App as a “Form” Jason Moore

Sign-up forms on your website are a critical component for any successful SaaS company.  Are you paying enough attention, or are you putting the responsibility on your prospects to navigate rough waters?

Taking this thought further, most SaaS applications are an in-depth form with specific functionality wrapped around it.  With that thought in mind, how much time is spent during the development process thinking of the interaction with your SaaS as a conversion opportunity?

This post from the Conversion Room Blog is geared towards your website forms, but the information is extremely valuable when it comes to application design, as well.

Our HelpDesk Ticket software is a very clear example of the “app as a form” concept.

The thought of each interaction with our HelpDesk as a conversion opportunity is brand new to me.  I’m hoping to get feedback on this concept to flesh it out further.

One complication that many SaaS products will encounter is their highly configurable nature.  Taking into consideration your clients’ desire to add more and more fields to your standard form will certainly increase the amount of care needed for pre-launch design.

How will the conversion rate change when too many custom fields are added?

Will the intended “simple” feel of your application be lost once a local administrator has their say?

How can you preempt this common behavior?

Thinking of our application as a conversion calculator for organization’s support structure is interesting (to me).  What would our conversion funnel --for brand new clients-- look like from logging in through work order request completion?