good metric to follow. If you have something like a CRM or a workflow management or project management software, then collaboration plays a big role in those kind of platforms. Have you been able to enable users to invite team members and other people that they work with to collaborate with, and how did that impact their accounts? Was their account expansion there? So that’s another revenue thing.
25:05
Peter Loving
If they had more seats and they’re paying for more users, then if we designed a workflow to let them do that easily, did that workflow have an increase in conversions, on account expansion, things like that? You can also measure, did you reduce churn? If your churn rate, then you implement improvements in your app based on feedback and you look at how that has affected churn rate or lifetime value, things like that. Other ways to do it that don’t relate to just revenue might be utilization metrics. They’re great things to get a gauge in terms of how much usage people are getting from your platform and how much value they’re getting. If you had a team who are there every time you have a team signing up and starting to use your product, but they don’t engage and activate very much and it takes a long time for them to adopt the product.
26:07
Peter Loving
If you roll out some UX improvements, are they starting to log more sessions, are they staying in those sessions for longer? Are they completing more tasks and are they activating features more quickly? Utilization metrics are a really good indicator on value and how well your new users are adopting the platform.
26:34
Joran Hofman
Yeah, 100% agree. I think every company should have a North Star metric. Not just, I guess, focusing on Monday recurring revenue, but also have a metric in mind which aligns with the value your clients should be getting from the platform. Just to give an example, like ours is related to the MRR our clients are generating. All those things indeed have to happen, but in the end they need to generate money. Like that’s the thing. Before that we need to optimize all the flows, all the conversions, et cetera.
27:04
Peter Loving
This is a really nice metric because it’s not making it about you, right? It’s making your users and you’re increasing MRI for them. The more that you can do that, the more you’re obviously delivering value, so you’re incentivized to work on their benefit. And that’s a really good one. We worked with a client recently, a CRM, who their North Star metric was number of messages sent by each user. Our design work became focused around making the messaging function easier to use, promoting it more around the product from the dashboard, from the navigation or contextually wherever they are in the app. It’s a good example of how North Star metric can just focus you on the value that your users are getting and then you’re always working towards improving that.
27:58
Joran Hofman
Yeah, I really like it and it’s a good addition because I would definitely recommend, before indeed you start these projects to have a North Star metric. What is the value your clients are actually looking for? They’re not looking to use your tool, they’re looking to get an outcome out of it. Define the outcome, put your notch on metric against it and then help them to get there.
28:21
Peter Loving
Yeah, that’s right. At early stage, when people becoming interested in SaaS, it can be that they’re interested to the business model of SaaS, which means, oh, it would be great to have a business with recurring revenue. I want a business with recurring revenue. Right. If you develop that mindset, you forget that actually the focus is delivering value to customers. If you focus on that, recurring revenue can and may come. Focusing on getting recurring revenue, I think it’s the wrong mindset. The North Star can help you keep you focused on delivering value.
29:00
Joran Hofman
Exactly. You see a lot of companies who just want to make money without actually giving or keeping in mind that they do need to have a product which people really like and get value from.
29:11
Peter Loving
Yeah, people underestimate how difficult it is to build a product that delivers value but actually build the SaaS. I think that’s quite a common misconception.
29:21
Joran Hofman
We’re definitely going to have other podcasts which are going to be more related to that. You talked about a lot of things already, right. Like, I can imagine you’re not coming into every company, especially as an agency. Give me an idea what would be the best company or what would be the best time for a company to reach out like an ACC like yourself to get help on board.
29:47
Peter Loving
We’re really well positioned to help companies transition between building a product when they’re in that found a stage, and they have technical farmers, and they’ve taken it up to a point where they might have an engineering team, but they haven’t ever had design in their product. They have revenue and potentially have funding as well. Because during early stage bootstrap, generally, there’s not the resource to pay for agencies to work with. It can be that someone on the founding team is taking a product role or you’re working with freelancers on kind of project based occasions to help with design. Where we come in is really when there’s a real need to improve the product experience, make it more intuitive and just give them that competitive advantage once you’ve gone past that early startup stage. A typical client for us looks like a team of around ten to 30 people.
31:01
Peter Loving
They are quite technically focused. The product is functional and it looks really good, but it just hasn’t been designed ever by a product designer. We can make a lot of big improvements and that’s a time where there’s a lot of wins, particularly if there are existing customers. The other thing that happens quite often is that we’ll design a product from the ground up. It might be an enterprise or corporate company that is launching a product within their business and they’re not necessarily going through a typical funding route, but they have revenue and they have a very clear spec of what they need and the problem that it solves.
31:40
Joran Hofman
Yeah. Definitely not early stage, but after that stage where they have money, have clients, and they can make the wins on whatever you’re going to change is going to have an impact basically on what is happening within the product.
31:53
Peter Loving
Yeah, that’s right. What I’ve also found is that not necessarily later stage two because after series A, series B, usually companies have an internal product design team. Now they might need some support, which we could help with, but really they’re typically they’ve got these resources in house so that they maybe have the preference to do this in house. It’s not the very early stage and not the later stages. Like that kind of just before the middle sweet talk.
32:26
Joran Hofman
Well, I really like that you have your ICP really clearly defined. That’s one thing I guess I would always recommend to people listing, have your ICP, have your nostal metric and then exactly what you need to focus on.
32:38
Peter Loving
Yeah, it really helps and sometimes you learn that through trial and error over time. I wasn’t always so clear on who that was until I started to find the customers that really needed us. When I profiled them, they would start to have very similar profiles in terms of stage of their business in this current situations and it really helped me to refine and focus. Okay. We’re really focused on these and then build our service to make the most impact with that profile.
33:13
Joran Hofman
Exactly. It can change over time, but having it clearly defined is definitely going to help you with the acquisition as well. As you mentioned, like it’s really easy then to find those companies in the same state with the same characteristics. That is fine.
33:29
Peter Loving
Yeah. That’s it. That’s it. Yeah.
33:30
Joran Hofman
Completely nice. We talk about user experience in general and we’re just going to cut it up into different stages like what kind of advice would you give SaaS founders when they’re just starting out, maybe pre revenue? What kind of advice would you give.
33:48
Peter Loving
To those in terms of building a good customer experience? Yeah, so think about how you would like your users to think and feel when they use your product. What emotions do you want them to come away with? What impression? If you were asking them to describe their experience using a product, how would you like them. To describe it. If you get clear in that, then you can take that insight and put it towards your design and that informs how you’ll approach it. I want my users to feel empowered. I want them to feel like we’ve saved time, that the tasks that they were doing before that were quite painful. We’ve made it a lot easier for them. So they have a sense of relief. Now, this is just one example because there’s a million different characteristics and feelings or thoughts they could come away with.
34:44
Peter Loving
Say if you take those three things like time saving, relief and empowerment, then that gives you an idea of how you’re going to approach the feature set, the kind of language you’re going to use in your product. Because obviously there’s a lot of copy, there’s a lot of UX messaging in there. You might use empowering language or time saving kind of language in your workflows. So that really helps. One analogy I like to give for onboarding is to treat it like imagine the experience of going to a five star hotel. When you arrive in a hotel, there’s a huge amount of work that they’ve put into giving an impression and an experience to people who visit the space. Everything from the way the interior is designed, the way they welcome you when you get to reception in the lobby, people come to help you. They take your bags, they ask you for what you need.
35:40
Peter Loving
They tell you about the facilities, events, things they might have there, like restaurants, gyms or spars. They welcome you and introduce you to everything. Everything around that is designed to give the visitor or the customer a very strong experience. I sometimes like and that’s an onboarding in a product. When somebody comes and tries out your product for the first time, are you giving them an experience? That kind of leaves them with that wow, they’re really looking after everything I need. They’re really caring for all of our problems. They understand us. Can they relate to that? Do they see that you understand them and that you’re solving their issues? That’s a nice way to think about it. Think about it from the thoughts and feelings and emotions point of view and then you can work back towards instilling your product with the kind of interactions that promote those thoughts, emotions and feelings.
36:40
Joran Hofman
Nice. Thank you. This is for people starting out right and indeed, like giving the impression they want or saving time, relieving people or giving them empowerment. Like really giving them wow moment if you would change it. Now, let’s say somebody has revenue and they’re a bit further down the line. Let’s say they’re between they’re just growing to 1 million arr. What kind of advice would you give them? Because they are in a different stage with different needs. What would you say to them?
37:14
Peter Loving
Often with those companies, it can be that there have been areas where inside the product, user flows or interactions could be improved and even much later than 1 million arr. You can have bigger problems coming into the product because over time, you’re always building. You’re continuing to build and build. You’re adding to your feature set, you’re adding to your navigation. Sometimes you get problems like the navigation becomes a bit messy, or it’s not grouped very logically, or features get hidden. We’ll look at what the product already does well, and we’ll look at, okay, where are the problem areas that we can improve? If we improve those, will they make a big impact? We’re iterating on improvements, really improving the product. One example I can give of this that I’ve seen happen a few times now, is that once the feature set gets quite busy, there are some features that were launched in the beginning.
38:32
Peter Loving
As new features have been introduced, sometimes on an existing navigation, there’s not a top level menu item that perfectly accommodates one of these new features. They can get hidden or put somewhere else. Over time that’s a problem that grows, gets bigger. One thing that we’ve seen happen is that in settings menus, there have been some very valuable features hidden in a settings menu for the top level navigation. We’d say, hey, your users really value these features, but they’re not easy to find and some don’t even know about these features. Let’s rethink the navigation, pull some of these features out, promote them in the navigation more clearly and in other areas in the product, and help users activate onto these features. So it can be things like that. It can be things like that. There’s always issues that occur in products over time, and there’s plenty of things that can improve the product both for existing and for that new user experience.
39:36
Peter Loving
The practice changes to looking at I mentioned earlier the biggest pain points, one of the biggest pain areas, and what ones can have the biggest impact. We’re looking for those and we’re working.
39:48
Joran Hofman
Through yeah, with anything you do, always keep that in mind. That’s definitely what I would recommend as well. Maybe my final question on this topic, any other thoughts which we haven’t covered today which you would like to share about UX and UI to other SaaS founders?
40:12
Peter Loving
I guess it’s always to value the impact that it has. Even if you’re not in a position to work on the product or you don’t have a product designer on the team, or you don’t have that skill set currently, it’s to learn a little about it. If you can. Because if you’re working in product and developing products, then you can only benefit from understanding more about how design can help you deliver more value to users. If you can learn some principles that you can apply even without the cost and expense of hiring a product designer at working with an agency like us, then you can still benefit. You can still benefit from it, whether it’s making your product a little more intuitive or innovating in a way that makes you stand out in the market against competitors, or whether it’s just improving a conversion rate in your product.
41:27
Peter Loving
So, yeah, I think it’s just to learn and see if there’s something you can apply, even if you don’t have the resources. That would probably be my advice.
41:43
Joran Hofman
It’s good advice. I will definitely listen to this podcast myself later on because I definitely want to hear about the mistake we talked about earlier and this one again, I’m going to implement something from this already myself.
41:57
Peter Loving
Thank you for some interesting points for you there.
42:03
Joran Hofman
Nice. In the end, we’re doing this show to help other people like me to get value. My opinion is if I get value, other people will get as well. So thank you for this. I think my final question, if people want to get in touch with you, if they want to get contact here, how can they do it? What is the best way?
42:23
Peter Loving
It would be to visit useractive IO. That’s based on the concept of having active users in your app. We just turned that around and called it useractive IO. On our website, you can book a call with me directly and I’m always happy to talk about issues or challenges or problems that founders are having with their product. It’s a no obligation call, so always happy to just help. We also have a few on the channel, so we have a YouTube channel where I often interview founders and I also shoot some videos that give product design kind of concepts and how to and things like that. So there’s some theory there. We also have a Facebook group for SaaS founders, so there’s over 13,000 founders in there. That’s the SaaS founders Facebook group as well. Yeah, you can find me on useractive IO if you want to get in touch.
43:22
Joran Hofman
Good, thank you. I definitely see you all the time on all the socials, like I’m in your group, I see the webinars coming by. I would definitely recommend personally that people are going to check you out and watch all the content because it is really good. This is of course the basis or a really high level, but if you want to dive deeper, then definitely look at Peter videos.
43:44
Peter Loving
Thanks, Joan. Appreciate that.
43:47
Joran Hofman
Great. Well, thank you for being the first show on this guest, the first guest on this show. We still have some work to do, I guess, on my pronounced nation, but all good. Thank you very much Peter, and it was good seeing you again. Yeah, you too.
44:01
Peter Loving
I really enjoyed the chat and I’m really looking forward to seeing your grow your BTB SaaS podcast grow itself. I’m looking forward to that. So, yeah. Honored to be a first guest case.
44:13
Joran Hofman
Thanks.
44:14
Peter Loving
Thank you.
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