As layoffs mount, consumer confidence drops, and businesses cut back spending, the market for Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming hyper-competitive with demands for ever shrinking release cycles. It is survival of the fittest where good products can fail as easily as bad, and rapid adaptation is the key to survival. For companies that offer a SaaS solution, this means focusing design and development on releases that add immediate and significant business value.
Innovating and optimizing user experience is one area where companies can add value without adding lengthy development cycles. SaaS application and UI design can offer enhanced performance, improved application productivity, increased customer engagement, cost savings through business process reengineering, and enhanced customer loyalty. At Catalyst we implement SaaS application and user experience design using an agile method with short time-limited sprints (weeks not months). The agile approach is especially relevant in today’s Darwinian-type economy.
What do we mean by Agile
Agile means many things to many people, but for organizations that deliver services through software, agile application design means designing, testing, and implementing iteratively and incrementally, with each stage providing a self-contained deliverable. By developing the application design incrementally, the usability, productivity and real business value of the application can be evaluated during the project rather than waiting until the very end of the project. Agile also implies a people-oriented process that requires working collaboratively with tight feedback loops.
Catalyst application design sprints
Catalyst typically works in sprints of 4-6 weeks. Each sprint enhances the software application’s market value and adds an increment (sometimes large) in functionality and improvements that can be delivered to the customer. The relative shortness of the sprints improves the transparency of the process and gives the design and development team regular and achievable goals. The shortness also enables us to respond quickly to changing needs or requests from users, stakeholders, or external conditions such as the markets.
Our agile process generally fall into four sprints:
- Sprint 1 - design core modular, reusable UI system
- Sprint 2 - code the reusable elements into a high-fidelity prototype using the selected RIA technology (e.g. Flex, AJAX, Silverlight/.Net)
- Sprint 3 - derive, design and develop all of the application views with production-ready code snippets and a catalog of reusable UI elements
- Sprint 4 - integration support and adaptive refinement
The pressure felt by our clients in today’s market is palpable. Whether a CIO, VP of development, or development manager, each needs to justify any SaaS design project with early and frequent wins. A focus on user experience design using agile techniques achieves this with substantive, incremental deliverables and continuous refinement and integration. This methodology for SaaS application design enables companies to get out releases quicker, and be confident that those releases will be well received by existing and new customers.