A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Scale UX Design for SaaS the Right Way

In the traditional B2C sector, customers pay not only for a product itself but also for the benefits and emotions it delivers. This logic can also be applied to SaaS products, where users pay for the features the app has as well as for the benefits and experience it provides.

Improving the user experience and scaling UX design is one of the key ways to stay flexible and meet changing market demands. Like with any other tech products, SaaS UX design scaling has its specifics, so let's look at how to do it the right way and at the right time.

SaaS UX design scaling means revising, reworking, and improving the user experience your SaaS product delivers. The process implies carefully analyzing the business necessities, researching the needs of your users, and suggesting better UX design solutions to meet them in a simpler yet more effective way.

There are several business reasons to scale UX design for a SaaS.

To put it simpler, scaling the UX design process is always about adding more value to your product, strengthening your market position, and promoting loyalty among your users.

How to scale UX design for a SaaS? Below is a step-by-step guide to the SaaS UX design scaling.

There can be a lot of reasons to scale your UX. Most of them are driven by the market, but sometimes the necessity to improve and scale UX design results from the wrong decisions made on the pre-launch product development stage.

That is, competent business analysis is the first step towards scaling your UX. This task implies researching the current market conditions, objectively evaluating your competitiveness, dwelling on the best UX practices your competitors follow, highlighting the strong and weak features of your solution, and most importantly, analyzing the customers' responses. To cope with this task, you can use well-known methodologies like PEST, SWOT, Focus group research, and Google Design Thinking.

Next, proceed with the analysis of the user experience you deliver. The only proper way to do it is to reconsider your UX KPIs and search for user behavior insights. The latter may suggest a lot of valuable information on the actual expectations of your customers and the ways they would like to use your solution. Based on your research, shortlist the key reasons your business needs to scale UX and be guided by them at the next stage.

Proceeding from the reasons for UX design scaling, suggest the ways to improve it and solve the problem in a better way. Get started by creating several prototypes of an improved UX design, but make sure to be consistent. Don't try to solve all the researched issues at once since there is a risk of UX overloading.

Suggesting that better design solutions should be a step-by-step process, and each of the steps should be perfectly tailored to the user or business' problem you intend to solve.

When scaling your UX design, staying on the same page with your users is as important as making sure your design team is on the same page as well. A common and shared vision is key to suggesting more winning ideas, and you have to promote it. Encourage your design team to share their opinions, discuss, validate, reject, and get started from the beginning. Also, choose an effective task management tool for your UX scaling process.

Scaling UX design never means just adding one more feature. It means taking a comprehensive look at your project and suggesting ways to improve it from the business and user perspectives. That's why you will have a lot of issues to resolve during this process. The best way to solve them effectively is to choose and pick a dedicated tool for each task that will help you organize the whole process more smartly and cost-effectively.

Below, we will overview several useful applications that allow you to achieve your UX design goals better.

At this stage, the task is to create a more detailed, validated, and use-case-tailored prototype. Improve the one you have developed in the 2nd stage based on the insights you have gathered in the 3rd step. To fully validate an idea and make sure you follow the right UX scaling strategy, find the answers to the following questions together with your users.

To research the answers and reveal data-driven insights, make sure to use the corresponding tools from the list below.

Miro is great for customer journey prototyping. It allows for creating a clear path while carefully mapping each step, forecasting, and overcoming stumbling blocks.

Smarply is a reliable tool for stakeholder mapping that allows for relations visualization. As one more feature, you can use this tool for better researching your personals and tailoring your UX to their expectations.

Consider creating and managing design sprints with Jira since this is the tool that perfectly matches Agile development philosophy. This is an excellent choice for improving collaboration between your design team members, tracking and analyzing progress, and learning from mistakes.

Being a classic tool for UX and UI design prototyping, Figma doesn't need to be introduced. This is an intuitive yet powerful tool to create prototypes of any complexity, share and collaboratively improve them.

But when it comes to gathering and analyzing user feedback, Hotjar is a kind of innovation. Instead of supplying you with statistics and figures, it actually shows you how your users interact with the app. This is a must-use tool to understand the user behavior in real life and suggest ways to make their journeys more enjoyable.

Survey Monkey is a top-notch tool to involve your users in your project discussion. With its help, you can create deeply customized surveys and polls, plus engage your customers into taking part in them. Use it in combination with Hotjar to unlock even more behavior and expectations insights.

This is a tool that allows for testing the user experience firsthand. With its help, you can reach out to the users with a personalized message and ask them to share their authentic feedback with the help of real-time video capturing. This is also a perfect solution to emphasize with the customer and shorten the empathy gap.

Scaling UX design in the right way can be challenging. That's why you always have to keep some essential pitfalls in mind and be well-aware of the practices to either avoid or better cope with them. Below are the top 3 UX design scaling challenges and the solutions to them.

Sometimes, the decision to scale the UX design may take the wrong path from the very beginning. This is just the case when the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

To avoid such a situation, you have to be very clear with the reasons for scaling and reasonably evaluate the market and business triggers to get started with it. Make sure to research and analyze the business environment and your customers' expectations one more time before making changes to the product that can be already good enough to satisfy the users and drive profits.

When improving and scaling your UX, always keep the mobile-centric design in mind, especially if your app comes in both mobile and desktop versions. Sometimes the design solutions that work well on desktops and PCs are completely lame on mobile. Make sure to research your users' habits and tailor the updated experience to the device they expect to get it from.

And lastly, never overload your UX design. Scaling and overloading aren't the same things. To make sure you are on the right track with your UX scaling, follow the Lean methodology fundamentals at every step. That is, test each of your suggestions before investing time and money into their development.

Scaling the UX design of your SaaS product can be a winning decision. Still, you have to scale it right. Get started by carefully researching the current environment and be smart and creative at the same time when suggesting better approaches to your UX. Also, consider getting support from tech-savvy designers and developers Aspirity has under the roof. Our creative and data-first team would be happy to assist you with your UX scaling and make your SaaS application better meet your users' expectations!

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