There have been so many companies in the market recently utilizing technology to boost their profits. Therefore, if you want your company to have the upper hand, you must significantly consider the product design. Accept this fact or not, more presentable products tend to bring more profits to an organization. And when it comes to SaaS, the same principle applies, the more presentable your SaaS is, the more clients it will attract. But how do you develop a better SaaS design than the SaaS product in the market today? What early and late SaaS design principles should you consider to increase usability, add aesthetics, and improve your product?

SaaS in a Nutshell

SaaS is an acronym that stands for Software as a Service, a method of efficiently delivering apps over the web as a service (hence its name). Using SaaS, you do not have to struggle to install software and maintain it to use its feature. Instead, you must utilize the internet and gain access to these applications to use their feature. Doing so helps free users from complex hardware and software management struggles.

At times, some people also refer to SaaS as:

• Hosted Software
• On-demand Software
• Web-based Software

However, whichever name you come across, you should know that all SaaS apps ruin servers run by SaaS providers.

The SaaS Provider manages the application’s security, performance, and availability. Moreover, you can’t gain access to SaaS without their authorization.

SaaS Design Principles

If you want to design a SaaS, here are a couple of SaaS design principles you should keep in mind.

• Less is more

When it comes to developing designs for consumer products, this adage couldn’t be more accurate. That is because, in most cases, your client will want a minimalist, simple design that isn’t too challenging to understand and process.

To know whether your SaaS product satisfies the SaaS less is more principle, you should check on its simplicity and usefulness. Moreover, you should also check on its aesthetics and whether or not it satisfies user requirements. Generally, clarity and simplicity are two crucial aspects that you should significantly consider when developing your SaaS Product. Getting these two right will get you one step closer to a perfect SaaS design.

• Impeccable Collaboration

Perfect SaaS products require impeccable collaboration to get everything right. Moreover, every successful product requires a great team working hard to ensure they get every detail of the product right.

The design creation phase tends to be crucial to the SaaS product’s development. Therefore, you should give a lot of attention to this phase. That means selecting a great team to work on the product’s design and ensuring impeccable collaboration between project managers. Moreover, the analysts, engineers, UX designers, and other team members should work seamlessly to make the design as perfect as possible.

• User Friendliness

When designing a product, a designer always has the user’s needs in mind since they are the ones that are going to use the product. Therefore, designing a complex and challenging SaaS product should not be an option or a road that any SaaS designer would want to take. Instead, you should make your SaaS product design as simple and intuitive as possible to make the product beneficial to the user.

When using the SaaS product, the client should be able to resolve their issue in an intuitive and straightforward manner while spending minimal time trying to understand how the SaaS product works.

• Research and Study your client’s Behavior

When developing your SaaS product, consider that you aren’t the client that will use the resource. Therefore, even if your team and the product investors find your SaaS product design to be perfect, it might not fit the niche that you want to target. In some cases, you might consider your product very practical and valuable, but the end user might view things differently from their side. Therefore, for this simple reason, you should not entirely rely on the vision and understanding of the SaaS product. Instead, it would help if you studied the behaviors of your future clients and then tailor your product to fit them accordingly.

During the research, identify what your client needs via studying their recurring behavior and conducting several surveys. These basic things will provide you with enough information to develop a SaaS app that will attract many customers at the end of the day.

• Functionality

Do not generate a product for the sake of creating a product; instead, develop a SaaS product that helps solve existing issues. Note that even though visual design and aesthetics play a significant role in the application, they may not always be crucial to the app’s existence. If your product design breeds a time-consuming, counterintuitive and cumbersome product, then you should make some adjustments to the design. That is because all these features will bring to life an irritating, disappointing, and frustrating application that most users will not want to use, even if it looks fantastic.

Therefore, when developing your SaaS design, always consider the current issue it will solve for the end user. Note that users will not benefit from an app with no functionality. The entire point of developing it vanishes when the app has low to no functionality. Therefore, keep the product’s functionality in mind when creating your SaaS idea.

• Fast Feedback

In most cases, developers rush to meet deadlines and deliver apps to the end user. During this rush, they must carry out application testing in a hurry to deliver perfectly functional apps to the end user. Moreover, developers that work with prototypes face the same problem: they must go through the prototyping phase fast. However, carrying out this phase hurriedly with no backup information can cause many issues in later stages. These issues increase maintenance costs and reduce profits.

To avoid these issues, you should utilize client feedback and get to know how the user will interact with the application before you move on to the next stage. Moreover, designers can quickly validate many questions and pivot if necessary when working with prototypes. Users might also provide helpful information that you can use to improve your design.

• Frictionless Signup

When developing a SaaS product design, ask yourself the following question: would you enjoy filling out large signup forms before trying out a new online product? Most likely, your answer to the question is no, and the same applies to your target audience.

Most organizations feel the urge to collect a lot of information from the client upfront during the signup stage. However, when working with SaaS, you should know that you can collect more details later as the user utilizes your resource. Therefore, you do not have to overwhelm them with multiple questions during the signup stage.

• Dynamic Sorting

To most SaaS users, these products are essentially web applications. And as we all know, web applications deal with data that users have to dice and slice in varying ways according to their requirements, which change constantly.

Therefore, if your product only offers fixed sorting capabilities, it may work for a very small niche. Moreover, you should use a dynamic data sorting feature when developing your product design. Doing so will help user limit search results to data sets that are relevant to them.

Conclusion

SaaS products are crucial resources that most people are now using to ease the pressure of having to install and manage multiple apps. However, though they are helpful, developing their design can be challenging for many SaaS designers. That is because you must consider many issues for the design to benefit the end user. Therefore we hope this article will help you gain a perfect SaaS design to attract many clients.

Want to develop a SaaS product? Connect with SaaS development company Aalpha & get consultation at no cost.

Also read: SaaS development costs