SaaS products are an important barrier to entry for many people to enter the new technologies that are digital productivity and entertainment. Any application, regardless of its functionality or features, is a means of including hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the new productivity linked to the digital market.

The simplicity of UX is the key that allows converting all real-life people into users, turning them into data generators and almost unlimited content on the internet.

A SaaS product that does not have a simple and accessible design is left behind while the simpler and easier to use ones are embraced by most users. Result of a pleasant and intuitive experience that attracts rather than repels by its high complexity.

Google carried out a study to better understand how users deal with the design of several applications, some of them SaaS products. The result: visually complex designs are considered less beautiful by users, while applications that have simple, clean designs create high-value user experiences that are more time-consuming.

Simply put, designs that focus on simplicity and look clean are nicer and tend to retain more users.

What is simplicity?

Simplicity is a subjective concept, what is simple for one user, may be extremely complex for another. To be simple in the SaaS context is to streamline the user's path as much as possible until he reaches his goal, making this path the fastest and easiest to achieve.

What defines this agility changes depending on who your target audience is and in what situation these users normally use the resource.

Don't confuse simplicity with minimalism, many simple tools are minimalist, but having as little as possible on the screen can cause more difficulty than making a tool easier to use, all the options that are needed must be placed in the product design.

Why Simplify?

Increases User Retention: Users easily give up on applications that take a long time to load or seem too polluted, simplifying increases the amount of time each user spends using an application.

Options in the right measure: Neither too many options nor too few. Users like to have the right number of actions to perform within any given website or app, let the essentials stay there and people will continue to use it without thinking about switching to another app.

Ease of use: Simplifying the design of your SaaS product means making it easy to use, it is human nature to always seek the path that requires less effort and time. Use this feature of the mind to make this simplification into ease and agility.

It's enjoyable: Do the exercise in remembering what websites were like in the 90s, remember? They were strange, there was no pattern, the colors didn't match and they were cluttered with information, looking extremely polluted. Over the decades, there was a simplification of sites and an established standard, which made browsing the Internet more pleasant.

Pleasant enough that elderly people, who were repelled by technology, could join in and are now part of the virtual community of more than 5 billion users worldwide.

Helpful Tips to Simplify Your SaaS Product

Understand your audience

What is simple for one user may not work for another, for a simple social media user a programming application is too complex. In the same way that a video editing program can be complex for a programmer, it is simple for a YouTube content creator for example.

Inspired by what already exists

When you know who your target audience is, try to find out what other tools they already use, it is easier to make a SaaS product simple and intuitive if it resembles or has common characteristics to others that users have already used before.

If a user of the Xbox platform moves to the Playstation base there will be no estrangement, the interfaces are similar because they are made to be simple for the selected users. The same thing happens on social media platforms, they all have a very similar design to retain users from other social media.

Turn complex tasks into smaller steps

The human mind always seeks to perform tasks quickly and with little effort, an extensive, complex task that requires a lot of time from the user may push him away, think about transforming this task into smaller, divided, and faster actions.

In total, the time spent to accomplish what the user wants may be the same, but when transforming it into smaller tasks, it generates a feeling of simplicity, at the same time, it generates several sensations of accomplishment instead of a single one, retaining the user to the end of the task.

Do not oversimplify

In the pursuit of simplification, the chance of making a mistake in hand and oversimplifying to the point of taking resources that are needed from the interface can decrease the value of your SaaS Product. Removing too much can make your product weak and ineffective at what it is intended to do.

Being simple has a limit: how useful your tool is. If the utility is decreasing, the value users add to it will also decrease.

Build your product with users

At the end of the day, who decides whether your product will be too simple or too complex to be repelled are the users who make up your community. Including the ideas and change requests that arise as a result of usage improves the overall user experience.

Make the most of user feedback to know and understand what can be changed and improved, always with the aim of making your product experience as pleasant as possible.

A very easy and quick way to start this inclusion of users in the continuous construction of your product is through a public roadmap for all your consumers, Changelogfy's all-in-one platform is an excellent way to accomplish this objective.

With the public roadmap, each new feature or product change can have the generated user experience analyzed almost instantly, after all, users love to say what they think about everything and all the time!

Use the voting system to understand what is welcome and what was not received by your users without having to ask one-on-one.

If it's the user's experience, no one better than the user to say if your product is simple and pleasant enough or not.