SAAS

7 Common SaaS Dashboard Mistakes — How to Fix Them

Stop clotting the beating heart of your SaaS business. Implement these 7 tips to streamline your dashboard and improve user retention.

SaaS dashboards, like everything in life, are a compromise. They’re a constant battle between functionality and ease-of-use. And, like most compromises, they typically do a bad job at both things.

Luckily, my consultancy, Pwego, identifies and fixes SaaS dashboards for a living. Over time, we’ve identified 7 mistakes that I see SaaS businesses make over and over again with their dashboards.

I’ve identified these mistakes and distilled them into one great article for those looking to dramatically improve the customer metrics through their dashboard. So if you’re interested, read on…

Mistake #1: Welcoming new users with… a blank login screen

Imagine, for a second, that your dashboard is a beautiful river that your hawaiian-shirt-wearing, pina-colota-drinking prospects are flowing down on their journey to become a customer.

As the prospect is sipping their drink and loving life, there will inevitably be a moment where they first experience friction.

For many apps, this moment is when they need to sign up and create an account. This moment of friction is essentially like telling your customer they need to portage over 100 yards of forest and hop back into the river on the other side.

Aka: It’s painful.

The problem, however, isn’t just in the act of authentication itself. It’s in the position we place this in the user flow. Greeting new users with a login screen might be essential, but can we give the user a taste of the value proposition before we make them sign in?

There’s many ways to fix this. The simplest would be embedding your sign-in form within the page. This allows the user to see the navigation and get a good feel for what they’re signing into.