The Role of UI/UX Design in B2B SaaS Startups

The tendency to switch from on-premise and offline software solutions to cloud-based ones continues to grow. The statistics state that 96% of businesses use at least one software as a service product, while 72% want to invest more in implementing web-based applications.

The rising interest in B2B SaaS products makes plowing capital into on-demand software creation profitable. However, the defining success factor lies in technological solutions and the enjoyable user experience achieved through UI/UX design. So, let’s delve into the critical significance of B2B SaaS design.

What Is B2B SaaS?

Understood as a business-to-business software as a service, it is a cloud-based application that meets the niche-specific needs of businesses and enterprises. So, instead of creating and selling one product to one company, B2B and SaaS make it accessible to multiple organizations for subscription-based use. Businesses gain numerous benefits by implementing software as a service product, as they don’t need to be maintained and updated. Companies get a ready-to-use-and-scale solution for their customer management, accounting, finances, project management, and marketing needs by paying the membership fee.

What Is UI/UX Design?

UI/UX is responsible for the application’s appearance and navigation. Everything from the product icon, login buttons, and text fields is part of the scope of the designers’ work. The UI part stands for the aesthetics of the product elements, while the UX ensures that users have a smooth interaction with the platform.

In B2B SaaS, design plays a decisive role as it makes the product not only functional but comfortable to use.

Challenges of B2B SaaS Products

B2B SaaS solutions are innovative and tailored to specific industry needs, presenting challenges different from those of traditional consumer-focused applications.

• Advanced user needs. Since B2B SaaS aims to meet specific business requirements, their development requires higher expertise. It also relates to the design scope that has to make complex features easy to use and not overwhelm users.
• High level of customization. SaaS products are not universal and can not cover every niche request. They are created for a specific problem solution and thus have to be highly customized both in terms of features and ease of navigation and usage.
• Rapid scalability. Businesses that acquire cloud-based solutions are responsible only for the membership fee, while developers promise to tailor the application to the company’s growth. Thus, B2B SaaS products must be flexible throughout the enterprise development cycle.
• Solid security and compliance. Consumer-oriented applications do not always store sensitive information, while B2B SaaS solutions operate with tons of critical data, such as finances, personal information, and business information. It requires implementing advanced security methods, building access control, adding threat detection, and other measures for innovative products to be safe.

Even though B2B SaaS startups have many chances to create top applications, they need to equally focus on the design part, as people do judge a book by its cover when first seeing the product.

Role of UI/UX Design in B2B SaaS Success

As the main income source for SaaS products is the subscription-based model, user retention emerges as a critical priority. So, as a startup owner, you need to invest in design at the earliest development stages. Studies show that a high-quality checkout design page can increase the conversion rate of an e-commerce website by 35%. So, let’s see what other benefits top-tier UI/UX design brings for B2B SaaS developers.

Increased Product Popularity Among Users

Process optimization stipulates the need for businesses to use cloud-based tools. By subscribing to a SaaS application, companies expect to adopt it quickly and use it easily. The user-centered and intuitive design turns the user experience into a seamless journey with fast onboarding and high engagement.

Higher Customer Satisfaction

Keeping customers happy is no longer a secret to long-term collaboration. But deep personal relationships that build on their satisfaction when using your services make them return to your product. High customer satisfaction influences the loyalty rate, turning your clients into repeat ones and promoting you through others’ positive feedback.

Better Productivity

One of the main reasons why businesses invest in SaaS is to increase their productivity. But even if you offer advanced functionality, a lack of thorough-thought UI/UX design can, on the contrary, require more resources for adoption. Imagine bank workers whose activity is based on financial insights. Well-thought design can turn charts and numbers into valuable information that can save time for the investigation.

Reduced Customer Support Costs

The better the UI/UX design is, the fewer customer support requests are. When you make elements and navigation look appealing and straightforward, consumers will not need to contact you. Thus, you can save costs on maintaining multiple channel support teams.

Market Advantage

The rising popularity of B2B SaaS products is both beneficial and challenging, as many competitors are on the market. To win more customers, you need to stand out from the crowd. This can be possible by providing an excellent product focusing on user-friendliness and simplifying business workflows.

UI/UX Desing Process for B2B SaaS

B2B SaaS development of the design part has several stages, and the final goal is to build not only an aesthetically pleasant application but also a functional one. This is what design crafting looks like:

• User research and persona identification. You should learn your target audience’s needs to know what to build. This starts with user research and identifying their expectations, pain points, preferences, and behaviors. This information serves to create user personas: your ideal customers.
• Content structuring. Niche-specific products contain pages of information, every bit of which is essential. But you can’t surely post it like a book and overload the readers. That is why you need to go through the information architecture step and define the content structure and appearance.
• Interaction design. When you develop all the widgets, you should think about how to put them together so that customers follow the easiest paths to reach their goals. Drawing user journeys will help you identify the primary business workflows and organize them in the most intuitive ways.
• Visual design. Aesthetic SaaS look increases confidence in the product. But under the appealing design, your brand identity hides. So, when crafting UI elements and layouts, make the final image reflect your brand.
• Usability testing and improvement. To fix a successful result, you have to test it in practice. How will the users react to it? Will your hypothesis and research be true? Testing and interaction practices will help you achieve the best application design version.

Saas UI/UX Design and Development Agency

For a successful B2B SaaS product launch, partnering with an experienced UI/UX design agency is the best solution. As cloud-based solutions present many intricacies and unique challenges, it is crucial to entrust the task of design creation to professionals. And here is why.

Strategic Partnership

Digital design agencies work closely with clients to identify their necessities, a budget, and deliverables. They align development processes to achieve results and meet customer and business needs.

Access to Professional Knowledge and Resources

By ordering SaaS design services from an agency, you automatically get access to a professional pool of talents and advanced resources. However, you won’t need to learn all the behind-the-scene details as the experts will do the hard work.

Quick Product Launch on the Market

Agencies with successful product design development cases in their experience follow optimized workflows, saving you time. Thus, accelerated processes help to streamline the overall development and schedule the product launch quickly.

Cost Efficiency

Outsourcing a design agency is the best financial solution for a B2B SaaS startup. This collaboration eliminates the need to hire an in-house designer team. Also, agencies know how to optimize the budget and save costs during development.

UI/UX Design Examples for B2B SaaS Startups

Real examples speak louder than words, so let’s see how design solutions have improved B2B SaaS startup products.

Airclub

As a fitness and wellness enterprise resource planning platform, Airclub B2B SaaS was struggling with a lack of UI/UX design optimization. Their clients had to make multiple clicks and actions to get the needed information. The applied design practices have transformed this ERP solution. As a result:

• In member management, the information was updated based on priority, so all the critical data, such as payments and the outstanding balance, were highlighted on one page.
• In class scheduling, designers created an easy-to-use calendar plan that didn’t confuse business owners and their clients.
• In analytics, design solutions helped to gain valuable insights as it was difficult to analyze tons of information. The insights now contribute to making data-driven decisions.
• In virtual content, users could not easily access videos and thus missed a chance to attend virtual training. Simplifying the access process helped to engage more clients to watch the videos.

ResHub

The medical sphere is where speed and concise information can save lives. This is what the ResHub platform is doing: simplifying the connection between medical staff and senior patients and their families. This multi-module product wanted to turn paperwork into digital pages so medical personnel could plan their working routine more easily. This is how ResHub changed after implementing the best design solutions:

• In the dashboard, designers first transformed the page to show important updates. Thus, medical staff can see who needs urgent help.
• In the calendar, advanced UX principles helped to make appointments visually understandable. So now, the number of missing meetings is lower.
• The procedure was simplified in feedback surveys so every senior customer could quickly fill them out.

Measuring UI/UX Design Success

To see how design solutions correlate with B2B SaaS product success, it is essential to measure design efficiency. First, you can track user adoption with indicators such as sign-up rate, conversation rate, session duration, time-to-value rate, free-to-paid conversion rate, and others.

Another way to track design success is to look at customer satisfaction. You can gather feedback through a survey, customer satisfaction score, net promoter score, abandonment rate, usability testing, and more.

And the most obvious way is to track the revenue. Effective design solutions always contribute to higher income.

Conclusion

Design is a crucial part of any product, especially niche-oriented ones. B2B SaaS has to be highly customized, flexible, and scalable, so the best result can only be attained by UI/UX design practices.

Design creation should appear at the early development stages for startups only about to set their place on the market. This will ensure that the final product is both functional and appealing.

And for those looking for professional UI/UX designers to build B2B SaaS designs of any complexity, you’re in the right place. Our agency helps companies turn their products into the ones that customers love!