Ten Rules of SaaS UX

Why is UX
important for
Saas product
and how to
implement it?
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Author’s Bio

CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1

CHAPTER 2 Integrating User Experience In 4

Your SaaS Product
1. User Research 5
2. Define and Sharpen the MVP 7
3. Feature Segmentation and Monetization 10
4. On-boarding experience 13
5. Navigation 14
6. Gamification 16
7. Cross-device Experience (Mobile and 18
Offline Integration)

8. Customization 21
9. Integration: Development Perspective 23
10. Customer support management 25

CHAPTER 3 Success metrics of a SaaS product 28

CHAPTER 4 Quick Reference Guideline for UX 30

Integration

About Koru 33
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BANSI MEHTA
UX Design Expert
Founder & CEO, Koru UX Design LLP

Bansi Mehta is the Founder & CEO of Koru Design LLP, with the experience of
more than a decade in the field of User Experience. Collectively, her team
provides exceptional UX for enterprise applications and complex systems,
working with clients ranging from healthcare giants to boutique investment
banks. She is a self-driven leader who is an inspiration to many whose lives she
has touched through design. She believes that life is worth living when there is a
meaningful contribution you make to people around you. What gives her
fulfilment is when she, being in business, ultimately helps someone live a better
life.

UX Design is her love and passion both. She gets thrilled every time a challenge
comes her way where meaningful UX can turn around the way users interact and
look at the product. Her passion drives her and it extends in her team at Koru.
Her passions outside UX design such as traveling, fine dining, reading and being
around people is what breathes fresh air in her work.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction
With business verticals demanding more industry-specific features, a
steady stream of growth has been projected for the global SaaS market.
Despite the promises of exponential growth, however, SaaS business
models have particular challenges including how to manage customer churn
rates by improving customer retention, how to increase customer lifetime
value, and how to best structure a team to fuel growth.

The global SaaS market is dominated by Salesforce.com Inc., Workday Inc.,

Automatic Data Processing Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft
Corporation, Fujitsu Ltd., Oracle Corporation, IBM Corporation, and
Google Inc., which offer an array of products and services in their bouquet
and target larger organizations as their primary clientele segment, keeping
SMBs as secondary prospects. However, smaller players with niche-offering
and scalability range from small-to-large enterprises, viz. Asana, Slack,
Basecamp, Trello, Toggl, Stripe, etc., often get more praise and accolades,
despite generating less overall revenue than the aforementioned complex
enterprise solutions. So, what is it that they are doing differently? How do
they meet the demands of their user segments? How do they stay ahead of
the curve?

They craft innovative, intuitive designs and surprisingly delightful

experiences. As simple as it sounds, success of any SaaS product is built
on the solid foundation of a great user experience.

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With most routines being built around digital products and services, the
user expectations keep constantly rising. To add to it, apart from the
designated work hours, people often check work updates regularly, even
when they are on a holiday or a break. The boundaries between personal
and professional lives are blurring. People have become more comfortable
with being their true selves at workplaces. It’s a good sign though, as it
increases employee’s productivity and happiness. As users demand more
synchronization between personal and professional lives, the aiding
work-tools must also step up to this behavioral change, and provide a
simplified, adaptive, intuitive and elegant user experience.

From the business perspective, too, it makes perfect sense. It is often said,
and truly so, that success of a SaaS product depends as much on the
product as it does on the service aspect. Apart from creating a product
which addresses the users’ needs, further investments are made to keep
the product afloat and profitable through customer acquisition,
engagement and retention.

However, it is often observed that shortcomings of a bulky, complicated,

languid product leads to its doom, regardless of the well-meaning efforts
made by sales, marketing and customer support teams. On the contrary, a
well-built, easy-to-use product can generate business on its own while
cutting down the investment costs. Rightly said,

Design can speak the tongue of art

with the force of commerce.
FRANK CHIMERO

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Consider yourself covered from start to end.

This handy resource will guide Plus, there is a SaaS success

you on how you can integrate metrics on which you can
User Experience in your SaaS evaluate the current state of
product to address the your product. And, a UX
business challenges and nip Integration Guideline to help
them in the bud. you stay on track!

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CHAPTER 2

Integrating user experience

In your saas product
In the words of Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, “User experience
encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its
services, and its products.”

Quite contrary to popular belief, User Experience is more than just

enhancing the visual appeal of the product and is purely analytical and
quantifiable in nature. It is a combination of multiple components, such as
user research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design,
functionality and ease of usability. In fact, User Experience goes beyond the
digital touch-points and encompasses the whole user-journey and
addresses the issues with accessibility, availability and customer support as
well. To build a successfully selling product, these components must be
worked upon for optimal performance and best outcomes.

When it comes to designing complex SaaS products, User Experience

principles and practices are crucial to build a reliable product to meet
expectations of multiple sets of users involved, viz. end-users,
administrators, maintenance and support group users, and henceforth.
Integrating UX experts early into your product can create a balance
between the technical constraints, stakeholders’ concerns and users’ needs,
while meeting business goals of the product itself.

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So, how do you go about it? Mentioned below are few key guidelines for you
to understand and implement -

1. User Research
Let’s be clear. You cannot claim to design and deliver a good product unless
you have validated your design decisions with effective user research. With
SaaS products, it becomes easier to overlook the importance of user
research since the decision makers /buyers are not the end-users. Often,
this could lead to serious damages.

Considering stakeholders and buyers’ viewpoint is definitely important. At

the same time, it is for end-users that you build your product. And
considering their requirements and challenges to complete a specific task
will bring about more clarity about the product you are designing. In case
you do not have access to real-time users, build up a persona and figure out
your way with identifying important aspects related to your product and
features.
While User Research forms the first and foremost step of integrating the
UX process in designing a new product, it can also be used to identify
problems and obstacles in an existing product and work on solutions around
the existing user flows.

Case in point, SaaS startup, Groove – a personal customer support tool

meant for small and growing businesses, faced sustainability issues owing
to its 4.5% churn rate, despite having a steady stream of new users.

Surprisingly, for a simple, minimal tool, which addressed the users’ needs
without any clutter or complexity, the Groove team was quite clueless
about the reasons behind customer drop-out.

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This is when the team decided to research user behavior and find solutions
to reduce churn. Groove found out “Red Flag” Metrics (RFMs), which
differentiated the customers who quit and the customers who stayed, via
their user research. These RFMs allowed Groove to identify risky users
before the churn actually happened. The most significant RFMs for Groove
included length of first session, frequency of logins and total number of
logins in the first month. Another important metric – time spent on a certain
task – helped them come up with data-driven solutions to reduce the churn.
While studying the user behavior, they also discovered that their power
users sent almost 400% more referrals than the control group.

Thus, by identifying the behaviors that signaled when customers were in

danger of churning, Groove was able to set up interventions and retain some
of those high-risk users.

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Not only that, but they also increased referrals and rewarded power users
by focusing on the opposite end of the engagement spectrum.

2. Define and Sharpen the MVP

Once you have clear insights from your user research, turn them into
actionable points. Decide the features, functionality and flow of your tool.
Avoid committing the deadly UX sin of throwing in too many features at once.
This will only add up to the users’ confusion and frustration, leading them to
leave. Instead, define the most crucial needs of your users and work
extensively on addressing those needs in the most simplified manner. Make
the corresponding features and user flows error-free, hassle-free and
effectively efficient.

Remember, it is those basic and seemingly simple features, which will make
your product lovable and delightful for your users.

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Dropbox has been considered as a champion of MVP in terms of stripping

down and sticking to its core offering - simple, fast sharing. Through its
humble beginning in 2007 until now, it has focused on making it easier for
the users to upload and share files in various formats, such as audio, video,
photos and documents. Nothing more. Nothing less.

A more recent example of this is Clearbit. This business intelligence tool has
a clear goal – to become the data backbone for modern businesses. To
deliver on this MVP, they offer a suite of APIs to help companies find more
information on their customers in order to increase sales and reduce fraud.

Now to strengthen it further, Clearbit provides three APIs:

Person API:
Takes an email address and returns information about a person such as
name, avatar, title, and social accounts.

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Company API:
Takes a domain name and returns data about a company, such as name,
logo, market category, and headcount.

Watchlist API:
Lets the companies search names against a consolidate global watchlist,
simplifying Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliance.

The well-defined and verified lead research and processing saves a great
deal of time and effort on sales front, while delivering well on Clearbit’s
MVP.

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3. Feature Segmentation and Monetization

Make sure the product features are thoroughly segmented and organized
for the ease of usability. Related tasks, features and flows should be
grouped together, while keeping unrelated features separate.
For instance, while all conversation and channel logs in Slack are grouped
together in a left-panel, a small-button stands out individually in the
conversation tab to add any attachments or snippets. Moreover,
conversation settings, search options and additional features of the
application are grouped in the top panel.

CleverTap is another example, which is a mobile engagement and analytics

platform for apps. It is a very well-designed, intuitive and feature-rich tool
that provides deep insights on user behavior, powerful segmentation and
personalized messaging in a single platform.

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The tool's biggest strength is robust segmentation – the Behavioral

Analytics segment includes funnels, cohorts and attribution to optimize a
campaign across channels, figure retention rate and pinpoint the exact
trigger at which the users drop off. This segment also provides rich ‘User
Profiles’ which help the mobile app owner understand the users better,
identify device crossovers and track and analyze uninstalls. In the ‘Clever
Campaigns’ segment, the mobile app owner can run pre-defined campaigns
to retain acquired users, drive app engagement and reduce churn.

These triggered, pre-scheduled and personalized campaigns let the

customer send contextual messages at the right place, right time and
through the right channel.

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This segment also has a provision for A/B testing to improvise the
performance of campaigns. Monetization in SaaS products is largely based
on a Freemium model. It would be unwise, nonetheless, to lock away most
of the features to prompt users to subscribe to a premium version. To
figure out the premium features and relevant upgrade prompts, it is advised
to pick up one or two features that correlate the most with your targeted
users. Optimize such features to deliver more value to your users and
consider buyers’ aspect (to decide the subscription fee) to drive
subscription.

For instance, while Buffer allows you to schedule a fixed number of social
media updates under its free individual model, it offers two upgradation
packages – Awesome and Business. While Awesome expands the number of
posts you can schedule and number of channels you can link to an account,
Business opens up a plethora of additional features such as adding team
members and providing advanced analytics for social media performance,
and is further segmented to meet requirements of small, medium and large
businesses. Such incremental enhancements make it easier for users to
opt-in as per their usage requirements and convenience.

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4. On-boarding experience
Unfortunately, SaaS products have a whopping 30-50 percent dropout rate
after signing up. Users sign up but never use or return to the product after
first usage. A poor, complicated and excruciatingly long on-boarding
experience can be held responsible.

A great onboarding experience, on the other hand, not only gives the user
immediate value and satisfaction, but also paves the way to increase the
customer lifetime value (CLTV) as well as promote and propagate the
product for further acquisitions.

Keep the on-boarding experience as short, sweet, and simple as possible.

Do away with long sign-up forms or asking for unnecessary information. Aid
the on-boarding process with a mail, which can provide further information
on the product, as well as support access.

Show them how it’s done. Make your users achieve a task during

on-boarding to make them comfortable with your product. The onboarding

experience for a SaaS product has to meet the standard expectations and
add a “WOW” moment for the users to convince them enough to advocate
and recommend your product to other teams and peers.

Case in point, Coschedule asks for minimum required information during

sign-up process, such as name, email address, password, company name and
website. As the on-boarding process begins, customers are presented with
tips and updates from their team. It includes the employee’s picture along
with the text and video. This induces a sense of familiarity, and lending a
human face to the product makes it easier to trust. To make the process
efficient, customers are then asked to connect their social media profiles to
save time when scheduling updates.

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Thus, it keeps the onboarding process really short and lets the users begin
work immediately.

5. Navigation
SaaS users expect increased productivity from their products. They expect
an interface which makes the important things obvious and clearly
visible/accessible, while making additional, complicated features and
functionality at bay. A well-organized, simplified navigation makes the
product easier to use and keeps your users satisfied enough to renew those
subscriptions, time after time. A clear navigation which segregates the
critical features from optional features is basic to getting the user
experience right. You can offer a centralized navigation hub on the home
page/dashboard. Prioritizing tasks and features and grouping similar tasks is
the first step to structure the navigation of your product. Once finalized, you
can use top, left/right and bottom navigation panels to place similar groups

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together. For example, the Hubspot Marketing tool differentiates its top
navigation bar under tabs titled ‘Dashboard’, ‘Lead Flows’, ‘Collected
Forms’, and ‘Settings’. Correlated tasks are clubbed together under each
category to support complete automation and present a streamlined
navigation. It also creates a provision to integrate an existing email service
provider. Under ‘Lead flow’, a user can create a customized 3-step flow on
their website to capture leads and gain insights about customers. The
‘Collected forms’ automatically gather data from all forms on the website.
The contact information collected thus can be sorted by First name, Last
Name, Source and Status. During ‘Email Integration’, the contacts are
pushed automatically to the external email service provider. All the
information is presented over a clean ‘Dashboard’ in a visual manner,
making it really easy for marketers to keep track of progress.

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6.Gamification
With more screen-time exposure, SaaS users want their products to
“behave” in a pleasing, helpful and human way. Gamification and positive
emotional reinforcements increase user engagement and loyalty towards
your product.

To include gamification in your SaaS product, think about real-time work

collaborations, discussions and behaviors within a team. Replicate the
desired responses and behaviors for selected use-case scenarios within
your product subtly using illustrations, graphics, animations or messages. If
chosen and implemented carefully, these positive, quirky and delightful
gamification tactics should increase your user engagement and retention.

To implement gamification, three elements must converge at the same

moment: motivation, ability, and trigger. It is also important to keep the
process simple or else the users will become frustrated and lose interest. A
few, easy-to-implement gamification tactics, as suggested by Kissmetrics
include:

Rewards: A reward is something you receive and feel positive and

accomplished about. Customers should be rewarded with virtual goods for
specific behavior. Those virtual items should offer access to exclusive
privileges and rewards, such as levels or prizes.

Loss Aversion: Most people strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring

gains. One way to get going with this is to give people something right away
that they can lose, unless they keep playing. When you join Zynga’s
Farmville, you get a starter farm. If you don’t visit the farm and care for
your crops, they wither and die.

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Feedback: Feedback tells users that their intended action was registered,
and shows the outcomes of that action. Seeing points accumulate as actions
are taken establishes a clear and instant reward system. It’s also an
immediate indication that the user is getting closer to their goal.
Continually accomplishing small goals in order to reach a larger goal is
often what makes games addictive.

For instance, OpenText, an Enterprise Information Management tool

implemented gamification by making it possible to earn points and badges
by sharing information, contributing to discussions, completing
assignments, passing tests, or closing deals for their OpenText Pulse
product. The results were more than promising - the level of active
participation was well above 60%, which was significantly higher than the
average in the rest of the company.

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Similarly, Codecademy used gamification to increase the number of active

users to 1 million in just 5 months. Users did not have to sign-up for their
service, but were instead invited to participate right away. On completion
of little assignments, they were provided badges, which made the process
enjoyable.

Users were only later asked to create an account if they want to save their
progress, and not lose the work they’ve done so far, thus successfully
applying the loss aversion tactic.

7.Cross-device Experience (Mobile and Offline Integration)

Since the lines demarcating personal and professional lives have blurred,
most of the SaaS users are always online, even on weekends and long
holidays. Consider it as an acquired habit, but people check up on work apps
and tools frequently, even when they are not at work.

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Sometimes, there might be critical issues resolved, or tasks to be completed

or monitored for smooth operations and coordination. For example, a
supply chain company might need to optimize the end-to-end supply chain,
from forecast to planning, scheduling, and execution. To serve the purpose,
the supply chain management system deployed should allow the manager to
optimize resources and labor utilization, facilitate communication with the
internal team, suppliers, partners and customers alike, improve inventory
and shipping operations, and respond effectively to fluctuations in the
market. Also, the generation of mobile employees do not want to feel
restricted by the device they are using and/or the availability of internet
connectivity.

Understandably so, seamless mobile (cross-device) and offline integrations

have become vital to SaaS product managers.

However, there is an added advantage of adapting your SaaS product for

mobile and offline usage. You do not need to duplicate entire features and
functionality for mobile and offline services. Focusing only on core tasks
can also provide space for innovation in design. Just a cautionary tip, be
clearly communicative about the limited functionality in offline and mobile
versions

For instance, Mailchimp, which provides email marketing automation,

offers Android and iOS apps to its users. The abridged version of the full
web application provides quick access to recent campaigns, subscriber
activity, and the ability to add and manage your subscribers. While it lets its
users set up new campaigns and send already drafted campaigns from the
ease of a smartphone, the Design step of the Campaign Builder is not
supported for smartphones so the web application is required to create and
edit the content.

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Similarly, Google spreadsheets allow you to access and read contents of a

file in offline mode, but editing features are not available.

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8. Customization
In addition to easily available, efficient and engaging features, SaaS users
often demand a certain level of customization.

Customization gives the users a sense of empowerment on ownership of

the product, and they are likely to invest more towards it. However, the
customization functionality should be well thought-of before handing it out.
Following the 80-20 rule is usually the best way to go about customizing
features for your SaaS product. This means that 20% of the functionality
used by 80% users should be customizable. These easily customizable
features can include profile settings, privacy settings, notification settings,
views and insights.

Mixpanel – a mobile and web-based business analytics tool – challenged

the 30/10/10 ratio of “Law of web/mobile physics” proposed by Fred

Wilson. It stated that regardless of business or industry, 30% of customers
will use a service each month, 10% will use it each day, and as many as 10%
of daily users will be using it at any given time.

Using an aggregated set of over 15 billion actions analyzed by Mixpanel

each month, they were able to establish new, industry-specific benchmarks

for retention. While establishing that retention rates vary quite a bit from
one industry to the next, they also found that two forces were at
play—instant gratification and customization. Though the natural
assumption is that instant gratification apps have a higher retention rates, it
turned out that actions that went beyond instant gratification, allowing
users to more fully engage with the product, proved to be increase the
sticky quotient and retention rates of a product.

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Working on the industry-specific customized features for their customers,

Mixpanel proved that it’s just not enough to merely meet the benchmarks in
your industry. To succeed, you must beat them by consistently retaining
more than the average percentage of customers.

Moreover, customization may differ from app to app, software to software

and industry to industry. Considering the specific scenarios, it is important
to balance instant gratification with customization in a way that works for
your customers in order to have an experience that keeps them engaged.

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9. Integration: Development Perspective

SaaS products have heavier customer touch points with more frequent
interactions. Given the frequent release cycles with SaaS, the development
aspect of these products needs to ensure consistent availability with
non-disruptive upgrades and continued interoperability. It should support
multiple languages and operating systems effectively.

Security is a major concern for organizations to adapt to SaaS applications.

Since the responsibility of the application and hardware security lies with
the SaaS provider, developers should ensure that data on the shared
infrastructure is well-segregated and accessible only by the teams/users
who are intended to access it.

While Basecamp seems to be a great tool for collaboration and

communications between teams for smooth project management, it doesn’t
give priority to security. Despite being under an unidentified
Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack earlier, it uses cross-site
scripting (XSS) which poses a serious concern on handling of customer’s
data. Moreover, their terms and policies put the onus on the user on having
the rights and responsibility over their submitted data. In other words,
customers are liable for the data (including any sensitive information) they
share over Basecamp and any data breach or corporatization which
happens. Consequentially, it has caused many users to drop Basecamp and
migrate to safer alternatives.

Though it is not mandatory, but a SaaS tool should also have integration
capabilities with other applications.

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For instance, Stripe made its way to compete with PayPal through its
high-level security and compliance, along with its ability to support multiple
languages.Stripe has a clear, well-written and thorough documentation,
which makes it easy for developers and non-developers alike to understand
the APIs and products associated with it. It creates and supports client
libraries for most popular programming languages, making it easy for
developers to integrate Stripe quickly and seamlessly.

In addition to the documentation and libraries, it has also invested in

creating robust testing documentation and functionality. Stripe makes it
easy for a development team to build with confidence and test the system
thoroughly before deploying it to production.

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Stripe has earned its stripes for being a developer-first organization

through assets like documentation, utility, community and product
excellence in addition to a support organization of knowledgeable customer
success engineers, private early access groups, meetups. In fact, its
developer-oriented and utility-driven approach has earned it financial
backing from Paypal itself.

10. Customer support management

Customer support is one of the key factors of SaaS growth. An Oracle study
suggests that 9 out of 10 drop-out subscribers leave the product because of
a poor customer support experience. However, customer support is an
extremely time-consuming, expensive and sensitive task.

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The way you handle it can make or break your business.Since SaaS products
address complex and critical issues for their users, the support system is
likely to be used more frequently and often during initial usage. To retain
your users and let them get used to the product, your support contact form
and resources should be accessible and visually prominent.

Most of the support tickets indicate towards bug reports, missing features
and hidden/complex features and functionality. While fixing ‘bugs’ should
be the top-most priority, the support system should also work on
smoothening out ‘hidden/complex features’ to lower the number of support
tickets raised. ‘Missing features’, on the other hand, can provide insights
into developing and expanding your product range further.

It is also recommended to optimize all channels of user communication,

such as e-mails, telephonic conversations, social media, chat support,

in-app/desktop support and ticket management dashboard to prioritize and
address all issues in a timely manner.

Lastly, like everything in UX, remember to iterate, analyze and improve

constantly.Although belonging to a different vertical, Zappos has created
an exceptional customer delight system earning huge business, brand image
and loyalty out of it.

Coming to SaaS products, PlanGrid – a construction blueprint tool –

continues to redefine what a great support experience means. It has sped
up its response time to customers. The response-time over mails has
decreased from 130 minutes in 2015 to 35 minutes towards the end of
2016; while the chat-response time has gone down from 20 seconds to 5.93
seconds during the same duration.

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Apart from the speed, they have also maintained a customer satisfaction
rating of 92% over email and 95% over live chat. The concerted efforts to
improve the customer experience reflect on the increased user
interactions, which has grown by 22 percent in the same timeframe.

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CHAPTER 3

Success metrics of
a saas product
You can derive your SaaS profitability score by using these 5 metrics.

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is often the largest expense for SaaS companies and a key indicator
for profitable growth. Lower the CAC, more profitable and successful
your product is.

2. Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR)

Considerably the best growth indicator for a SaaS company, CMRR
provides a pipeline view by measuring Monthly Recurring Revenue
(MRR) along with the number of signed contracts. It helps differentiate
between “one-time” fees and recurring fees, thus identifying churn. It is
therefore necessary to maximize CMRR in order to increase profits and
stability.

3. Optimize Churn/Renewal Rate

Customer renewal rates are a key indicator of the value of your
company’s annuity stream. Higher the renewal rate, higher your revenue
figures.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

In simple terms, your CLTV should be more than your CAC. If you spend
more time reducing churn and enhancing the customer experience, the
lifetime value will increase.

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Indicating operational efficiency, these metrics reflect the profitability

and financial health of a SaaS product.

5. Free Cash Flow (FCF)

Perhaps the most obvious, Free Cash Flow (FCF) is a critical metric for SaaS
companies. There are obvious cash flow problems with subscription models
as companies spend upfront to acquire customers and recognize revenue
slowly over a period of months. If you evaluate yourself weakly on any of
these metrics, remember that integrating User Experience practices in your
product can help you score better. Every dollar spent on UX brings up to
$100 in revenue. (Source: Forbes.com article, proving ROI on UX)

The UX processes are quite close to business principles in terms of

psychological foundation. Involving a fair amount of research, testing
analysis and iterations, UX plays a significant role in creation of a more
reliable, intuitive, relatable and high-performance SaaS product.

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CHAPTER 4

Quick reference guidelines

for UX integration
Being a SaaS product manager is not an easy job. With so many tasks at
your priority list, you are likely to forget the UX principles and best
practices you just learnt about, till you come across a fundamental problem
which could have been avoided, had you integrated the UX design early into
the process. To stay focused and utilize this e-book to its full potential,
follow these simple, easy-reference guidelines designing your SaaS product
to ensure the best user experience for your customers and success for your
business-

1. User Research

• Define user personas

• Collect real-life sample matching your persona to conduct

the user research

• Decide objectives, goals and measurable metrics

• Collect data, based on answers of your user sample

• Analyze the data, draw insights and turn it into actionable points.

2. Define and Sharpen the MVP

• Work on features, tasks and user-flows based on the results of User

Research

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• Optimize your product for mobile and offline usage Focus on core tasks
and functionality

• Be clearly communicative about limited functionality

8. Customization

• Use customization techniques to trigger users’ sense of empowerment

and ownership

• Following 80-20 rule: 20 percent of the functionality used by 20%

users should be customizable

• Easily customizable features include profile settings, privacy settings,

notification settings, and views & insights

• Industry-specific customization must be considered carefully

9. Integration: Development Perspective

• Ensure consistent availability with non-disruptive upgrades and

continued interoperability

• Must be secure to handle sensitive information and avoid data

breaches or leaks

• Consider the integration capability with other applications

10. Customer support management

• Make customer support system accessible

• Optimize all channels of user communication

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• Prioritize and address all issues in a timely manner

Lastly, do not forget to test and iterate. As much as you benefit from an
early implementation, UX is an ongoing process to improve your product’s
usability to meet and surpass users’ expectations. While the UX process and
best practices remain more or less the same as stated above, specific
requirements differ from product to product. This guideline should help you
get started on understanding the importance of UX in business. Facing a
glitch or stuck at a point? Feel free to contact me and my team of UX-ifiers
for a consultation.

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Koru is a specialized Enterprise UX Design company partnering with technology

companies in B2B space to provide customized UX strategies and solutions. A
passion-driven collaboration of 50+ professionals, Koru has delivered 250+
Enterprise UX projects collaborating with clientele in San Francisco, New York,
Boston, New Jersey, Lakewood, London, Dubai, Melbourne, Singapore.

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