While managing so many design projects at Brucira for our clients over the years, we have realized that they do know the importance of UI/UX design. However, when we started creating Ruttl, we came across a unique challenge.
It dealt with making thoughtful design decisions at various stages of our SaaS product. This is something that we had not faced first-hand at Brucira, so it pushed our limits. We also researched a lot by the side for ruttl and understood early on that SaaS product design is different from other forms of designing.
When Siddhita Upare and I came up with the idea of ruttl 3 years back, all our decisions were driven by problems we faced during our initial days at Brucira while working on website projects. The comment and edit feature were nothing but replication of screenshots and inspect mode that we were already using to review live websites and we just presented the same in a more sophisticated and friendly manner.
Post our soft launch, we received thousands of test users who gave us feedback for introducing new features. So, in the second year our design decisions were derived by customer feedback.
Now, in our third year, we have a lot of decisions to take on features such as edit limits, pages limits, pricing structure. In order to get to the right decisions we are now taking help of "data" and so far we took a lot of right steps. Fully bootstrapped, we now are able to optimize our Ads spends and reach a total revenue of USD 80,000+.
Keeping these learnings and milestones in mind, we have collated some of the major design decisions that you need to consider for every stage of your SaaS product development. These insights have helped us a lot while we were making Ruttl. Go through them to relook at your SaaS product development journey:
Stage 1: Follow a Market First Approach
At the start, when you are focusing on creating an MVP for your SaaS product, follow conventional design principles. Do market research, analyze your competitors, define pricing, fine tune sales and marketing so that you can place your product in a good way. During this stage, you might end up giving more importance to market research than user research. However, soon you will have to relook at your users and take their feedback.
Stage 2: Interact with Your Users
SaaS products rely a lot on customer satisfaction. So, once you acquire more users, start scheduling more interviews and take their feedback to plan more features. You can also use these user given insights to refine your existing features. During this stage, you can also study your analytics to study each and every design flows. By this SaaS product design stage, you would have most of the information you need to make it grow big.
Stage 3: Introduce Features Based on User Feedback
Once you have collected user feedback, studied all the analytics and design flows, start focusing on the big picture. Based on the data and user feedback, you should start making major decisions on features, pricing, diversification and then let all the numbers decide whether you need to make any significant change on the user experience front.
SaaS product development and designing pose a unique set of problems and challenges that are gratifying to solve. If you are a design agency owner or an independent consultant trying to figure out this space then feel free to reach out to us. We will be happy to share more learnings we stumbled upon through Ruttl.
