We all like to claim our software product is full of innovation.
Your B2B software should actually be the opposite. It should not be innovative. On the contrary, it should work just like everybody’s else software, say 99% of the time.
Transcript:
We all like to claim that our software product is full of innovation to make our user’s lives better.
In this video, I’m going to claim that although this might be a good marketing message, in reality, your software should actually be the opposite. It should not be full of innovations.
On the contrary, it should work just like everybody else’s software does, say 99% of the time.
There are two reasons why I think we should avoid over-innovating in B2B software.
First, your users spend most of their time using other software, not your software. With very few exceptions, we are not making the software that people use all day every day.
So when they come to our app, our SaaS product, we had better make sure it works just like the other software they use all day the same conventions, the same user interface controls, the same layout, the same language.
Second, in the B2B context, your users are busy people. They have many things to do and many competing demands on their time. They are not using your software to relax nor are they using it to pass time or for entertainment. They want to get a specific job done. When they use your software, they want to get started quickly and finished quickly without any headaches. And then they can get back to whatever other important tasks they have on today’s todo list. They don’t want to have to remember about the unique way your user interface works.
Now, if you can accept that our job as creators of B2B SaAS is mostly not to innovate, then there are some really positive consequences make our jobs easier.
Consequence 1
We get to ride on the shoulders of giants. We get to benefit from the work of those people who do make software that people use all day every day. These products are typically the work of mega corporations, Apple, Microsoft, Google, even Meta. These companies don’t just have product managers. They have hierarchies of product managers. They run usability tests on everything. And they have some of the best UX people in the world.
More importantly, their products have come to define the conventions our users to expect to see in our software.
They’ve done so much of the hard work for us. We can, and we should let our product decisions be guided by what they’ve concluded works best.
Consequence 2
When designing a new product, or even a new feature within a product, you should find major products that have similar concepts to what you are designing and then study the heck out of them.
Remember the saying “good artists copy, great artist steal”?
Be the great artist and steal from the UX of the products created by the teams with many times more resources than you and I have.
I don’t mean you should copy your competitors.
I think I can better explain with some examples.
Say your new product has a concept of an inbox. Ask yourself, what product that we all use every day has an inbox as its main focus?
Gmail. So go and study Gmail’s inbox and learn everything you can from it.
How is it laid out? How do the UI components work? What language do they use in the user interface? How does clicking on one thing affect the rest of the inbox How do you navigate around? How do you manage it? Gmail has defined for you how this should happen and how your users expect this to happen.
So take advantage of it.
And then, and then you can innovate carefully, modestly within those conventions.
Another example: your new product has a concept of an issue created by one person assigned to another and it goes through a workflow until it’s completed. That sounds a lot like Jira. So study Jira ,the controls used by Jira, the language, the way the workflow happens, and so on. Find another product with issues and workflows, and closely examine how they do things.
And then again, you can innovate just a little within those conventions.
This approach also works on the smaller stuff, say you are designing something minor in your product settings, like a password reset function.
Go and look at how the big companies implement it, the language they use, the small details too, because you can be sure the massive software companies have spent a lot of energy on getting these small details right.
The more you can make your software work just like everybody else’s software, the better the experience for your users, and that leads to satisfied users who appreciate your software, who want to keep using your software because it helps them get their job done without frustration or headaches.
And innovation?
Leave that for the 1% of your software that truly is unique.