SaaS & Cloud Services Design
Strategy, User Experience and Application Design
Application & UI design of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Application Services
Well-designed cloud application services or Software as a Service (SaaS) offer organizations a way to sustain growth, deliver innovative new services, and establish on-going relationship with employees, customers and business partners. Catalyst Resources has unmatched experience in the design of highly successful and profitable SaaS and Cloud services applications.
Design new services or migrate existing on-premise applications for delivery as SaaS
Catalyst can help you to launch new cloud application services, augment current services, or redesign and migrate existing on-premise applications for delivery as SaaS. We evaluate your planned/current product UI, identify business needs, define SaaS strategy across all components of the customer life cycle, and of course, design the application flow, screens, modular UI components library, and specify connections backend data services.
User experience design at every touch point in the SaaS life cycle
The user experience demands for SaaS are very distinct from on-premise applications and other software models. With SaaS most of the touch-points in the customer life cycle are exposed directly to the user in software. So in addition to the design of the user experience and information flow of the core application, we also design the application to address the full progression of steps a customer goes through when exploring, purchasing, deploying, provisioning, using, referring, and upgrading a product or solution.
We tailor each SaaS engagement
Working with Catalyst, you can engage at any stage of the design and choose the services that best meet your needs and derive the greatest return on your investment. For new projects we can identify and design all of the functionality and flow in an application. For projects where functionality is already defined, we can design the way the user experiences all of the touch points of the application.
Reusable UI for performance, scalability, flexibility and faster time to market
SaaS is inherently a dynamic solution that needs to adapt based on real-time customer data and changes in the competitive landscape. We build SaaS applications with modular, reusable UI components that are high-performance and designed to scale. Development times can be reduced by as much as 85% and organizations can bring enhanced composite service offerings to market very quickly.
Related Case Studies
Experience across a broad range of SaaS application segments
Catalyst Resources has helped to migrate a broad range of applications to a Software as Service model. It takes lots of forward planning and user validation to create a superb piece of software user interface that adapts when deployed into any customer environment. The benefits to your bottom line are shortened sales cycles, faster deployment and reduced support.
The types of SaaS applications we have designed and helped deploy include:
ERP & HUMAN RESOURCES
- Payroll and benefits
- Records Management
- Procurement services
- Sales force automation/CRM
- Insurance policy administration
B2B SERVICES
- Print-on-demand
- Market research
- Training
- IT sourcing
E-COMMERCE & Financial
- Call center
- Banking & credit card processing
- Trading applications
- Real estate listings
- Teleconferencing
CONTENT & PROJECT MANAGEMENT
- Document management
- Healthcare collaboration
- Advertising
- Marketing automation
- Collaboration
Three Core Principles of SaaS Design
Catalyst Resources has delivered application and UI design for nearly 400 SaaS and mission-critical pieces of software. From this work, we have defined and refined a set of tested principles for the successful design of SaaS user experience.
The SaaS Design Principles white paper details three foundational principles.
- Don't just "port"
The application and UI design principals for multi-tenant SaaS are different than for on-premise or web applications. - Design for the full customer life cycle
Successful SaaS is more than just the core application. Design the software to manage everything from acquisition, to on-boarding, to support. - Design for modular sales & upgradability
Services need to componentized so they can be sold separately and upgraded independently.
Whether you are migrating an existing on-premise application to SaaS, designing a new SaaS application, or updating your existing SaaS, these principles will help your project come in on-time, on-budget and on-value.
To download the SaaS Design Principles white paper, complete the form below.
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Reduce Risk and Increase ROI with Your Next SaaS Release
Have your customers or stakeholders expressed any of the following:
- The interface is not intuitive; it takes too many clicks
- Your software looks and feels out of date, not reflecting its value
- Features and functionality do not meet customer expectations
- Performance is sluggish when compared to desktop applications
- You don't have a mobile solution
A Catalyst Resources $3495, 10-day Rapid UI Assessment provides a low-cost, high-value service to identify the most compelling usability issues and prioritize the top 20 UI enhancements required to enhance and revitalize the user interface, streamline workflows and create an engaging user experience for your SaaS web or mobile offering.
Why you need it
A Rapid UI Assessment is the quickest and most cost-effective wvay to understand how your current application measures up to the needs, expectations and future demands of your target market as well as the costs and specific steps it will take to move your SaaS to where you want to be.
How to use the results
- Prioritize initiatives and budgets based on ROI
- Provide expert diagnostic and justification analyses for executive buy-in
- Present a roadmap to internal or offshore development teams
- Solicit competitive bids for full application and UI design services
- Understand the priorities for a compelling, long-term solution for mobile users
Our approach
- During an initial web review meeting our SaaS UI team will look over your current application, reviewing key screens and important workflows.
- We then bring together the resources a UI designer, UI architect and UI presentation layer technologist with over 36 years of combined experience to focus on your application and your specific challenges.
- Ten days after the initial review, we deliver the final assessment as actionable recommendations for improvement, next steps, resources and alternatives.
Deliverables
During the final consultative web conference we typically cover:
- Review of target user profiles and a user story catalog
- Identification of high-value scenarios and user-desired functionality
- Analysis of optimal, high-engagement conceptual models
- 20-point mapping of your current UI architecture, UI design & UI technology relative to where you want it to be in the next release
- Prioritized list for the 10 user experience and design changes that will deliver the best return on investment and take your SaaS application to a new level of performance and competitiveness
- Recommendations for scalable, high performance RIA UI modular functionality and technology
- Proposed mobile strategy as a companion solution
- Agile roadmap and work plan for what to implement, in what order, what resources you need, and a clear mapping of dependencies
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