Designing User Experiences for B2B SaaS 👩🏻🎨
Is it important to design the User Experiences in B2B SaaS? Let's find the UX design in Retentics
Dec 05, 2022
What is UX?
UX, it literally means ‘User Experience’. It is a total experience including the feelings, required actions from the first moment they meet a product or service to the time they leave. Originally, it was used in the web/mobile environments, but the scope has gradually expanded and now it is common to see it around.
As you can see the image above, the seat-like shape makes it easy to adjust the chair as you want. It’s a small part that may seem insignificant, but these positive experiences make customers feel satisfied with the product and have a good impression of the brand. This is one of the reasons why UX is so important.
Is UX important for B2B as well?
Retentics is providing companies with analytics tools for customer retention. In this B2B area, people can normally think that technologies and features are more important than UX. No matter how inconvenient it is, if you provide a great and unique feature, there’s no other choice but to use it. It’s kind of true, but great technologies and features are eventually catched up, and functionality not supported by UX often leads users to leave in search of alternatives. B2B leaders like Mailchimp, Slack prove that constantly engaging with users and striving to provide a better experience is not something to be taken lightly.
So what should we consider?
When we talk about improving UX, we often focus on ‘Usability’. It is to think about ‘How can we make it easier and more comfortable to use?’. Of course this is an really important part that can’t be overlooked. However, it is important to understand the user’s context from a broader perspective rather than simply considering usability when designing UX. Especially in the case of B2B products, it is necessary to keep in mind the differences from B2C products. For example, the fact that the decision maker and the actual user may be different or B2B products often contains complex information.
Here’s 3 things to consider to provide a better UX in B2B products.
1. Useful
The focus is on information provided by the product. For example, it means improving the product by thinking about what information the marketers who use MakeDash are curious about and how to look at it so that they can focus on their work more efficiently. It is not good to include a lot of information unconditionally, and it is necessary to adjust the intensity to show the important things first.
2. Usable and convenient
It should be easy and intuitive to use. It means helping people who use analytics tools like us see the data they want to check. You also need to figure out what kind of inconvenience or needs they have and provide them. In the case of B2B services, people often use what is decided by the company. Customers who have used it for a long time are already used to it, so they don't realize what the problem is, or they don't actively give feedback even if they have discomfort. Therefore, it is necessary to put a lot of effort into finding hidden inconveniences that even users do not know about.
3. Consistency
If buttons that do the same function on the screen are in different forms on each page, users will have to learn again and get confused every time they use the product. As well as the colors and fonts that show the identity of the brand, components such as filters and navigation should all work in the same way.
And bond
Like B2C, I believe that B2B should provide value beyond enabling users to do their jobs efficiently. It is not just a tool, but a strong helper who can solve problems together and give helps. That's why the MakeDash design team carefully selects every single word used in our products. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate goal UX design for B2B to improve products that not only make it easy to get what users want and even feel an emotional bond with?
Written by: Jenn Lee
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