I’ve talked at length in the past about the user onboarding process, the difficulties of first-time use and how empty states can solve some of these problems.

While this is all well and good when you’re trying to tackle user drop-off after the first session, what about the later stages?

Assuming that everything else has clicked into place for your user and they’ve made it all the way up to the purchase, you must have made a good first impression! Unfortunately, it’ll be all for nothing if your app is hard to use, awkward, inflexible or disappointing over the long term, or if your premium plan’s onboarding isn’t tight.

Post-sale UX optimization isn’t something I’ve looked at before, or even heard about. But writing a guide about SaaS customer success is not a small task and UX is definitely a big deal, especially because good UX makes it easy for Customer Success to do their job.

In fact, a good SaaS user experience takes the weight off customer support, too. Overall, you don’t want to put a barrier between your users and your app and most importantly for revenue, you don’t want to put a barrier between your paying users and your app.

Here are some SaaS user experience optimization pointers to think about which will make the lives of your Customer Sucess team easier.
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What happens if you make software too difficult to use? Probably the same thing that happens if you never made it at all — no one uses it.

It’s easy to get users to adapt to familiar concepts like drag-and-drop, but what if you made something totally new? You need a creative user onboarding process, like the one Microsoft used back in 1992 and the others I’m going to look at in this post.

The Software User Onboarding Process

I already talked about concierge onboarding, so this time I’m going to look at the total opposite — a style known as low-touch user onboarding. It’s not always possible to work with every customer, especially if you’re distributing software on a massive scale like Microsoft Windows, so writing onboarding into your product is a necessity.

James Hunt‘s excellent article on Mental Floss reveals the true purpose of Minesweeper, Microsoft Solitaire, FreeCell and Hearts: a gamified way to teach users concepts vital to success using Windows 3.1.

Let’s take a look at exactly how they did it.
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