Design-Driven Development: The Perfect Match for SaaS

Design-driven development is the guarantee of product success after its launch. To better understand why prioritizing the design process matters, imagine you have a house and need to renovate it. Before looking for construction workers, you will create a design plan with precise electrical wiring and plumbing drawings. Otherwise, if you don’t plan how your house items will be located, you may end up in a situation where remaking is needed. An identical approach has to be applied for software-as-a-service (SaaS) creation.

The urge to put design first and code afterward has a solid basis for such a decision. The statistics demonstrate that e-commerce apps with excellent UI/UX design have secured a 39% retention rate. On the contrary, products with crashes and slow loading have made 62% of users uninstall them. Let’s discover how design-driven development benefits business owners and clients.

Design-Driven Development Definition

Design-driven development (DDD) is a strategy in software development that instructs to focus on design as a primary consideration and code after. According to this methodology, the product creation process starts with crafting low-fidelity prototypes, testing them, and then taking steps into coding based on the results. By following this approach, SaaS product developers create a human-centered and intuitive application that aims to transform workflows into seamless journeys.

Traditional SaaS Development Challenges

Even though coding before designing sounds as a proper flow to approach SaaS creation, it still comes with many challenges:

• Slow market entering. Traditional development process focuses on rigid technical requirements. Also, teams usually work separately, combining the results in the end. The traditional approach dictates that testing can happen only when the product is ready, meaning the improvements are implemented later and thus require more time to be fixed.
• High churn rates. As SaaS solutions serve niche-specific requests, businesses evolve quickly and thus need the same level of flexibility. Traditional approaches in development are not very agile and adaptive. So, delaying addressing customer feedback results in a high churn rate.
• Lack of scalability. Businesses expect their SaaS instruments to scale as they grow. However, this feature is not predicted during the conventional development procedure. The inability to grow and meet new user needs doesn’t contribute to customer satisfaction.

A design-driven concept in SaaS development offers solutions to unique modern issues and puts a customer at the center of the product. This way of thinking is targeted to create a product that is functional and pleasant to use.

Benefits of Design-Driven Development for SaaS

If you are new to the design-driven approach, you might have a biased thought that it focuses on aesthetics more than advanced functionality. But these advantages will prove that starting a development journey from design first is a great idea.

Improved User Experience and Satisfaction

UI/UX design’s main goal is to create a product that is aesthetically attractive, easy to use, and easy to navigate. When this user-centricity approach is put from the beginning of the development, the result will be a user-friendly SaaS solution. This leads to a higher satisfaction rate and a smooth user experience.

Better Product Adoption and Retention

Businesses implement SaaS tools to help them optimize and simplify existing workflows. And design is a decisive part of fulfilling this role. With a straightforward interface, thorough-thought navigation, and properly constructed content, clients will easily adopt new instruments and stay longer with the product, making their work straightforward.

Speedy Time to Market

Applying design principles in the early SaaS product development stages streamlines the overall process. Also, a design-driven approach enhances collaboration between teams so developers and designers work together on the solutions. This speeds up the time to market, leaving competitors behind.

Reduced Development Costs

The main principle of design is to test it through prototyping. That is why when applying design thinking from the beginning, you save yourself from reworks at the final stages. And we all know how expensive it is to change product features when they are already up and running.

Better Product-Market Fit

User demands change quickly, giving preference to those products that are highly customized and flexible. The design-driven approach allows the creation of a SaaS solution tailored to business and user needs with the potential to grow and develop rapidly.

Design-Driven Development: How It Works in SaaS

The design-driven approach doesn’t limit the development process but, on the contrary, enhances its effectiveness. Here is how design prioritization works when creating SaaS apps:

• Design-thinking process. Approaching development starts with a theoretical part based on discussing user pains and coming up with solutions. Design prioritization focuses on understanding the end customers and creating the best ways to satisfy their needs.
• User research. To build a product, you need to know for whom you are building it. This is what the user research step encompasses. By learning about a target audience’s preferences and expectations, teams can create user personas and tailor product features to their demands.
• Testing and prototyping. Unlike the traditional SaaS creation process that starts with product coding, a design-driven one has room for testing design prototypes. Based on the user reactions, developers can proceed to the coding phase with total assurance that the functionality will be in demand among users.
• Collaboration between teams. A design-driven strategy unites designers and developers into one team, as they can not work separately following this approach. Enhanced collaboration and communication streamline the processes, transforming the development journey into a cohesive procedure.

Real Case Scenario

A perfect example and tangible proof of the effectiveness of a designs driven approach is the Slack SaaS product. Growing from an internal gaming company tool, Slack focused on researching user experience. This effort has led creators to build a clean and easy-to-use interface that most companies can recall using. The success of a design-oriented development strategy can be measured based on Slack’s example. So, let’s take two critical metrics: user engagement and company revenue:

1. Millions of users rely on a Slack product in their work communication: the user base has grown from 14.6 million in 2019 to 54.1 million in 2023.
2. Over the past 2023 year, the company has made a staggering $5,967 million.

Overcoming Challenges

The innovative and revolutionary concept of design-driven development comes with its challenges. Companies that adopt this approach usually deal with difficulties among teams in approving it, equally choosing among design and functionality, and modifying the existing flow of running things. These practices will help you embrace a new design-driven strategy more easily:

• Modify the company culture that equally values design and development.
• Set clear communication between the teams and describe all the potential benefits and risks of the new approach.
• Encourage cross-functional teams and stakeholders to collaborate for smoother transitions.
• Ensure the equal balance between design and functionality is met.
• Introduce new tools and strategies and give the times enough time to learn them.

Role of SaaS Design Agency in Successful Design-Driven Approach Adoption

The innovation of SaaS products presents many intricacies for developers, as well as for designers. Even though this approach is essential to follow in the fast-paced digital world that focuses on user-centricity, its implementation requires experienced professionals. Thus, for companies who want to create a cloud-based solution with a design-driven approach, the best way is to collaborate with a SaaS design agency.

Uitop, a digital product design agency, is a team of highly skilled UI/UX designers and researchers who have multiple successful projects in their portfolio. We believe that the foundation of every prosperous project is proper user research. That is why we prioritize this step for our further design development process. Our extensive portfolio of SaaS design development cases demonstrates our deep expertise, many years of experience, and ability to work with different industries: from fitness studios and CRMs to products for real estate and architecture firms.

Final Words

A design-driven strategy for software development is a profitable possibility for looking at product creation from a different and more user-centric angle. This approach presents multiple options for enhancing business and client experiences. Putting design first comes with multiple benefits, such as better user experiences, higher customer satisfaction rate, easier product adoption, better retention rate, saved costs for product remaking, and fast time to market. These opportunities are highly profitable for a SaaS product niche as it follows a human-centric approach and high customization.

If you want to take the first step toward creating a successful SaaS product, contact us for a consultation. Our team specializes in design in all development stages, from user research to maintenance and iteration. We adhere to the latest trends, including design-driven development, and can help your project meet user needs in a competitive market!