What I’ve learned from Formaloo UX Workshop?

Formaloo Landing Page Hero Section

On the last Wednesday of April, we had the chance to have a great workshop by Farokh Shahabi, Formaloo’s CEO, about UX tips and points.

The day started with a 2-hour workshop in which we’ve discussed what UX points should an online SaaS product have. Then as an exercise, we found some issues on different Formaloo products, such as Landing Page, Dashboard, Android Application & Wordpress Plugin.

We entered what we found on a Trello board especially for this workshop as suggestions and Farokh himself groomed the board suggestions to “Not For Now (Long term)”, “Next Sprint” & “TODAY” columns. After an hour of break, each of us assigned the tasks in the “TODAY” column depending on our abilities to ourselves and started a 5-hour task to complete each one of them.

UX Workshop Trello Board

At the end of the day, we had a demo meeting and we’ve presented our work. It was a great experience, it is shown how the user experience can improve in a small amount of time and how there is no limit on enhancing the user experience.

So let’s sum up what I’ve learned from that 2-hour workshop with you.

We started from product landing pages. There are some key points that you must keep in mind when designing and developing landing pages:

• If your website took more than 4 seconds to fully load, the majority of people will leave it no matter what.
• About the hero section of your landing page: First, describe what’s your product goal and slogan and don’t forget to implement a CTA button.
  Remember: You have customers from different segments (which are either a potential user o a regular user), you should optimize your descriptors & CTA for all of them, not just a select few.
• Don’t forget to point out the distinguishing features.
• You must gain the trust of a potential customer which can be accomplished implementing the sections below on your landing page:
  - a Clients Section
  - a Clean UI
  - Stats Section
  - a Testimonials Section
  - a Free Demo/Signup CTA

Formaloo.net Login/Sign up page

Let’s move to the login page, consider these points for a great Login/Signup page:

• 70% of texts won’t be read by users.
• For potential customers, you should show the Signup button at first but you can do more creative things, for example, in a form builder product you can create an empty form for a potential customer that can help him/her to know your product and then signup.
• In each page you should consider 2 and only 2 functions:
  Primary Function & Secondary Function

What about forms? They play a crucial role in the communication between the product and the customer. One key point that I’ve noted was to make it easy and clear for your user to enter his/her phone number. You can try different things like adding a country selection option or a placeholder.

Note: Consider the user as a blind person, he/she should know what to click on in a few seconds.

We then talked about different tips about how we should communicate with our users?

Slack Communications Example

• First, we talked about Alerts, one of the most important ways of communicating with your user.
  Don’t use the same communication messages for 2 different scenarios. You should consider different communication messages for each scenario and prepare the user for the next step.

All the UX is about Next Step ⏩

• We shouldn’t have any undefined objects in our product. We should consider a tutorial, either visual, text, or video (or a product tour) to be sure that every user can use our product with its maximum potential.
• Don’t forget to implement a Feedback Widget, because lots of UX issues are told by the users themselves:
  - They ask questions
  - They don’t ask questions by considering that problem happened to them is having a problem by itself
  - People don’t say what they want, we should find it ourselves by watching the flow of using the product by users
  - Sometimes users tell the opposite of what they want and we should be aware

Ultimate UX Goal: We should add features without waiting for users to tell us and that’s when they’ll say WOW!
Example: When Apple removed the Flash Player support from its browser (Safari) lots of users and developer communities argued about that but at last we saw that Flash Player has been removed from our daily use.

Steve Jobs has defended Apple’s decision not to allow Adobe’s Flash technology on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad — and cited a series of reasons why he thinks letting Flash onto mobile devices is a bad idea, including security, battery life, and user experience.

Conclusion

I ❤ User Experience

UX starts before opening the website, so be aware of that. People can be lazy and be in a hurry so try to reduce the steps of your product reaching to its goal, reduce the number of clicks a user needs to do so they’ll be happy!

So to wrap this up, consider these final 3 points:

1. In UX, everything is about the Next Step

2. Don’t forget to have a crystal clear communication with your users

3. As Steve Jobs said wisely: “Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’

Thank you for reading this post, I would love to hear your feedback and your experiences regarding this post. If you want to contact me or ask me any questions, here is my LinkedIn, I would be happy to hear from you