Ask HN: What are well designed SaaS websites? - piu
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ksec
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
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.

~~~
Mandatum
Does Stripe write about how they handle storing those requests/responses?
Seems like this could get very expensive, very quickly.

------
kenning
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
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.

~~~
beamatronic
Um... maybe you had a strange situation but usually for mortgage interest on
your home , your lender sends you a form with essentially 1 number on it and
you just enter this form into TurboTax when it asks you.

------
bjterry
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.

------
philip1209
Some of my favorites:

[https://mailchimp.com](https://mailchimp.com)

[https://transitapp.com/](https://transitapp.com/)

[https://www.intercom.com/](https://www.intercom.com/)

[https://lattice.com/](https://lattice.com/)

I'm fond of what we have built:
[https://www.moonlightwork.com](https://www.moonlightwork.com)

~~~
whitepoplar
Hey, curious about your experience with Mailchimp. I've noticed that people
seem to either love it or hate it. What do you think they do well? Where do
they fall short? (if at all)

~~~
jonathan-kosgei
I hate mailchimp and prefer to use tinyletter.com. I can't talk enough about
how much I love tinyletter!

~~~
flaviocopes
TinyLetter is amazing. Simple, easy to use, just does what you need without
templates, campaigns and other stuff that gets in the way between you and
subscribers receiving an update from you.

------
anacleto
Needless to say Stripe.com \-
[https://www.plainflow.com/](https://www.plainflow.com/) \-
[https://sentry.io](https://sentry.io) \-
[https://slack.com](https://slack.com) \-
[https://figma.com](https://figma.com) \-
[https://basecamp.com](https://basecamp.com)

~~~
philfrasty
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."

~~~
anacleto
True.

But that's actually a common trend. When the company's brand gets bigger and
stronger in people's mind, company position slowly switches from

1 Product attributes

2\. Product benefits

3\. Emotional benefits

4\. Something bigger

This applies well to every type of product. SaaS included.

This is a great essay on the topic:
[https://medium.com/speroventures/branding-for-
builders-19e10...](https://medium.com/speroventures/branding-for-
builders-19e103ef3f1d)

------
lwansbrough
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](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.)

------
spking
[https://baremetrics.com](https://baremetrics.com)

[https://sendgrid.com](https://sendgrid.com)

[https://www.drift.com](https://www.drift.com)

[https://lookback.io](https://lookback.io)

[https://reply.io](https://reply.io)

~~~
briandear
Baremetrics for sure. Really effective — the dashboard gives you all the
important data quickly and then you can easily drill down. I use their product
several times a day and it’s the best interface of all of the many services I
use.

------
jonathanbull
[https://lookatthatsaas.com](https://lookatthatsaas.com) is a good resource
for inspiration.

------
qstearns
[https://segment.com/](https://segment.com/) seems to take design really
seriously. They also have a pretty nice React toolkit here:
[https://segmentio.github.io/evergreen/?selectedKind=alert&se...](https://segmentio.github.io/evergreen/?selectedKind=alert&selectedStory=Alert&full=0&down=0&left=1&panelRight=0&downPanel=storybook%2Factions%2Factions-
panel)

------
tschellenbach
I frequently compare [https://getstream.io/](https://getstream.io/) with
[http://stripe.com/](http://stripe.com/),
[https://www.mapbox.com/](https://www.mapbox.com/), sendbird.com, algolia.com,
pusher.com and [https://layer.com/](https://layer.com/)

------
ruairidhwm
[https://stripe.com](https://stripe.com) \- It's beautiful but conveys all the
information that you need quickly. It also has excellent copy.

[https://canny.io](https://canny.io) \- Very crisp design and it conveys the
use case really well.

[https://baremetrics.com](https://baremetrics.com) \- This has come such a
long way and has stunning design.

------
igorv
Not really a SaaS website, but I really dig this
[https://district0x.io/](https://district0x.io/)

~~~
2bitencryption
I'm not too fond of that "stay up to date" modal, which tries to mimic system
native UI.

------
whitepoplar
[https://dnsimple.com](https://dnsimple.com)

[https://basecamp.com](https://basecamp.com)

[https://sentry.io](https://sentry.io)

[https://semaphoreci.com](https://semaphoreci.com)

[https://instapaper.com](https://instapaper.com)

Old Heroku :-(

~~~
johnhenry
What's changed about Heroku that's made you unhappy? (Not an employee, just
curious).

~~~
whitepoplar
Take this copywriting, for example:

2011: "Forget Servers - Get up and running in minutes, and deploy instantly
with git. Focus 100% on your code, and never think about servers, instances,
or VMs again."

2018: "Deploy and run apps on today's most innovative Platform as a Service -
Heroku is a cloud platform based on a managed container system, with
integrated data services and a powerful ecosystem, for deploying and running
modern apps. The Heroku developer experience is an app-centric approach for
software delivery, integrated with today’s most popular developer tools and
workflows."

Which is better?

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
2018: it describes what they do in a much clearer way.

------
simantel
For lots of examples, check out
[https://www.pages.xyz/](https://www.pages.xyz/)

------
CommanderData
I recently came across toggl for time tracking and reporting.

Toggl - Time tracking -
[https://toggl.com/pricing/](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
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](https://clubhouse.io)

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

------
deadcoder0904
Find some great Inspiration at [https://hyperpixel.io](https://hyperpixel.io)

------
oferzelig
[https://omnystudio.com/](https://omnystudio.com/)

------
cyberferret
Can I chime in here, not with a link to any specific site, but just as a call
out to patterns that I am seeing recently.

A lot of sites now have lists and content that updates automatically as things
happen on the back end. One good example is Intercom. I have their screen open
24x7 on the first tab of my browser so I can monitor users on our site. I love
how it updates the 'time last seen' dynamically, and I usually have my
customer list sorted by the 'time last seen' field.

But sometimes, while the content of the list fields are updated in real time,
the sorting of the list is not, and the list goes out of order (i.e. customers
who re-login recently are still shown lower down in the list that customers
who logged in an hour ago even though the 'last login time' is more recent.

I wish there was a way in these instances to just refresh the list within the
page, without doing an entire browser page refresh, which could take up to 10
seconds in the old Intercom UX. Also, while talking about Intercom, jumping
between the Customers page and the Conversations page could also take anything
from 5 to 10 seconds on my browser, and there was NO indication that anything
was happening in the meantime, which increased confusion and frustration. I
think we need to bring back the hourglass or some other 'waiting' indicator
for transitions that take a while.

(NB: The new Intercom UX has improved on the waiting delay significantly, but
not the sort ordering of the customer list).

Someone also mentioned the Stripe design (of their back end, not their
marketing site). I tend to like the new design of their admin panel, however
their menu hierarchy was a little confusing, making it hard to find things a
lot of the time. Also, the redesign tends to break the 'back button' behaviour
a lot. I tend to spend a lot of my time on the Stripe admin panel looking at
webhook logs etc., and every time I bring up the log listing, then drill down
to an entry I can't seem to go 'back' to the list easily without the system
rebuilding the entire list each time. Makes it frustratingly slow to try and
find the exact log entry I want when I have to spend so much time waiting for
page refreshes.

In summary, I think we need to go back to these 'old fashioned' design
constructs which aren't considered "trendy" any more:

* Give the user some sort of 'waiting' indicator if a page redraw is going to take time.

* If a list on your page refreshes in the background, and your user can sort the list, make sure you update the sort order as well as the content

* Don't break the back button behaviour if you can help it.

------
jacobwg
[https://webflow.com/](https://webflow.com/) \- complex product, but the
marketing site makes it clear and understandable

------
hartator
Shameless plug, I kind of like the work we did on our own SaaS website:
[https://serpapi.com](https://serpapi.com)

------
velp
pitchbook.com

Interesting mix of content and product information. I like how it's laid out
as well

------
Mojah
My favorites:

\- stripe.com

\- ohdearapp.com

Simple, to the point & clean layouts.

------
johnhenry
Did you mean that the services themselves are well designed or are you
referring to pages that describe them?

------
jiveturkey
does ecommerce count? mcmaster.com

~~~
manuaero
agreed ... mcmaster is one of the best designed sites.

------
fairpx
Chiming in after seeing us get mentioned here (context: lead designer @
[http://Fairpixels.pro](http://Fairpixels.pro))

Working with engineers of b2b saas companies every day, for more than a year
and having analysed all the best SaaS companies who have 10+ internal
designers, I found a couple of principles that anyone can apply to make their
website look decent:

* Consistency - One practical example: If you use a 4px border-radius, use a 4px radius everywhere. It may sound small, but having a consistent experience across your application makes the product feel so much more polished to your users. Don't use multiple fonts, different navigation menus etc. Keep it consistent.

* Reduction - If anything, design isn't about adding more things to make it 'look nice'. Try to remove as many things as you can. If something doesn't serve a specific function, then remove it. Every pixel should make sense. The more you put in front of your users, the more brain power it'll require to process.

* Divide - This is mostly UX, but one thing I see so many get wrong. A lot of SaaS apps overwhelm their users. They present them with all the features upfront. Whether it's a long onboarding form, or a dashboard with 50 actions one could take. By splitting up things in different ways, you can guide the user through the experience. Your signup process for example (that might be a big block in conversion) might be made so much better if you ask for certain types of information later on in the process.

~~~
vincentmarle
I very much like your fixed fee / month business model. Exactly what I need, I
will likely become a customer soon.

Is there a similar service out there that has fixed pricing for web/app
development?

~~~
redmaple
saw this few weeks ago:
[https://greenpine.co/#pricing](https://greenpine.co/#pricing)

------
iampaul
Most SaaS businesses are run by engineers and unfortunately many of them/us
lack the eye for style. That said, here are two of my favorites:

[http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro) \- I found these guys here on
HN and their work seems spot on.

[https://www.spotify.com/](https://www.spotify.com/) \- their simple design
and IPO should be an example for fellow engineers who’re building saas.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Fairpixels doesn't appear to be a SaaS service, but a service company that
does design (not only for SaaS).

I'm curious:

\- is there a particular SaaS designed by fairpixels that you consider an
example of good SaaS design?

\- do you have any relationship with Fairpixels? Your HN account has posted 2
comments since being created, and both those comments recommend fairpixels.

~~~
iampaul
Ive been following their progress for over a year and am a customer. They’ve
structured their website and business like a Saas. I don’t know about all of
their customers but I love the work they did for Uphex.com for example.

------
soulchild37
Would recommend [https://stunning.co/](https://stunning.co/) , I like the
floating tube animation and the increasing recovered amount is really
appealling.

~~~
Rjevski
Meh, I disagree, the design looks dated.

~~~
samstave
I agree - it feels poorly-designed-2012

But thats not a knock on their offering - if their customers are happy and
they are doing a good job, then more power to their servers.

