on Universe
NOTE: I am a product manager at Squarespace working on mobile apps. The products I work on exist in a similar domain. There’s bias here and lots of it.
Wix, Wordpress, Weebly, GoDaddy, and Squarespace dominate the website builder industry. These titans have existed since the early 2000's and have led massive transformations in web design and truly democratized website creation. In doing so, they have amassed a massive subscriber base. Technology has massively shifted since then, and while each titan continues to iterate on their mobile offerings — they've fallen behind on the mobile curve and what it means to offer a true "mobile-first" approach to website building.
Universe is a mobile app that enables user to create websites using their mobile phones. And it's been pretty damn successful at that. They've raised $17.3 million since their founding in 2014, supporting over 400,000 websites.
a Senor Tower report for Universe
This is an analysis of the Universe app, broken down by overarching key areas I had thoughts on. It exists solely as a personal learning exercise and does not remotely cover everything. Feel free to reach out at saraswatayu@gmail.com or on Instagram @saraswatayu if anything — good or bad — catches your eye here.
1/ ONBOARDING
WINS
Getting started with Universe is SO easy. A variety of options that cater to a broad range of users ensures there's something for everyone. With nearly each step, a directed flow makes picking a template easy. And the template previews load quickly, making it clearly exactly what you're signing up for.
Universe makes accepting payments particularly easy. The store set up process takes less than 30 seconds. There's been no easier way for a micro-business to get started selling online. Props. More on e-commerce further down in this blog.
Further down the funnel, Universe introduces the grid-based editor through a series of directed prompts. They're short and easy to act upon. And holy smokes — the education here really is key. The editor isn't the easiest to get a grasp on but boy does this onboarding process make it a whole lot easier to understand.
MEHS
I'm obsessed with Instagram — it's one of my favorite products to use. As such, Connect with Instagram is an enticing option, but Universe doesn't enable me to explore what that might be at all. Even as a paywalled "PRO" feature, I'd expect more information than Universe's "Instagram Magic Builder". I would expect this to be one of the easiest ways to get started: bake your existing Instagram brand into a website that represents you or your project. It's a shame Universe doesn't make this free and add upgrade paths further down the funnel.
2/ GUIDES
the "Build Your Mailing List" guide in Universe
WINS
Universe continues to build out a collection of some of the most amazing guides I've seen in a mobile product. Building a website if oft-complicated, forcing most website guides to become large text blobs. Distilling this down to short, animated tidbits is incredibly effective at conveying what is possible and how.
MEHS
Guides make it easy to set up a website on Universe, but it isn't clear how to make these websites successful. The success of a website builder is dependent on ensuring the websites its users build are successful. I'd love to see future guides that lean on tools Universe provides to help users make their websites more successful. Adding support for additional tools that fall into this domain (i.e. SEO management and other marketing tools) also may be increasingly important as Universe expands into selling.
Some other lingering curiosities:
The omnipresent "Get Started" action makes it easy to directly jump to the editing experience, but the experience it redirects to starts out jarring. I'd be curious why this part of the experience doesn't continue the guided journey that exists through other onboarding processes in the app.
Maintaining recorded content can be incredibly expensive as new features are introduced and core UX patterns evolve. References to past interaction paradigms are prevalent, but easy to ignore. I'd be curious to see how this evolves as Universe scales rapidly and taps into different customer bases.
3/ EXPLORE
WINS
I enjoy being able to browse a catalog of Universe websites. And to search through them with a topic in mind is fun. And that's where it ends for me. There's tremendous potential here, it just hasn't be capitalized on.
MEHS
There doesn't seem to be any curation in the way Universe depicts the websites on its platform. Combining an element of storytelling, or narrative videos, or some other information about the websites presented will make the experience feel more relatable than just an endless list of websites.
It'd be interesting to vet Universe's appetite for enabling their users to duplicate websites they found interesting. And because content theft will likely be a concern, at least enabling the duplication of styles or layout would make this experience more actionable & purposeful.
Lastly, explore is also used to advertise their premium subscription. This is their least compelling value proposition and makes the product feel cheap. It may have been a growth driver while the platform was small, but I don't see a future in which this bodes well for the company.
4/ E-COMMERCE
WINS
Universe optimizes for speed of getting started, and it feels most prevalent when setting up an online store. With Universe, payments work automatically and Universe collects the money for you until you're ready to move to a more widely-known payment processor. Contrast this with most prevalent website building titans — Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly — that force users to set up a payment provider to start accepting payments. Wix and Weebly have first-party offerings in the form of Wix Payments and Square, respectively, but even those require a separate configuration process. This is a BIG deal.
They also haven't invested in building out an inventory management system, rather ensuring they're leverage third-party APIs to deliver a store set up experience that's still brilliant. Special kudos to offering Square Cash — you don't normally see that, but seemingly everyone has it and is an easy way to get started if you're just starting out.
MEHS
10% cut on payments. Might be acceptable for people just experimenting with online selling. Luckily, it's free for the $1000. For people that are able to validate their ideas successfully, I can't imagine this fee will encourage them to stick around for longer.
Universe relies on the Shopify platform to power its Commerce block. Square also caters heavily to the "just getting started" audience Universe does — I'd expect that to be a better partnership. Seamlessly integrate with Square's core business — physical selling — would be extremely powerful.
5/ MOBILE WEBSITES
Featured Universe websites: Taka Enoki, Adam Watters, Klub Kid Records, Frida
WINS
Universe makes mobile-optimized websites and it shows. The approaches they take to subpages is interesting — paging content horizontally is easy to navigate on mobile.
A responsive grid layout, customizable with up to 5 boxes per row, makes it easy to build a website. Drag, pinch, and panning gestures are easy to learn and the instant updates make building a breeze.
MEHS
Universe deems itself "the easiest way to make a website". And while it's super easy to get started, the websites I've been able to produce are far from what I'd consider a "good website".
Let's break that down:
The options to navigate between pages on Universe isn't easy to customize. Nearly all examples of a navigation drawer I've been butcher any attempt at being pleasing to the eyes.
Customization of website content is too detailed. There's a lot of visual clutter when trying to build a website, especially when starting with a template. I wish the templates had an "advanced" mode, but defaulted to a more restrictive setting — it'd make getting started easier. Onboarding content creation for the templated pages may also help. For instance, a guided experience to name the product, add descriptions, and set the price would make setting up a store page WAY easier.
And lastly, an important nit:
Universe websites are mobile-only. There's no tablet or desktop view and no ability to tweak any experiences to be better on a larger screen. This reflects in other design choices such as horizontal scrolling, which in Universe's case only works with swipes. Swiping doesn't work at all with a mouse. Even if optimizing non-mobile experiences is out of question, content shouldn't break.
6/ “PRO”
WINS
All-in-one. Universe pricing is simple and upfront. Over the last few years, they've transformed from offering modular products (i.e. domains + websites separately) to a single annual subscription that bundles a custom domain, an email address, an "advanced" website, and analytics. With "PRO" displayed throughout the Universe experience, the messaging is clear and easy to act upon.
MEHS
Annual or lifetime subscriptions only. The flipside of a subscription that includes a custom domain is that there's significant upfront cost for Universe. And as a result, it makes sense that the only viable business offering be at least one year in length. But... a starting price of $120 is just a lot.
Two recommendations:
"PRO" trial period. The majority of Universe's functionality is inaccessible to free users. I would imagine opening up a short trial period to test out all the blocks and analytics tools may help a lot with lower-intent users. Downside risk of offering a trial seems low — I certainly can't imagine a significant number of users would take advantage.
Offer a separate monthly subscription. There's certainly a world in which the LTV of a user is high enough with a monthly subscription to be more profitable. Focusing on longer-term retention by creating automated social tools (i.e. offer configurations to automagically update the page when there are new Instagram posts), or connecting email lists directly Shopify inventory notification, etc may help offset the risk here.
7/ SPEED
WINS
It feels really frickin fast. There's barely any loading anywhere. Even videos load quickly. And when there's even a hint of loading, I appreciate the attention to detail paid to the loading states. Props to the team on this one.
MEHS
Large websites on Universe aren’t the fastest things in the world. That said, I’ve only come across two websites that felt slow, Klub Kid Records among them.
Overall, I’m jelly. Incredible work Universe.
CONCLUSION
Universe is an incredibly polished tool for making mobile websites. There's tremendous opportunity that lies ahead of it, especially with it being so far ahead of the pack in mobile-first content. Its biggest opportunity is also its newest: payments. With a few tweaks and experiential polishes, it'll be a dominant player for people who want to test small ideas in no time.
