We have finally reached the 500,000-user mark for Buffer. This product helps you to share more effectively on social media. When we began our journey to build Buffer, two years ago, we knew that we would face obstacles and make mistakes. We have learned that mistakes are inevitable and that we can learn from them to help us move forward.

These mistakes are partly what I believe helped us get to where we are today.

Our Product Building Experience

Before I talk about the most important lessons learned from our UX and design errors, I want you to know one of our main product development principles.

” Validate First, Code Later”

Let me tell you how it happened. Joel Gascoigne, our founder, immediately began coding instead of validating his idea. This is the way he used to approach things. He realized this wasn’t the right way to go after a few minutes of coding.

He tried another approach. He created a landing page, pretending that his product was already available. Even though he wasn’t done with everything yet. The link to his site was then shared on Twitter.

If their interest was piqued, they would click on a button to register for an account. The user was then presented with another page, which stated that Buffer wasn’t yet finished and requested that the user leave his/her address to receive an email when Buffer launches.

We were able to get our first customer after just 7 weeks.

This experience led to the creation of three key principles for product development:

1. As little as possible, keep the first version of a product or feature.
2. Prepare for a long journey that will require a lot of direction.
3. Any idea for a feature can be turned into a hypothesis, which first needs to be validated by the user.

The following lessons we have learned about product development will help you make sense of the information.

Lesson 1: Revenue should be a secondary focus of user flows

We learned early that UX was key. It is important to focus on maintaining customers and not generating revenue. Because it directly impacts your reputation, user experience is crucial. This is how we learned our lesson. The user flow for our initial landing page was the following:

1. We will show you the “subscription plans” and pricing page when you click on the signup button after you have viewed our landing page.
2. You can then choose from one of our paid plans or the “Free” plan.
3. Once you have chosen the best plan for you, it is possible to sign up by entering your details (e.g. your name, email address, and so forth).

This user flow allows us to generate revenue quickly by allowing people to choose a paid plan immediately after signing up. We quickly discovered that users who paid for the product without ever having the opportunity to use it drove our churn rates skyrocketing. This is why?

We discovered that although people would pay, they wouldn’t use Buffer. They also stopped using it, so eventually, they canceled their subscription. We changed the way we sign up users and how we acquire them. We thought it was a better idea to ask the person to try the product before they upgrade.

This resulted in a user flow that is much more fluid on our website. Two important things happened as a result:

1. We didn’t add a pricing page to dilute the funnel. This resulted in more people signing up.
2. Over time, more people upgraded because it became easier to use, find value, and stay with us.

We have made many product improvements since then that offer more features for free. Our core product features remain free. We would only recommend that you upgrade to a paid plan once you have seen a lot of benefits from Buffer. We were able to identify user flows that are focused on user retention as a key discovery.

Lesson 2: Email Sign-in Is Better than Social Sign-in

After many failed A/B testing to increase conversion rates on our landing page, the idea was to enable Social Sign-In. This means signing up for a Buffer Account and then logging in with your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn account. Buffer is a platform for posting on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Therefore, it was only natural that potential users could sign up quickly and easily using an existing account.

Our switch from email to social sign-in is one of our greatest growth hacks. This allowed us to increase sign-ups by 50%. 

We went from 500 daily signups to 800 daily signups almost immediately after this switch.

Lesson 3: Get out of your comfort zone early and test all of your assumptions

Let me tell you about how we failed with a new browser extension redesign idea. Buffer’s core component is our browser extension which works with Chrome, Firefox, and all other major browsers. We know that the extension will make your experience the best if you are a user.

The most powerful use case was sharing from any website and adding all your content to your “buffer” for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. As we had many ideas for improving the product, it was natural that we focused on this aspect of the product. However, when we started to create a better browser extension, we felt like we had reverted to our old ways and made the same mistakes that we were trying so hard not to.

This is the sequence of steps we took to build our extension (not).

1. After identifying some problems with the browser extension, we brainstormed what we wanted to do.
2. To design and create a functional first version, we spent a lot of time and money.
3. The first version was not released until late in the development process. We found that people were confused by it.
4. The new idea was never implemented.

Since that failure, we have ingrained in our brains the practice of testing each assumption we make. This is how we approach the development of new products and features.

1. Identify the problems with the product and brainstorm ways to fix them.
2. Ask users if they have the same problems.
3. After confirming it with our users, quickly create wireframes or a simple prototype. This takes less than 1-2 days.
4. Ask users to talk again about their experiences with the prototype.
5. Continue to refine your product/feature to make it more usable.
6. Track engagement/growth/revenue metrics and talk to users again about their experience.

Lesson 4: Make sure you are clear about user interface labels

The last lesson I want to share is one that I have been thinking about for a while. It’s the issue clear regarding labels, buttons, help texts, etc. Being smart with them. This problem was very well described by Des Traynor of Intercom in an article

Situation: Your feature solves a real problem for your users.

However, they aren’t using it. They don’t use it because they haven’t seen it or they didn’t know what it was.

This is a situation we will continue to face.

Here’s the key example: You can connect multiple social media accounts to Buffer so that you can post to them all from one place. For example, you may sign up with your Twitter account and log in with it. However, you might also want to connect your Facebook account and LinkedIn account to Buffer to make posting easier.

We imagined that a clever symbol icon with a “plus” (+ sign would indicate that this is the way to add other social network accounts. We were repeatedly contacted by users who wanted to know if Buffer could connect their LinkedIn or Facebook accounts.

We changed several aspects of the “connect” button by making it a placeholder icon and using a larger plus sign. There were many other design changes. What was the final design solution? It was easy: We used the text “connect more account” in plain words. This is a lot more effective than using (what we thought) a cleverly designed icon to represent this UI task.

We discovered that the clear solution is better than the clever one. Even though the latter might not be as beautiful, unique, or as cool, it’s always the best choice for the user.

Conclusion: Every Hypothesis Must Be Validated

Our company and app are still in their early stages. As such, many of our design methods and processes are still experimental. We have learned the most important lesson about. It is not necessary to attach to one idea. Every design and feature iteration should be treated as a hypothesis that must be validated. From golfing restaurants, user experience is crucial. People need to be able to access your site easily or they will move on to something else.

Testing is crucial. We intend to add many more features that people love. We also plan to create many more features that people will love.

This way of thinking is what we believe will allow us to create the best product possible for our customers.