SDL Proprietary and Confidential

SaaS trends watching

UX Summit 2014

João LopesUX Strategist, SDL CMT

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Purpose of this exercise

“(…) extract design strategies and design patterns that we will then be able to apply

to our own products.”

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Home page components (95% of the times)○ A Benefit-Driven Headline: Value Proposition

○ Summary of features

○ A Lead Capture for email

○ Some sort of proof element (usually testimonials or logos of prominent companies that use the product)

○ An explainer video (optional)

○ Clients / Brands logos

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And also

○ Solid, well-thought design (no longer a differentiator)

○ Extremely friendly language

○ Subtle humor is very common

○ Simple graphics, often childish

○ Direct help (chat)

(aside) About Value Proposition…

Superlatives and Hype:Didn’t tell you what they do

Clear direct benefit:Value of the service made tangible

200% increased conversion rateSource: Ryan Gum http://ryangum.com/value-propositions-describe-your-startup/

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Experience

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“Build comprehensive, contextual and meaningful customer journeys across multiple

channels and devices.”

“Optimize the future of your customer experience with a complete, integrated and easy

to deploy technology solution.”

“(…)enables companies to deliver seamless, data-driven experiences to customers at every

point of the buying journey – across all channels, devices and languages.”

www.sdl.com/cxc

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How to make ourselves tangible?

Is being tangible the first challenge?

○ How to translate our product offer to real / tangible benefits

○ How to identify and differentiate must-have benefits andnice-to-have benefits

○ How to address different kinds of visitors / personas

○ How to shift the organization DNA strongly focused on sales peoples in the field

○ Do we want a product page to sell or only to support sales in the field?

○ How will we gather customer testimonies? (we’re just ramping up!)

○ How will we to track / measure activity in our CXC landing site?

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“You really want to capture the email as quickly as possible, before worrying about walking through the

product.”

So, considering our ecosystem 4 categories to think about:

Make me want you

○ SaaS appeals to positive emotions, to ‘niceness’, makes visitors perceive suggested service as desirable. It’s about making you want the things you need.

○ It’s less difficult to convert someone that has the perspective that using out products will be awesome (not necessarily that the products are).

It’s all about you, not me

○ Focus on the tangible benefits of the features and not the feature itself: ‘what’s the value of this TO ME and why it is meaningful to my organization’.

“Leverage actionable insights from social data to drive business decisions”

vs“Find out who’s loving you”

○ Maybe continue using tangible Pete and make him the center of the seven quadrants of our offer is a good idea

○ Come up with different stories depending on visitor’s profile. Have different characters depending on key markets. Headphones will not impress pharmaceutical business.

Dress to Impress

○ Go a step higher in terms of Visual Design. Similarity among what’s out there is frightful. Adobe managed to raise the bar. Can we do even better differently?

○ Be great about onboarding patterns. Salesforce is doing it in such a horrible way. Adobe is not brilliant either. However, small start ups do it so nicely. Isn’t it possible to be big and still awesome?

Never lose sight

○ Have a general strategy on what to do with the ones we actually manage to get on board. Keep’em happy and enthusiastic while we continue to evolve. An email one month after the ‘thank you for subscribing’ will not be enough. Noticing a surprising number of positive tweets yesterday might be.

○ Have a strategy forehand to mine data we will gather from visitors, subscribers, adopters and navigation paths. What to do with it?

○ Do not focus on creating Buzz for Forresters of this world only. Don’t neglect small channels like blogs and websites.

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