Importance of Working Out UI/UX Design for SaaS Product
Today, there are a huge number of artists who are ready to take up the development of your site or applications. The enormous difference in the cost of the same project among different performers is striking because the price of a site starts at $ 100 and ends with space figures. In this article, we will tell you about the importance of UI/UX for SaaS, its components, typical misconceptions and myths based on our personal experience working with clients, and we will help you determine the cost of SaaS platform design so that you get exactly what you expect from the designer.
What is the Main Misconception About Creating SaaS App UI Design
Many clients think that development does not require preliminary interface design because the developer, in principle, can do everything himself. This becomes the main misconception at the initial stage that when using some standard components and approaches from the library, everything will turn out beautifully and conveniently at once. This misconception is most often encountered when creating startups because they are more limited in budget and try to save on everything. Often, the founders of startups do not really understand the values of different stages of development and begin to save on what cannot be saved. In particular, they save on the work of the designer.
It’s even worse when they begin to save on the analyst’s work because it’s the analyst who needs to figure out all the requirements and conceptually draw the architecture of the project, the screen and users, what functions will be, describe iOS cases and so on. That is, he prepares the first materials that are already delivered to the designer, and he, in turn, makes this a beautiful and convenient product. Since many customers like to save money on analytics, as a result, they skip this stage of design. The worst case is when they immediately begin to develop functionality, believing that the developer is professional, which means that he can do everything right as the client wants. This is a huge misconception.
Let's see if it is worth saving on UI UX design and what the consequences could be. What can be lost and what mistakes can be made if this is not done?
3 Myths about Design Practices of SaaS Application
1. We are a small project - we don't need UI/UX design
The first myth is that the client believes that SaaS application UI design is needed only for beauty, image, and very large successful companies. In a small project, this is not necessary and you can just do it somehow and they will forgive you because you have no money. If this is a small company and no one knows you, and therefore everything may not be important if only it can work somehow. This is a misconception because users do not forgive the low quality.
2. Developers can design a product - we don't need a designer
The second myth is that a developer can do everything himself without an analyst and Web Design Companies. This is absolutely not the case for two reasons.
Firstly, the developer is a technical specialist who sees everything quite differently as ordinary consumers have completely different habits of using software products and a completely different level of readiness to deal with something difficult to achieve a goal that an ordinary person will not do. Secondly, the developer is a person who knows how to create a software product, but he does not know anything about a specific industry niche, future users, what market trends are formed, or that stack of products and solutions. Therefore, he cannot, by definition, do this. In the best case, he can make the application convenient and understandable for himself and for people like him.
3. It is too expensive - we are a small startup, we have no money
The third myth is to think that work on UI UX design is very expensive and you can really save on it. This is absolutely not the case. This work requires very little time, much less than it takes time to develop it. It is absolutely impossible to save anything on this.
Consequences of Believing in Similar Myths
The system will either be inconvenient and users will simply leave quickly. Or they won’t understand the rules of use at all, because the training that will be necessary is so long that it will demotivate people and they will go to much easier competitors. That is, if the product is not adapted to the behavioral characteristics of people, to their habits, to how they would like to use all this, then the probability of failure is 100%. Look at this image below - your customer is that little kid watching those cute fluffy asses rotating in a random direction :)
What Is Often Ignored Before Starting UI/UX Design
Too many companies do not have real product experience in creating a product, launching it on the market, and bringing it to a successful state, designing an interface for reasons of component usage standards as recommended, plus their own vision of convenience.
This is wrong because the SaaS UI design of the interface should not be focused on your own tastes and not on your own concepts of convenience but on the audience who should use this product later. Most designers and analysts know the existence of standard components and some classic interface solutions. They create a beautiful but ineffective and inapplicable interface in this business because they ignore the following:
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Your interface should be at least as good as the interface of your main and best competitors. But preferably even better, not much, but at least a little better. Sometimes this is enough for users to prefer your product. An example here is Airbnb and Booking, and one of the universally recognized advantages of Airbnb is its simple and convenient interface compared to old-school Booking. Therefore, before we begin to design interfaces, we are sure to study in detail at least two or three of the best competitors of our client's product.
- You can never do the style of appearance based on your idea of modern and good SaaS app UI design. All this must be taken at least from those competitors (or even not competitors), but from those products that have already worked in this niche for some time. Each niche has already developed its own stereotypes and its own trends and standards that must be taken into account. Your product should be a logical evolutionary continuation of the whole story, and not go into any new direction, but be at least one step better than existing products.
- A good interface is always created only with a product manager or marketer who knows the audience of future users well, understands their daily needs, and understands how to build their work so that it is convenient for everyone. Complex things should be solved easily and beautifully. That’s why you can never trust developers to make an interface on their own. But even a designer by himself without a marketer will most likely not create a SaaS UX design that will be really user-friendly.
- Often, to save money, the customer makes a static SaaS interface design, a set of screens, instead of making at least a clickable prototype. This is an opportunity to try this interface precisely in dynamics and realize all the routes the user will have to go through to do something. Such a prototype is a very cheap and effective method to test the convenience of an interface in a focus group. It is correctly planned routes that are 80% of the interface's success because, most of the time, the user understands what sequence of actions you need to do to get the desired result. This is not an intuitive arrangement of components on the screen. Although this is also, of course, important.
Important Conclusion
A high-quality interface is the fruit of the work of 3 people: a marketer (or product specialist) + an analyst + UI/UX designer. Yes, these 3 heroes save the planet and our brains from annoying and unusable interfaces.
Cost of UI/UX Design for SaaS App
In the SaaS development of the first version of the product, investors usually invest in hundreds of thousands of dollars if development takes place in the United States or Europe. In our company, the same thing will amount to tens of thousands of dollars. When launching the first version, startups have no room for error - there are no extra tens of thousands of dollars to redo the Front-End. If a product does not enter its consumer because of the very complex learning process and development due to the complex interface, then the startup will simply have no money left to redo it. As a result, the project will have to close. Even if there is money, then at an early stage, it is very inefficient to spend it on fixing mistakes. It would be much better to use them for remarketing in sales or simply in any other project development.
Our Experience in SaaS Interface Design
We recently had a very significant case. We were approached by a client who developed his product for two years by a rather considerable team. There were about 4 developers. This is a lot for a startup. Four people developed a huge amount of functionality over two years, working monthly and without any single design at the product level that would consider marketing or usability. Therefore, they threw one functional on the second and added it wherever possible.
Thus, many absolutely uncomfortable pop-ups appeared with completely illogical interface solutions for simple tasks. To the developers, this seemed like a convenient solution and was structured beautifully, but for a normal person who goes to work every day and needs to use this product, it was very difficult and confusing. This client contacted us so that we could completely redesign the entire system. Initially, there were about 40 screens and forms. After the redesign, we simplified it to about 27-30 screens and forms while retaining all the functionality.
We made all the chains much more logical and compact without duplicate information. Everything became available in one or two clicks. For all this work, we spent about three weeks of work of one designer and one week of work of an analyst in analytics, that is, a total of 160 hours. At our rate, it is $ 5600. That is, it is less than the salary of one developer per month that this client paid for 2 years.
Therefore, it is obvious that it is impossible to save on design. After the redesign, four developers reworked the entire product externally for approximately two months. For two months, four people worked to convert a bad design into a good one, which amounted to about $40,000 - $60,000. As a result, it turned out that analytics plus competent design took about 10% of the time that you need to spend to remake the entire interface of the entire product. It would be simpler and more profitable not to save on design, do it right away and not spend the extra $40,000 - $60,000 to change the appearance. Please take a look at this example of UI/UX design in more detail.
Final Thoughts
The main thing that any business needs to remember when developing a new project is that the right UX / UI design thinks about a person's simple needs, motives, and goals. A lovely shell and convenient functions should work for a real person and simplify his experience of interconnection with the interface.
Due to the constantly growing demand in the market, more and more specialists in this field are required who are able to analyze the behavior of the target audience, to offer quality solutions to enhance usability. Our team will help you avoid many problems you may encounter too late, and most importantly, it will significantly save your costs. If you need help with UI/UX design for any software, fill in the contact form below.