When your SaaS UX design doesn't scale

I can clearly remember the first ever sign up to my HR SaaS project - it was a small company in the UK with about 10 employees. What a thrill that was. Over the next couple of years, we signed up more companies of even greater size, until we got a pretty good base of customer companies that were around the 100 employee mark each, on average.

Until this month, when we landed a deal for a major UK manufacturer with over 1000 employees! That was a 10x jump on our average customer size. Yikes!

Now, initially, I wasn’t at all worried. I am a tech guy by nature, and had designed my SaaS from the ground up to be scalable. We have multiple load balanced servers, replicated data stores, separate queueing services for background tasks etc. This wouldn’t even have caused a small sweat on our hardware infrastructure.

However, a designer I am not, and I quickly realised that our actual user interface would struggle under such a vast amount of user data.

Let me give you an example. On the main dashboard of our HR app, when the user first signs in, there is a little widget which show all the upcoming birthdays for your staff. It actually shows you all birthdays for the past 7 days, and the next 14 days coming up. This helps the HR manager to plan for office parties etc. or to send greetings out to the team.

Now, in a company of about 100 employees, this list really never grows to more than about 7 or 8 people on the list at any one time. This makes the widget a nice sized box on the page that stays ‘above the fold’ on a single page. Everything else on the dashboard fits around that quite well.

However, after we finished assisting the new company to upload all 1000+ employees into our system, I was horrified to notice that the birthday list was about 60 employees deep. In fact, the law of averages say that in the 3 week time span that the widget shows birthdays for, there will be an average of about 58 employees on it at any one time, in a 1000 employee company.

This made the widget overly tall, and pushed everything down the page. Users would have to scroll down quite a way on the page to see other critical dashboard data. Oops.

I learned the hard way that test data and expectations of low to medium data volumes had dictated some pretty serious limitations as to how I designed the widgets and most of the interface in general.

Thankfully, we have some great designers on my team now, and we put our heads together to work out how to best resolve this issue. We could

• Dynamically reduce the number of weeks spread for the birthday list depending on the volume of employees in a particular company

• Let the customer specify the date spread to show the birthdays for, or

• Set a hard limit on the number of birthday that we would show on the widget and show only those close to today’s date

All of these were discussed and dismissed as being a bit too limiting. After all, our other users loved this widget and frequently told us how it helped them to relate to their staff better.

In the end, we went with - incorporating a mini scroll bar within the widget. Anything up to 10 birthdays on the list and it would show like it always did (so therefore no difference to nearly all our other customers). More than 10 on the list and the widget would peg itself to 500px in height (which still fits on most screens), and a little scroll bar would appear on the right of the widget allowing the user to scroll down the list of birthdays.

My rule #1 for interface design is “Don’t change anything that customers would be already used to unless it is absolutely necessary”, and I think this design choice fits that well.

So far so good with this new customer, as they seem to be loving the system. We will be working closely with them over the next few weeks to ensure that all other elements of our interface are capable of handling 10x the data presentation that we are used to.

How are things with your SaaS? Have you come across similar situations? Or were you smart enough to design ‘defensively’ and cater for these sorts of edge cases?

You don't have to love something to be good at it

Image by mahindraraj

All the popular motivational books say something like ‘Do something you love, and you will never work a day in your life’.

I am lucky enough to do work that I absolutely love, and work on a project that is entirely of my own creation. Every day, I can’t wait to get up and work on my startup HR Partner.

However, there are aspects of building a business that I don’t enjoy. I could sit and write code for hours straight, but picking up the phone to talk to a new potential customer ties my stomach up in knots.

I am skewed towards being introverted, and I have never considered myself a sales or marketing type of person. But a big part of growing a business is getting customers to pay money for what you have built. It’s not that I dislike talking to people - on the corollary, I actually love talking to customers. It is the ‘salesy’ part that I don’t like. Some deep part of my psyche must believe that ‘selling’ somehow equates to ‘making people buy things they don’t want’.

Now, I am currently lucky enough to have a co-founder and an outgoing team that is great at marketing and sales, but as in most small companies, we tend to share tasks around. Added to that the fact that most customers like talking to company founders, I find myself doing sales and marketing quite frequently.

If I know I have to wake up in the morning and code up a new feature, I spring out of bed with a bounce in my step. But if I know I have to wake up and do an online demo of my product to a customer on the other side of the world, then wild horses have to drag me out of bed!

But here is the rub… If I focus on just having a conversation with the customer during the demo, and letting my genuine love and passion for my software product come through on those calls… it works! Customers respond positively. They buy subscriptions to my SaaS. They actually give me money for all this ethereal code that was spun out of my crazy imagination.

In talking to colleagues and vendors, they all seem to say the same thing. “Gee Devan, you are good at marketing and selling”. I always do my incredulous face when I hear this. If I had to rate myself, I would give myself a solid ‘4’ out of ‘10’ for it.

But it is obvious that there is a lot more depth and subtlety to this art of selling. And I don’t understand it. But it works for me, even though I don’t love it - and that is what is important. You don’t have to love something to actually be good at it.

Why I am glad my mother has dementia

One of the earliest photos I have of my mother holding me, circa 1967.

Upon first reading this title, I wouldn't blame you for thinking I must be some sort of terrible person and undeserving son for voicing such a sentence. I acknowledge that dementia is a traumatic and awful experience not only for the person suffering, but for their loved ones around them who are caught up in the painful journey.

But for me, my mother's descent into dementia has been the actual discovery of who she is (was?) as a real person. I have debated a long while about whether or not to publish this, but in the end, I feel that some of the darker sides of my family history probably needs to be told.

As a young person growing up in a close knit family, I was close to both my parents. I thought that they were the epitome of the perfect mum and dad, even though I was often troubled by some of the things my mother said and did.

You see, my parents had an arranged marriage, which is a common thing in my culture, and in Asia, where I grew up. My mother was the daughter of a well to do doctor, highly respected in the area, but unknown to most people, a demanding, controlling, tyrant around the house. For instance, my mum and her siblings were forbidden from speaking at the dinner table during a meal, and corporal punishment was dealt out to them with alarming frequency. This obviously had a detrimental effect on the emotional development of her, and her brothers and sister.

Her parents saw it fit to arrange her betrothal to my father, who was the son of a (lowly) clerk, but a brilliant, self made young man who was on the way to becoming a successful doctor in his own right. For some reason, this fact seemed to cause some sort of irrational anger in my mother towards any member of my father's family.

I mean, I think my mum and dad grew to actually love each other during their married years, but it seemed my mother always held a grudge against all members of my father's family - even those not involved in the decision around the arrangement of their marriage. As kids we were always discouraged from interacting with my dad's side of the family, and I think that grudge my mother had against them eventually was directed at me, because some of my most favourite uncles and cousins were on my father's side.

I was also lucky enough to be sent off to boarding school when I was about 15 years old. Being away from the direct influence of my mother for so many years, and getting to visit my friend's families on short holidays also helped to open my eyes that the sort of behaviour my mum exhibited was really out of the norm of what a caring, compassionate mother could be.

My returning home from my long stint away from my family is what started driving the rift into what was previously my close (almost to the point of being needy) relationship with my mother. I began to rebel against some of her more irrational methods of trying to drive wedges between extended family members, and that annoyed her because I was not being subservient and obeying her directions like my younger sister (who basically never left home) was.

Ironically, my time away from home actually made me closer to my father as I appreciated his quiet dignity and wisdom more as I grew older. And that also incurred the chagrin of my mother as she tried in many ways to curry my favour again and distance me from my father.

I tried to be the 'good son' and put up with this behaviour for many years, but it all culminated about a decade ago when my father suffered a stroke that took away his ability to communicate for a year before it degraded his health to such an extent that it eventually took his life.

Losing my father tore me up more than I expected. I realised that he was the rock that held the family together, and without him around, my mother's behaviour grew even more unbalanced as she sought to drive wedges even between my two beloved sisters and me. It made it worse when I discovered later that during my father's last year alive, when he was rendered helpless and immobile by his stroke, that my mother was regularly mentally and physically abusing him. I found out that neighbours would hear her screaming at him in frustration and called the authorities to the house on more than one occasion. I felt I could never forgive her for that.

After my dad passed away, my younger sister took my mother into their home to look after her. That act of compassionate kindness however, seemed to trigger a new level of irrationality in my mother, and she began a new complex theatre of emotional blackmail, lies and deceit to try and instil mistrust, fear and doubt in the minds of all family members. I began to distance myself from her day to day dealings as much as I could.

My visits to her were very infrequent, and would always be painful, as she struggled to weave the various fabricated stories, created to cause consternation and discomfort, together to try and trigger me. I realised that she had so many variations and lies on so many fronts, that it was getting increasingly difficult for her to make them consistent or even realistic any longer. I just sat and nodded most of the time and let her words wash over me. I long ago realised that trying to push back would just make her explode in irrational rage.

Soon, months would go by between my visits to her. I felt that whatever her love and maternal instincts were, they were simply absent from her personality now as she turned into a single minded person bent on the destruction of her own family unit who were only trying to be there for her.

In the last year or so, my sisters kept updating me on the deterioration of my mum's mental health. While she is still physically OK, she has been exhibiting the early onset of dementia.

I decided to resume my semi-regular visits to her. The first couple of times, I was amazed at the transformation. Her inability to recall her convoluted web of deceits meant that she simply did not bring them up at all, and simply chatted about meaningless, everyday stuff. That was such a relief for me. She simply could not remember, or summon the dark energy any longer to keep those machinations afloat, and that was a real blessing!

It actually made my visits to her pleasant again. I normally crave in depth intellectual conversation (like I had with my dad), but in this case, I was happy to just sit and chat about vacuous things like the weather and what was on TV because it didn't require the emotional wrangling of the past. I didn't even mind repeating the same stories or answering her same question repeated 3 times in the past 10 minutes, because suddenly my soul felt free again, and I felt that I was once again in the presence of my mother of old who was caring and protective over me.

My wife and kids have also resumed visitations, and they have all agreed with my sentiments that it is so much easier now to simply be with her and not have to be 'on guard' emotionally or watch what they say lest it be taken out of context and used against them.

I have noticed a gradual decline in her memory and mental faculties in the past few months, and I fear for where that will lead, but for now, at least she still remembers me and my sisters when she sees us, and while she cannot remember my wife and kids when they are not there and I visit her alone, when she sees them in person, she does recall who they are and I do see a delightful, genuine smile on her face when she sees her grandkids walk in.

The affliction that normally takes away all of a person over time has actually chosen to remove the darker aspects of her personality first, revealing the simple, but genuine soul beneath. I will cherish being in the presence of this part of her life before that too, is eventually gone.

Designers, please stop doing this...

Spotted this thread on Twitter today, these are the thoughts of a designer, retweeted by another designer I follow:

Given the pithy responses to the original tweet, I will give the designer the benefit of the doubt that he was just yanking everyone’s chain with this thread, but I have seen designers who post stuff like this without irony.

To those that do this - Just. Stop. Please.

I applaud that you perceive that there may be a problem with something you see in the universe, and that you think it could be better. But before putting your critique’s hat on, please take the time to become more familiar with the domain of the thing/concept that you are critiquing.

To cover the above scenario: I used to be a pilot, and had to learn morse code as part of my studies to obtain my license. I initially thought the same as above - what a confusing jumble this seems. But guess what? When I actually started to USE morse code, I realised what an incredibly efficient method of communication it is. The series of dots and dashes are not seemingly random, as pointed out by one of the replies above, rather they reflect the frequency of usage (‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language, and is denoted by a single dot), and are also designed to prevent ambiguity of similar sounding letters.

To suggest that the series of dots and dashes are dependent on the ‘numerical position within the set’ is flawed thinking. Quick - who can tell me the 16th letter of the alphabet? The 11th? As you can see - this is a pointless strategy.

(On the other hand, morse depiction of NUMBERS uses a flowing pattern system that is logical and consistent).

I was blocked on Twitter last year by a certain ‘high profile’ designer who is considered a darling of the Twitter Design community. She raised questions about something that is commonly used in the aviation industry, and when I (politely) pointed out the flaws in her thinking, based on my actual real world knowledge of the topic, she immediately Tweet shamed me and blocked me to prevent any further discussion on the subject.

This was quite an arrogant and myopic stance to take, and I hope that she is still not considered a role model for new up and coming designers in the field. (Note that she raised questions, but like the above example, didn’t actually use her designer expertise to come up with any sort of solution for the problem).

I know plenty of great designers. Some of them have even worked on my own creations and made them better than I could have ever envisaged.

Questioning something is perfectly valid. But before you voice your opinions on a particular facet of the existing design, please take the time to study the history and immerse yourself in the context of that design, and ask yourself WHY it is as it is currently? There are always forces that hold things in place, and sometimes those forces exist for a good reason, and shouldn’t be bent or altered unless your way forward is significantly better.