Product UX
How the product behaves after sign-up: onboarding, flows, states, in-product copy, and UX debt.
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Good for: PMs, founders and designers who want to fix activation, reduce friction and stop “tiny” UX decisions from quietly killing usage.
The wireframes looked perfect. Clean navigation. Clear hierarchy. Logical flow. Three stakeholders approved everything in 45 minutes. “This is exactly what we need.” PM scheduled development to start Monday. Then the designer added real content. Product names weren’t the placeholder “Product Name” shown in wireframes. They were 43 characters with special symbols and line breaks:…
B2B analytics platform. Six months post-launch. 1,400 trial signups. 83 paying customers. That’s 5.9% conversion. Founder: “Maybe our onboarding needs work. Or the trial’s too short. Should we extend to 30 days?” I pulled the usage data. 67% of trial users logged in once, clicked around for 4 minutes, never came back. The problem wasn’t…
The UX writer opened the staging site. Clicked through the onboarding flow. First button said “Proceed to Next Step.” Second screen: “Click Here to Continue.” Error message when she left a field blank: “Input required. Please try again.” Empty state in the dashboard: “No data available at this time. Please check back later.” She counted…
Got on a call last month with a potential client. Series A SaaS company, 18 people, looking for design help. “Before we start, can you walk us through your design process?” I should’ve known. They screen-shared a 40-slide deck. Their “UX design process.” Eight phases. Twelve deliverables. Three validation gates. Stakeholder touchpoints color-coded by department.…
I had a call last Tuesday with a founder who wanted help “improving activation.” Their SaaS launched eight months ago. Activation: 23%. Support tickets: 180/week. Team of six. I asked to see the roadmap. Roadmap Items Count New features 12 “UX improvements” (no details, pushed to Q3) 2 Total 14 “Which feature causes the most…
Last year I watched someone finish setting up a Salesforce integration. OAuth: worked perfectly. Field mapping: one click. Big green success message: “Connected successfully!” They closed the window looking satisfied. I was helping them debug something else, so I had their screen still open. Three days later, same person: “Is Salesforce broken? Nothing’s syncing.” I…
Last month, a SaaS founder asked me to review their onboarding. “We implemented every best practice,” they said. “But activation is terrible.” I opened their app. Welcome screen with value props. Account setup wizard with progress bar. Interactive product tour with twelve hotspots. Empty state illustrations with cheerful CTAs. Contextual tooltips on every button. Profile…
Your perfect onboarding just got killed by someone who never saw it. I watched a $50K ARR deal die in a conference room last year because of a question our SaaS onboarding never answered. The product worked. The user loved it. She’d completed our beautifully designed onboarding in 8 minutes, explored features, and was ready…
Most banking apps look fantastic when the balance is healthy. Sunlit gradients. Confetti for rounding up. Little fireworks when you tap “paid.” Then the number hits £0 (or worse), and the polish falls off. Tricky language, greyed-out buttons, pop-ups with moral undertones. The UI that was keen to celebrate a £3 cashback suddenly becomes shy…
Most UX audits are long, expensive, and full of beautifully formatted reports you’ll never read twice. This isn’t that. This is the UX sanity check — the quick-and-dirty, seven-question sweep I use when I want to know if a product is healthy enough to survive the week. It’s not a replacement for a proper deep-dive…
