Design Review: A Suite of Tools for SMEs That Could Use Some Clarity
Amploo is an operations management tool that climbed to the top of Product Hunt, but could really excel with a few simple design improvements
Before We Get Started
Design critiques are not intended to be personal nor malicious in nature. I do my best to find products that I think sound interesting and have potential, and then dig into their design decisions to understand where they’re really crushing it and where they have room for improvement. I particularly enjoy reviewing top products on Product Hunt because it’s at least some social indicator that the founder(s) are skilled and capable across any number of functions. I’ve also seen that most small founding teams don’t have experienced designers amongst their ranks, and so my hope is that these reviews can be a value-add for the founders who have backgrounds in engineering/finance/sales.
I approach these reviews from an ethos that is consistent with my own design work and other writings about design - that design can be a massive differentiator for software companies, and should be more thoroughly considered as a critical business function. I hope that shines through in these reviews as much as anything else, and provides clear, actionable take-aways for non-designers to implement as they scale up.
Now, onto this week’s critique.
First Impressions
I love the idea of niche-ing down SaaS tools for specific industries and roles. Instead of having 1-3 big players doing everything relatively well for all companies and organizations, fragment those out and win on product, design, and brand connection with a smaller ICP. Find a role you are intimately familiar with and build X tool specifically for them, with unique workflows and educational content, and tools that make the connection between you and them much stronger than it is with a general-purpose tool. By being more focused, dedicated, and intentional about who you’re serving, product decisions get easier (fewer high-impact tradeoffs), your brand position and design are clarified, and you can get more valuable feedback from your users (not to mention the competitive advantages inherent in this approach).
I saw Amploo on the top of the Product Hunt board this morning and thought it fit the bill for what I described above. In their own words:
I created it to be the ultimate solution for SMEs. Here’s what makes Amploo stand out:
✨ Centralized Management: One unified platform for all your planning and process management needs. 📅 Task & Deadline Tracking: Stay on top of projects with ease. 🚀 Onboarding & Learning: Simplify employee onboarding and training with our included learning management system. 🛠️ Asset Management: Keep track of your assets effortlessly. 💼 HR Functions: Streamline your HR tasks for better efficiency.
On first read, it feels like there’s a little bit of a disconnect between the 10,000-foot view of what Amploo does and what these more detailed product solutions are telling us. Primarily, these seem to be very generic business functions that span across a ton of different teams/roles and are likely not unique to a team of SMEs. With that said, each of these features could be retrofitted to the SME role, so I decided to take a look and see what it was all about in practice.
Auth
The auth workflows in Amploo are leaving quite a bit on the table. If this really is going to be a tool that competes with Asana/Notion/etc, then this onboarding process needs to be dialed in to really hook users and demonstrate value from the start. A few opportunities:
Not asking the right questions
The only auth questions asked of the user are where I’m coming from, how many employees at my company, and what we do
None of this feels relevant to the product and my journey as the user. If there were different paths for design companies vs HR companies, it makes sense to ask that question. Same for company size - if a solopreneur use case is different than enterprise, then those questions are relevant, but otherwise try and unlock value with your questions
Instead, it feels like I’m answering a marketing survey that will be used to recruit other users rather than spending time providing information that will help me solve my goals
This isn’t a knock on Amploo, specifically - many companies do this, especially when they’re relatively new. It’s useful to you (the builder) to know these things, but it provides no value to the user and slows down the extremely precious momentum you’ve gotten from them. When users are hard to come by in the early days, you should provide value to them at every checkpoint (not the other way around). These things can also be solved with tagging, attribution, email follow-up, etc, which don’t derail the user’s momentum
Missing an Individual-level onboarding workflow (or at least not exposing it very well)
I signed up, answered a few irrelevant questions, and was dropped in a Home view, but I didn’t input any of my personal information that would make the product useful for me or others
A big piece of the value prop for this tool seems to be user and team information, and at no point during the onboarding are you prompted to enter any of that information. It’s a big leap to rely on users to fill this in after the fact, and will likely lead to many empty or incomplete user/team profiles, making one of the core value props of the tool pretty useless
Onboarding Walkthrough
At this point, it’s becoming more apparent that Amploo is less a tool specifically for SMEs and more of a catch-all operations management software. It is nice to see that they have a pretty detailed onboarding walkthrough, but during this walkthrough, there’s not much mention of how the tool actually helps SMEs.
In the first step of the walkthrough, the CEO adds a personal note - a nice touch! - but calls out that the tool can do “whatever you’re looking for”. So we’ve got some mixed messaging, but there are some nice touches in the walkthrough besides that. It’s dynamic, moving to different parts of the UI rather than sitting in a modal in the center. This helps users visualize where exactly they can take certain actions.
With that said, there are a few things in the walkthrough I would probably update to help users land in a more successful starting point after onboarding. With a tool that has so many feature offerings, it can be helpful to give users a more guided experience to start so that they’re not completely overwhelmed by the options. As-is, there are too many similar steps in the walkthrough, and they could benefit from:
Clearer titles on what the user gets out of that action
Emphasis/theming to show users “do X for messages, do Y for social profiles, do Z for tasks”, rather than jumbling all features into one walkthrough
The status bar is ok, but still pretty ambiguous - I’d consider adding clear numbered steps (eg 1/12) so users know exactly how much more is in store
Core UX
The core UX (especially within the Home view after onboarding) feels cluttered, redundant, and unclear:
There’s a section for “Management” in the Employees tab, but it’s unclear who has access to that and what it’s for. There was no role validation to ensure I am management, and yet I can see all of that data
The Home view is extremely busy and feels redundant in a few places. How are Assigned To Me and My Tasks different?
The left rail icons lack hierarchy and cohesion and add to the confusing feel of the UI. Without some hierarchy/emphasis, it’s unclear where I should be going or what I should be focusing on
For a product with lots of features like this, it’s almost always a necessity to have a success checklist that outlines ~5 things you can do as a user to be successful and then checks them off as the user completes them (along with links/guides on where and how to complete them). This gives the users clear guidelines on what the most impactful steps to complete are, and how to complete them
Final Thoughts
Overall, there is a big opportunity in the SME space to capture some workflow automations and reduce the PgM work required of them. SMEs are folks who are very knowledgeable about certain subjects, but often end up doing a ton of business operations work to supplement their own knowledge work (updating documentation, filing feedback, searching for answers, etc). Particularly with the capabilities being unlocked by AI, these glue functions feel ripe for disruption with automation (think Zapier for back-of-house functions that let employees focus on their core work rather than PgM’ing operations work).
With that said, that’s not exactly what Amploo is aiming at with this tool (despite some of their marketing copy indicating that that’s the problem they’re solving). Instead, they’re focusing on an operations management suite full of - frankly - confusing tools that feel disjointed and thrown together. Startups often fail by going too wide too soon, rather than nailing a core product/niche and building deep before building wide. But beyond the lack of focus, some clear UX improvements would help users start on a better foot when onboarding to this massive suite of features.
Ensure marketing copy aligns with what the product is actually doing and set expectations accordingly. Currently, it feels like you’re having the rug pulled out from under you, expecting one thing and then getting 50 other things
In the Auth process, ditch the marketing questions. Replace them with robust tracking and more user-focused questions so that you can learn more about their problems and improve the product. Asking marketing questions in the auth process is leaving a big opportunity on the table
As part of the onboarding walkthrough, there are some minor improvements that would be easy to implement and make a big difference in how much value users get out of the walkthrough. Expectation setting and more emphasis on specific journeys would help users get a ton more value out of the walkthrough, rather than feeling like an extension of the feature dump that lives in the core UX
The core functionality is overwhelming and confusing. From a product POV, I think they’d benefit from scaling some features back/removing them entirely and focusing on 3-5 operations management functions that they can really solve. But if their core belief is really to have everything in one place, then there needs to be considerably more guidance on how users use and get value out of all these different tools from day 1
Eliminate 30% of the business on the home view - you don’t need “How are you feeling today” to be a permanent fixture, and many of the Home sections feel redundant
The value of having all of these different work functions in one platform should primarily be for simplicity of management. Amploo would benefit a ton from leaning into simplicity and focusing on a few core value drivers that they can bring together in one platform. Giving users fewer options and/or guiding them more explicitly on the options that are available would go a long way towards reducing user churn and solving user problems on day 1.