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Ask HN: What are well designed SaaS websites?

191 points| piu | 8 years ago | reply

73 comments

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[+] ksec|8 years ago|reply
Stripe.com

Simple, Consistent, fast , effective.

There are many other listed here as well. They mostly follows the same layout and pattern. What separate them are wording and graphics. Using simple words, and shortest sentence possible to describe your SaaS, and choice of graphics, which really is a matter of personal taste.

I think Stripe manage to do this very well.

Off Topic: Did Stripe ever talk about their Ruby Stack?

[+] simlevesque|8 years ago|reply
On Stripe I really like that you can see the logs of every API call you've ever made with the request headers and body and response body... It makes working with it much easier than Braintree.
[+] kenning|8 years ago|reply
I think turbotax has a pretty phenomenal interface if you're in the bracket of people with really simple taxes. Two and three years ago, my taxes took me about an hour.

Depending on what you're looking for, you may also be interested in aping their freemium model, where the first time you use the service is free and sets you up quite well to reuse the service next year and pay $40 for one of their obnoxious services. As a customer it was quite frustrating but it succeeded in getting me to pay $40 the second year, and had I not gone far out of my way to remove the "plus" and "premium" features I would have ended up paying ~$100 the first year and $140 total the second.

The third year I switched to a competitor and got to use their service for free. In a way, using turbotax felt like a great UX mixed with a battle to read everything extremely carefully and retread my steps to avoid paying anything; to me, this is not all that morally reprehensible because it adversely affects people who don't value their money as much as their time. However it also seemed predatory in that a non-tech-savvy user such as my parents would likely be tricked into paying higher costs for essentially no added value.

[+] tootie|8 years ago|reply
They have a really solid approach and keeping each step really straightforward and discrete to avoid overwhelming you with too much to think about at once. It still fails really hard when you get to anything outside their flow. I had to spend time googling the awkward set of steps needed to deduct mortgage interest. Ultimately, it wasn't hard, but it wasn't at all obvious how to do it.
[+] Waterluvian|8 years ago|reply
I love ufile. 10 min to file for my wife and I. One click to submit to Revenue Canada.

Its similar to what you say. A balance of minimal content and hiding unnecessary sections, but access to great detail when needed.

[+] aarondf|8 years ago|reply
Ha, I did my taxes today too...

I was actually thinking about how nice their webapp was to use while I was doing them, too. _Incredible_ amount of complexity to reduce to a really usable app.

[+] bjterry|8 years ago|reply
It seems the question is ambiguous. Everyone is responding with the marketing websites of SaaS compnaies, but I interpreted it as asking for well-designed internal interfaces of SaaS websites. Would love to see examples of that which people think are particularly great. Personally I've always found Gusto and Basecamp to have very good interfaces. Stripe's internal interface (which others have mentioned for their public site) gets the job done but I would hardly call it great.
[+] anacleto|8 years ago|reply
[+] philfrasty|8 years ago|reply
I found Slack rather poor in explaining what they are doing. This text is basically their entire landing page.

"When your team needs to kick off a project, hire a new employee, deploy some code, review a sales contract, finalize next year's budget, measure an A/B test, plan your next office opening, and more, Slack has you covered."

Do they offer A/B testing? HR tools? Code deployment? Who would have guessed it is chat.

Their /features page does a better job: "It simplifies communication. Slack brings all your team's communication together, giving everyone a shared workspace where conversations are organized and accessible."

[+] jkeat|8 years ago|reply
A design tool better be impeccably designed, and Figma is just that
[+] shrumm|8 years ago|reply
i second sentry.io, they do a great job clearly describing what they do and why they’re good at it.
[+] lwansbrough|8 years ago|reply
I was wondering the same thing the other day: looking for inspiration but also experienced recommendations and UI patterns. Found this with a quick Google (I have no affiliation): https://blog.chartmogul.com/saas-landing-pages

Also I found Pinterest to be a good resource for finding designs (more so than Dribbble, Behance, etc. surprisingly.)

[+] CommanderData|8 years ago|reply
I recently came across toggl for time tracking and reporting.

Toggl - Time tracking - https://toggl.com/pricing/

Their pricing page is one of a nicest I've seen, really easy to grasp but also functional eye candy.

I even hoped it was a WP template so I could customize one myself.

[+] leonroy|8 years ago|reply
Clubhouse is an excellent example of site and web app and their approach and integration with both has clearly had a LOT of thought put into it: https://clubhouse.io

Probably use it more than any other SaaS and am glad it’s so good.