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Creating an everlasting Saas product is like planting a tree. First, you need to put in requisite efforts upfront to ensure a strong foundation and then continuously nurture it as it grows.
But unlike trees, SaaS products don’t take decades to mature. In fact, with the right design approach, you can see significant results much sooner.
And as any seasoned designer, developer, or even a marketer will tell you today, scaling a SaaS product is best accomplished with Design Systems. These allow you to make extensive changes to your product with minimal effort and ensure consistency across the user interface. So let’s dive deeper and explore how you can use Design Systems to craft memorable and sustainable SaaS products.
Challenges Faced With Saas Product Design
When it comes to design, SaaS products have a few unique challenges. As a result, many product designers make common mistakes that hold back the growth of their products. Here are some of the most common challenges faced by SaaS product designers:
- With multiple people working on a single product, it’s easy for design elements to get out of sync. This makes it harder for users to navigate the product and find what they need.
- As your product grows and evolves, you will inevitably have to make significant changes to design elements. But doing this with conventional tools and systems can be time-consuming and tedious.
- Designing a flexible Saas platform for SaaS often translates to reimagining the platform from the tiniest element to the most complex functionalities, which can be extremely daunting.
- Modules must be flexible enough to be used for various uses and touchpoints, yet they also need to be cohesive enough to work together as a system. This can be a difficult balance to strike.
Benefits Of Design Systems For Saas Products
With the help of a well-designed design system, you can overcome each of these challenges and deliver mature, well-polished products that delight users with their impeccable user journeys! Here are just some of the benefits that you can expect in the process:
1. Design Consistency: A Design System will help you maintain design consistency across your product, even as it grows and changes. Every design element will be governed by well-defined rules that will set the precedence for meeting user expectations with every product interaction.
2. Improved Efficiency: By using predetermined, reusable assets and patterns, you can improve the speed and efficiency of your design process. You no longer need to spend time recreating assets multiple times or struggling to replicate a particular design style with painstaking details.
3. Scalability: A Design System is built to be scalable and flexible, so your product can quickly evolve in the future. You can easily make changes to individual elements or whole modules and still be confident that the overall product will maintain its integrity. Shorter onboarding times and fewer rookie mistakes are primary takeaways, along with hours saved in development over erroneously signed off designs.
4. Speed: With a Design System at your disposal, you can wave goodbye to the days of tedious pixel-level design changes. Instead, you will be able to work at a much higher level, delivering designs at breakneck speed without sacrificing quality or user experience.
5. Visual Accessibility: It is essential to build a UI base that balances visual approach, accessibility, and interface conventions, making the product appealing to all users. This calls for a harmonious colour scheme built on a primary colour and complies with AA accessibility standards.
6. Improved Collaboration: A Design System provides a shared language and understanding that can help to improve communication and collaboration between designers, developers, and other stakeholders. With everyone working from the same foundation, it will be easier to align on product goals & direction and achieve tangible results.
7. Increased UX Focus: By eliminating the need to recreate redundant assets from scratch, a Design System also allows you to focus more on ensuring the best possible user experience. You can spend less time worrying about misaligned or missing elements and instead devote yourself to making your products as intuitive and engaging as possible.
Amalgamating It All For Tyke
At zazzy studio, we consider Design Systems essential building blocks for all SaaS products. With this mindset, we approached the unique challenge of designing the website and dashboards of Tyke, a SaaS Fintech Startup, for 3 different personas — startups, investors and venture capitalists.
The first step was to create light and dark theme components, which would serve as the starting point for all other design decisions. We also decided to use a single primary colour — Vivid Sky Blue — and a few shades of grey to keep the overall design clean and modern and make our work significantly faster while designing the screens.
Next, we created a modular grid system that would provide the flexibility to accommodate various components for ease of use and efficiency. This helped the team organise assets and reutilise them across the platform without deviating from brand guidelines. This is especially helpful for a Saas product with an extensive set of assets, as it allows us to work at a higher level and get results faster.
Finally, we focused on ensuring visual accessibility and creating a consistent flow of information from the POV of users. Our goal was to strike a balance between visual appeal, efficiency, and UX focus — all of which are essential to any startup website and a Design System.
Conclusion
Designing a SaaS product does not have to be an intimidating process. With the help of a Design System, you can streamline your workflow, improve efficiency, and deliver consistent, high-quality products that will wow your users and keep them coming back for more! Not only will this save your organization precious time and money, but your team will also concentrate on the most critical issues at hand.
