Should You Build A SaaS Product Without Design? Let’s Find Out

When you are working on a SaaS product, your first instinct is to get it to the market as soon as possible. While the instinct is right, the opportunity is slipping away with all the hurry. We should not start making SaaS products without finalizing the design first. If you do, then one of the following may happen:

• You would get a product that requires more time and money than anticipated.
• The user experience of the product is not optimum and no amount of time and resources can fully fix it.

If you want to reach the stage of profitability without overspending money and time, here’s what you should do. Check how SaaS products should first have a design.

Why Create The Design First For A SaaS Product?

There are two factors in the development of a SaaS product: design and engineering.

Here, design is finding the solution, and engineering is building that solution.

The design of the SaaS product is the product where you find the right solution for the product. At the time of development, we design this SaaS product at some point. The part where you define what your users would be able to do with a product and how they would be able to do it are all under the design umbrella.

Hence, at the end of the day, we are still designing the product but not in the right way. If you take both design and engineering together, you make mistakes.

But, when we purposefully work on the design, we face fewer challenges during development. It helps us reach our goals and outcomes without many challenges. Let’s explore how:

1. It Takes Less Time

When we design the SaaS product, we are able to run rapid tests to know the problem areas and ideas. This is where the design process helps us get feedback and know challenges in a few days.

However, we can’t achieve this testing when we don’t design. For example, you can also end up building a solution for one or two weeks only to find out that this is not the right solution.

The design of the SaaS product helps you test the feasibility of an idea in hours. However, when you do this with code directly, you need days and weeks to figure out the truth.

2. Cost of Changes Is Less

If you calculate the time needed to make changes in code and design, then you would understand that you need 20 minutes or more to make changes in the design but a week to achieve the same in the code.

This is because the design is a virtual representation of your idea. You can paint the canvas again and make changes quickly. When you implement the final design, there will be much less hassle and modifications.

However, when you code first, you are getting into the logic and dependencies of the project first. This means when you have to change the logic, you need much more time. This also incurs a high cost.

3. You Get What You Expect

There’s a difference in all four:

• The SaaS product you want to create: Your Idea!
• The SaaS product you explained to your developer
• The SaaS product that the developer created
• The SaaS product that we receive as an outcome

It is possible that what you originally envisioned is totally different from what came out. To remedy the situation, you need to design it on paper. You can understand the value of the product without using it. You can decide the how and what of the product before actually working on the product.

This means that when you are finally developing the SaaS product, it will be close to your expectation.

If you leave questions open-ended, it would become extremely difficult to change the code over and over again.

4. You Need To Do Minimal Changes

It is necessary to understand that mistakes are inevitable and so change. It is not possible to create a SaaS product at once without any bugs and changes. You can’t launch it like that, there’s always room for improvement.

However, when we design the SaaS product first, we are able to reduce changes.

If you start building without a design in mind, you will understand the challenges a lot later in the development. Changing the code at this point is too difficult.

Many times, you may even need to rebuild the project from scratch because it doesn’t make sense.

To eliminate the issue, simply prepare the design first. Understand the feasibility of different elements and then move to the engineering part.

5. Without Design, There’s No Accuracy

When you directly move to the engineering of a SaaS product, we are asking the question WHAT over and over again. This means we are only estimating how much the features may cost us. This cost and time would not be even near the actual cost and time. You may as well double the time and cost in this case to find a favorable estimate. Further, here, we are not close to considering the HOW, which contributes to a large part of the time and cost.

If you design first, you are able to answer the following accurately:

• What can the user achieve with the SaaS product?
• How would the user be able to use these features?
• How will your team create these features and the product?

These questions will help you estimate the time and associated costs with it.

6. The Goal is Met

The goal of the SaaS product is to solve a problem.

However, we have already discussed that if you verbally communicate everything to the developer, then you may end up receiving a very different outcome than expected. Now, making changes from this stage and moving backward is difficult.

If you really want your SaaS product to resolve any issues, you have to spend time designing it. When you evaluate every step, feature, and feasibility of the feature, you can visit your goal. Knowing exactly what a product will do and how it solves issues will help you achieve the goal quickly and with efficiency.

Conclusion

Designing the SaaS product before engineering helps you improve the time to market and reduce challenges experienced throughout the project. If you want to reduce the hassle of development, then Desuvit Technologies can help you build a SaaS product. Our subject matter experts are equipped to first design and then code the project for maximum efficiency.

If you are interested in our services, get a quote now!

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