Pure on-demand SaaS is not appropriate to all business models. The underlying business value of a piece of software may require unique customer processes, or complex integration tasks that can't be automated. But the steps in the SaaS life cycle framework are still appropriate for developing a roadmap on how to design your SaaS. Examine the touch-points in the life cycle and determine how you design your application to address them - based on your specific business and technological situation.
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"A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is not simply a new way to package and deliver applications. It is a fundamental shift in the relationship between the software service provider and the customer." This is the kind of thing you read all of the time in the IT press or hear from pundits at conferences. By now most senior executives in companies are saying "OK, I understand I have to have a new mindset. But what $@!% does that really mean in terms of how I build my application and my business?"
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I was reviewing the latest FinTech 100 and noticed that 4 of the top 10 firms are recent or current clients of Catalyst Resources. To be sure, the economic downturn has impacted the financial services sector and almost everyone is aggressively seeking ways to cut costs. However we find that many of these firms are also responding by investing in new applications that improve ROI, manage risk, reduce business process inefficiencies and attract new customers.
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Choosing the right application design firm for a mission critical application, is in itself a mission critical decision. If only you could give a potential firm a test drive to learn how they think.
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Designing for viral adoption can be particularly relevant to SaaS, where profitability depends on quickly achieving and retaining a critical mass of users.
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It used to be in the healthcare arena, that investment dollars followed the companies searching for the next new breakthrough drug or treatment. Recently however, the opportunities and incentives (i.e. $19 billion) have started to shift to less glamorous products aimed at health care efficiency, and cost-control using SaaS, RIAs and optimized user experience design.
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Since choice of infrastructure for your SaaS is as much of a bet-the-farm decision, as designing the right user experience, you need to be diligent in your research. I generally don't advice clients on particular cloud computing platforms since it is ultimately based on your own development resources, estimates of growth and your unique SaaS life-cycle application strategy. However there are some high-level recommendations I can make.
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VCs are betting on SaaS and Cloud Computing as the future. So if you have an existing solution that uses on-premise software, do you need to replace it now with a SaaS and cloud infrastructure?
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You can’t visit a technology or business-related website these days without running into the terms Software as a Service (SaaS ), Cloud Computing, Rich Internet Applications (RIA) or User Experience (Ux). The technologies and best practices that define these terms are evolving rapidly and it is difficult for our clients and potential clients to sift through the burgeoning literature and blogs and find SaaS and UX content that is not filtered through the lens of an infrastructure or service management provider. So we have put together the SaaS Application Design Resource Center, our take on the weeks most relevant articles, blogs, whitepapers and guides.
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One way in which Catalyst differentiates itself from other SaaS and RIA providers is our extensive experience with developing modular and reusable UI. But what do I actually mean when I use the terms modular and reusable and is it important to your project?
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Simplicity, consistency, performance and innovation are particularly important for enterprise SaaS application user interfaces where expectations are high and and types of uses can range from rapid in-and-out use to all day reliance. Another often overlooked, but very important attribute is perceived control. In fact, in many ways, a user's feeling of being in control is what defines their perceptions of simplicity, consistency, performance and innovation.
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Modularity and reuse are standard practices for most coders and absolutely mandatory for scalable application development. But the imperative for modularity in SaaS application UI design is often overlooked. This is surprising because since SaaS is inherently a scalable application and all about the ability to be quickly reconfigured to adapt to changing market conditions.
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The market for Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming hyper-competitive with demands for ever shrinking release cycles. For companies that offer a SaaS solution, this means focusing design and development on releases that add immediate and significant business value. Agile design methodology can help achieve this focus.
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The progression along the economic value continuum for any product or service, is from a focus on goods and services, to a focus on user experience. This is particularly true for SaaS, where the features of the software can quickly become commodities. It is the user experience that can provide real economic value and differentiation.
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To be sure, the functionality that an application provides to users is important for differentiation. But it is the way in which that application provides the functionality truly gives a piece of software the edge. User experience is the key differentiator relative to the competition.
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Since customization continues to be a hot topic in the SaaS industry and often a stumbling block to adoption for many types of businesses, I wanted to briefly review how a SaaS can be designed to allow for easy customization and configuration of everything from terminology/lexicon and branding/layout, to individualized workflows, to data model extensions, to integration from other systems, to access control for each tenant and even to business logic.
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It's an old cliche that technology innovation thrives in times of recession. But we think this will actually be true for user experience and application design in 2009. So for this post I want to offer some predictions where the user experience market is headed. I've also asked several Catalyst Resources staff members to contribute their thoughts.
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When it comes to software, user experience can evolve very rapidly. So I wanted to look back at 2008 and highlight some of the key developments that rocked the world of what users experience. To help get a broader perspective, I also asked some of Catalyst' staff to highlight what they saw as significant trends.
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It's that time of year when companies go through their year end evaluation process. Catalyst is no different. As the market evolves with many new RIA and user interface design providers springing up (and fading away), we try re-evaluate where we fit in the market relative to our competition. Where is that sweet spot where our unique experience and skills perfectly matches what a client is looking for.
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While many organizations attempt to develop their SaaS or RIA using their internal IT department, perhaps assisted by a web design or Flash creative firm, the end result will "feel" like it was built by an IT department. It may be functional, may even be visually pleasing, but it will not identify high value tasks, streamline business processes, increase user productivity, build the brand or drive adoption & use. To achieve this level of business value you need a UI engineering team of experts, each with a different focus, distinct skills and tight accountability. So what are the roles of the primary team members?
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In the previous post I posed a question that is relevant to any enterprise that delivers services via software: where does innovation really matter and where should it come in to play when defining the user experience for on-premise or SaaS applications. In this post I want to look at each layer of the application user experience and evaluate where there is potential to deliver innovation that has a real impact on increasing the usage, adoption and social media referral of the solution by customers.
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I recently had a discussion with a colleague about where to innovate when designing an application or SaaS. He was pitching a new client that kept repeating how they wanted an innovative design. But they defined innovative as a revolutionary new way for people to think about task X, with a dazzling Flash interface full of bells and whistles.
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The goal of business process reengineering (BPR) is to redesign how an organization conducts business in order to improve critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, and speed. A company can spend a great deal of money on consultants to develop an implementable BPR retooling plan. But if you are are migrating your application to SaaS, BPR can be a natural "by-product" of the user interface/application design process.
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This year's downturn economy is forcing many organizations to choose between offering software solutions that "stay the course" or those that "adapt and embrace change". For many companies, it is difficult to pull away from a traditional business model that's been profitable, even though they know that the model faces significant threats and that profitability will wane. SaaS is one of these fundamental threats to an old way of doing business.
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With the financial crunch in full swing both in the US and the global market, it's fair to predict that businesses will find their cost of capital has increased. Consequently many companies will try to stretch their dollars further by moving to technologies or methodologies that deliver greater efficiencies. Two viable options include SaaS and outsourcing.
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Location, location, location. We are used to hearing that mantra when it comes to real estate. But location and geo-analytics can play an important role in many SaaS applications as a way to analyze data, manage resources, and provide tailored services
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Determining the right conceptual models is particularly important for SaaS applications. Online attention spans are short and users are less willing to spend a lot of time learning how to use an online application then they are for on-premise applications. However, if you craft the right conceptual model for a SaaS application, then you are well on the way to designing an application that not only requires less training and support, but also will be easier to market, have higher adoption/retention rates, and be more intuitive and productive to use.
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With credit scarce and future sales unpredictable, many companies are thinking about hunkering down and going on life-support. But a bunker mentality may not be the best approach, if, at the end of this turmoil (and there will be an end), you want to end up ahead of your competition. To the contrary, if you have been thinking about updating your software applications or moving to SaaS, now may actually be the time to invest and make your move - but do it wisely.
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Designing an enterprise RIA is significantly different then designing a consumer RIA. It is not necessarily a matter of better engineering or more innovation. But consumer applications generally do not pull data from multiple applications, require development of hundreds of inter-related screens or so thoroughly encapsulate improved business processes.
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Pilot projects seem like they should be easier to implement than a full SaaS. However, the same missteps that can doom a full SaaS implementation, are often amplified in a SaaS pilot project. It is not uncommon for Catalyst Resources to be called in after a company has already invested significant resources into a SaaS pilot and are now struggling to "make it work." The fundamental problem is that the pilot is addressed as a traditional software engineering challenge.
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The writing is on the wall - business applications are moving to the web as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) so that companies can accommodate a distributed and mobile workforce.
As users become accustomed to web-based business applications, SaaS implementations will need to deliver optimized business tools no matter whether the user is at their desk, at home, in a hotel, or waiting in line at Starbucks using a handheld device.
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By now everyone has heard that Google has taken the wraps off of it's "GBrowser" project and released a public beta of Chrome. While many people speculate that Chrome is a rekindling of the browser wars, the reality is that Chrome is a move to accelerate the development of advanced Web applications, Cloud Computing and the SaaS market in particular.
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I recently updated my laptop to a top-of-the-line system with an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.5+ GHz. This is technically five times faster than my laptop a few generations back. But while it is certainly zippier, it doesn't feel five times faster. A similar mismatch between raw technical performance and perceived performance can also occur in SaaS. But in SaaS, low perceived performance will mean customer churn.
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I was recently asked an interesting question from a prospective new client. They wanted to know how we could successfully design mission critical software across such a tremendously diverse range of applications - from detecting cancer cells, to completing bond trades to, to generating payroll to notifying college students of emergencies. The answer is deceptively simple - we focus on what we call "high value scenarios" and systematic user validation.
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User experience is voguish to talk about, but the meaning is often poorly defined and consequently undervalued. Many development teams equate it with application ease-of-use or branding/visual design and marginalize it relative to the functionality of the core application - nice to have - but not a key business driver. This perception however, could not be further from the truth. When it comes to differentiating your SaaS, user experience IS the product. The alternative is commoditization.
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Over the past few months,there has been a lot of news stories and articles about hosted services over the internet. The various terms that describes these offerings - SaaS, PaaS, Cloud Computing, On-Demand - are often used interchangeably and the meanings can be confusing. So I thought it might be useful to briefly describe each term from my own perspective of enterprise software application strategy and design.
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Last time I checked, the point of running a software or services business is to make money. But very few companies have done so yet in the SaaS space. Admittedly, SaaS is still at a relatively early stage of market development and acceptance, but the question still remains: for businesses that are providing SaaS solutions to enterprises and SMBs, how can they be profitable? What is the secret sauce?
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I've been arguing for a while now, that creating a Web-based version of a desktop or server-based product is only part of the battle if you plan to deploy SaaS in the enterprise space. This core application is just one component from the array of user experiences that need to be addressed when deploying or selling any enterprise application. Just how important are these other user experiences? While I usually try to write things from the point of view of our enterprise clients, this time I thought I would share some personal anecdotal evidence in the consumer space.
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The iPhone 3G and 2.0 software were released last week. As I perused the new App Store it struck me how the iPhone will impact the strategy and design of web and SaaS applications at the enterprise level. The iPhone is just the very visible beginning to an infinite variety of future form factors for internet-connected devices and applications. What this means for application strategy and design is that you cannot count on the guaranteed luxury of screen real-estate, input devices or processor speed.
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Having worked with a significant number of organizations on SaaS strategy and design, I see a pretty clear picture emerging of factors that define the winners and the losers. So what makes a winning vs losing SaaS when it comes to profitability? The basics are pretty simple: you need a stable cost structure that is below the subscription revenue stream.
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