Sometime ago when I heard about a new productivity / doc collaboration tool called

Then it made me think that it is not limited to us or one category but it’s everywhere. There are just so many tools from productivity booster to project management to team collaboration to everything else.

What’s every more exciting is that MOST of these newer entrants are quite successful. I mean, despite incumbent Google suite and mighty @microsoft

Practically, each of these products serve the same purpose but they could build a billion dollar business just by offering better experience.

Here’s a few more examples where better user experience worked as key value proposition and moat:

1. Blogging: Wordpress > Medium
2. Note taking: Notepad > Microsoft Word > Google docs > Notion / Coda.
3. Task/Project management: Diary > Notepad > Google sheet > Trello > Asana > Clickup.
4. Prototyping: Pen & Paper > Balsamiq > Sketch App > Invision > Figma.

I can keep going but I think it’s clear by now that every time we feel that we have reached to the pinnacle of easiest/most delightful product, there is a new entrant which sets a higher standards.

And, here’s why it is a great news for all product folks and designers.

Better user experience creates exponential value. Faster.

Why do good products often end up with poor experience ? “Use cases v/s User Experience” fallacy.

Path to building a successful product is either solving lot of problems with average experience or, solve one problem with great experience.

Every fast growing product starts with these two distinct approaches:

1. Bundling: to solve many problems under the single hood. Ex: Google suite, MS office and so on..
2. Unbundling: to solve one problem extremely well. Ex: Notion, Coda, Zoom, Calendly.

In both cases, there’s a perpetual battle between “solving more use cases” v/s “maintaining great user experience”.

While both approaches have very successful examples. Like iPhone is the most classic example for bundling telephone, fax, music player, calculator — all in the most delightful way possible. So is, Google suite and Microsoft office with everything-for-your-office needs.

And then there are unbundling examples like Calendly, Typeform and Slack which competes in slot scheduling, survey, and team collaboration ONLY. And they do it so well that users/companies often choose these over the free alternative.

But, it is not as easy as said. As soon as companies grow their user base, there is more diversity in expectation from their product. Which means having to solve for more use cases. This is where ability to maintain user experience gets tested. We’ll talk about that in a bit but if you dabble in SaaS, you must have heard the saying that “almost” every SaaS startup could have been a Google sheet.. :) Okay, probably little extreme but here’s more relatable version of it:

Every SaaS companies competes with Google sheet. From Support to CRM to Project management and personal task management, you name it. If you are building a SaaS business, chances are Google sheet is one of the alternatives for your users.

Then why does multi-Billion dollar SaaS market exists — Yes, user experience. Let’s see how some of your favourite products create that awesome jaw dropping user experience.

5 UX Tips from popular apps for you to build fast scaling product

Tip #1 Understand users’ expectations (with amazing onboarding)

If you look at any popular tool, you’ll notice that they kind of know what you are expecting from them. Most of these do it with a killer onboarding. And it’s not much honestly — simply ask your users directly and craft your product experience for specific need.

Example: Notion asks your current role (marketer, designer, product person etc.) and if you want to use Notion just for yourself or with your entire team. And make suggestions accordingly.

Other tools like Clickup go overboard asking users about their team-size, use case ( task v/s project management) and creates first experience for such a need.

Tip #2 Make users successful. Quickly. (Onboarding / Templates)

A really successful product makes users feel smarter and successful, no matter what. And with so many choices and distraction available, it is unexpected from users to spend time in a new product and adopt it.

One of the best way to make users successful is to understand the intent and give them a headstart in form of templates. There are so many good examples already available — templates in Google suite, Figma, Asana, and of course Notion.

Now, this can be discussed at length ( Checkout product led growth, if you want to dig deeper). But key idea here is to think what success means for your users and how can you deliver it quickly.

Tip #3 Be where your users are (Integrate)

It’s impossible for any product to replace every other in users’ toolkit. From common day to day tools like (Gmail, Slack, Zoom, Calendar), there are specialised tools like (CRM, Mail chimp, Asana) and many others.

There are good chances and outcome from one of the tools becomes feeder into another one. Your ability to play a well connected in this value chain can be crucial because as a user I’ll always prefer a product which talks to the rest of the bunch.

Tip #4 Push technical boundaries

Cliche alert: User experience isn’t what it looks on screen but how it works. Imagine a chat app which looks great but every email sending/receiving takes minutes. Will you love that? Probably No.

My favourite example is Figma. Before Figma, all the UI design tools were desktop based and there used to be sending back and forth of Sketch files. Remember: “Final Final version (1).sketch” ? I do.

Figma changed all that with browser based super collaborative approach. While it looks great too but by pushing the technical boundaries, they have made all other UI design tools look old and dated.

Same goes for

Tip #5 Make users feel at home

Will you go to a new place where you have to learn new ways of doing things? I won’t. Same applies to your users coming to your app. They don’t want to learn new shortcut or flow than what they are used to.

For all key actions, try to use the already popular approaches and don’t necessarily reinvent the wheel.

1. Keyboard shortcuts: they are like ninja assassins. They are discreet and get the job done very effectively. But make sure to popular shortcuts and don’t go on inventing your own.
2. Call-to-action: Again, there’s mad rush to be creative and unique. Everyone is writing wittiest website/app copies. While it’s good if you come up with something that works with your users but for large part, it’s always a good idea to stick to popular CTAs.

Wrapping up

So now you understand why products with poor UX survived and how competition made it impossible to do so anymore. In fact, good experience in product is your first and most important sales and marketing.

Wrote this story very long time but only now got conviction to share with everyone. Lot of early readers didn’t agree that experience could be differentiator — Would love to hear what you think.. :)

I hope you’ll find these UX tips super helpful for your next product.

There’s more..

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