When developing a product, UX design is just as important as UI design. Although these two practices do occasionally overlap, most people agree that the two terms represent two different goals. User experience design tends to focus on the entire process of interacting with your product or website. In contrast, user interface design focuses on the aesthetics and usability of the online space.

These are both very serious topics in their own right, so let’s focus on a more practical question: what could UI/UX designers do to enrich your SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) strategy? A lot of the success in marketing comes from user-friendliness. If the product fails in terms of UX/UI, it will affect productivity and cause losses for business in terms of its return on investment. It is where UX/UI designs come into play.

What is the Role of Design in SaaS?

Design is a crucial element in the success of any SaaS company. However, design as a term has become an extensive term. It is used loosely to describe many things, from graphic design, which is just one aspect of it, to user experience. When you hire designers, you can expect them to deliver great visual assets that complement your product’s features and functionality.

They will also ensure that your product has the right level of usability for your target audience, providing valuable insights about which features should be included and how much time users should spend interacting with your product. Here are the several roles of design in general:

• Understand the user’s needs and goals, thereby attracting more users.
• Conduct research to understand user behavior and environment.
• Create wireframes, prototypes, and visual designs to deliver a compelling, intuitive product with a clear flow from one screen to the next.
• It creates a memorable user experience.
• It makes the service more straightforward to use than the competition.

UX Design Best Practices and Trends

User experience design is creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. It involves creating the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function. Here are some of the best design tips you can use to give customers a better experience.

Easy Login and Sign Up

Easy sign-up and login are a must for SaaS websites. It would be best to keep in mind that your users are impatient, so you must provide them with an easy login and sign-up process. Users don’t want to spend hours going through a registration process to access your software. Let users sign up with their existing social media accounts such as Facebook or Twitter to make things even more accessible.

Gamification

Have you ever heard of gamification? It’s a process of making something more exciting and fun by adding game elements. In other words, it’s making a process engaging and enjoyable for your users. Gamification has been proven to increase customer engagement and make things more fun.

Customers are much more likely to remember your website or mobile app if they could earn some reward for using it! It also helps build loyalty between your customers and your company because they have the chance to achieve something valuable to them.

User-Friendly Onboarding

The most crucial aspect of any new customer’s experience with a product is the onboarding process. It’s what your customer sees and feels as they first use your product, and it sets the tone for the rest of the relationship. User onboarding makes it easy for users to get value from your site and easily engage with it.

When designing, avoid creating complex pages that require users to spend lots of time learning how to operate. Make sure everything on each page has a clear purpose: If a button doesn’t do something meaningful when clicked on or interacted with, remove it.

Send Automatic Invoices

Another way to engage customers with your UX design is by making it easy for them to pay any outstanding invoices that you may have sent out. Some people hate manually writing a check and mailing it in, but if you send them an automated invoice through your website, it could be as simple as clicking a few buttons and confirming their payment method. They don’t even have to get up from the couch.

How to Design a SaaS

The Saas development process requires paying special attention to various user experience and interface design aspects. Here are the steps to follow when designing one:

Pre-UX Design

Designing a SaaS starts with the pre-UX design, which is all about idea generation and validation. Tasks in the pre-UX design stage include:

• Identify and define the target user(s) and their problems.
• Evaluate existing solutions and evaluate their shortcomings.
• Generate ideas for new solutions.
• Test ideas with potential customers to validate their worthiness.

UX Design

In this step, you’ll create wireframes and prototypes based on your strategy in the first step. In this process, you also determine what content will be displayed when users visit the site and how they’ll interact with that content. A prototype or wireframe is a visual representation of the website’s information architecture, allowing designers to communicate ideas to developers and other stakeholders.

Wireframing can be done on paper or using computer software. These wireframes provide you with a clear picture of how the final product will look. It is also a good time to do usability testing to see if the application’s features are intuitive enough for your target users.

UI Design

The user interface (UI) is your software’s actual layout and design. It includes the colors, buttons, icons, and links used to make up your software’s main pages.

It is the stage where your design becomes a reality. Here are some tips for creating an effective UI:

• Find designers who can create mock-ups based on wireframes.
• Develop wireframes for every screen in your application
• Make sure that the design is consistent across all screens.
• Use proper colors that make sense for each screen.

The world is full of companies trying to build software that facilitates specific tasks for startups. But few of those startups make the leap from being valuable tools to an invaluable service. One of the steps to get there is having a super-effective user experience and user interface on your website.

It may seem like a daunting task. After all, you need to keep your customers informed, entertained, and engaged while navigating your website. Still, luckily, you can design many elements into the front end of your site to make it succeed where others fail.