SaaS (Software as a Service) remains one of the fastest-growing segments in the IT market — and for good reason.
Businesses gain access to agile, cost-effective solutions, while customers enjoy flexible, subscription-based, affordable and reliable software. Following the pandemic, remote work has become the standard across industries, further accelerating the demand for cloud-based SaaS solutions. SaaS market growth is expected to exceed 17% in 2025, making strong product design more critical than ever.
Delivering a seamless user experience across every touchpoint — your landing page, mobile app, support chat, or blog — starts with exceptional SaaS product design. A clean, intuitive design makes products easier to understand, increases user satisfaction, and helps drive sustainable growth.In this article, we'll share practical tips on how to create a successful SaaS product from scratch. You'll discover the best design practices for SaaS platforms, essential stages of development, and an overview of estimated costs.
Let's get started!
Importance of SaaS in Modern Business
SaaS (Software as a Service) has become a cornerstone of today's business operations, providing easy access to powerful software without the need for complex infrastructure.
By adopting SaaS solutions, companies can eliminate costly setup processes, reduce maintenance burdens, and enjoy automatic updates that keep their tools running smoothly.
Thanks to its scalability, SaaS is perfectly suited for startups, small businesses, and large enterprises alike.
Whether it's project management platforms or CRM systems, SaaS applications support a wide range of business needs, helping organizations optimize workflows and reach their objectives more effectively.
Steps Involved in SaaS Product Development
Building a SaaS product is far from a one-size-fits-all process — it's a dynamic, evolving journey that demands strategic planning and precise execution.
Here's a breakdown of the essential stages involved in SaaS product development:
- Market Research - Start by deeply researching your target audience. Understand their needs, frustrations, and preferences. Analyze competitors to uncover market gaps and identify what can set your product apart. Solid research forms the foundation for validating your idea and refining your value proposition.
- Defining the Product Scope - Outline your SaaS product's core features, functionalities, and user flow. Create a clear development roadmap that prioritizes must-have features, aligns with your business goals, explores potential pricing models, and sets realistic milestones for each phase.
- Designing and Developing the Product - Focus on creating an intuitive, engaging user experience. Use agile development practices to build your product in stages, allowing for continuous testing, iteration, and user feedback integration. This approach ensures the final product resonates with real user needs.
- Setting Up the Infrastructure - Choose a robust, scalable cloud infrastructure to host your SaaS application — services like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure are popular choices. Prioritize security, scalability, and reliability from the outset to support growth and ensure data protection.
- Testing and Quality Assurance - Rigorous testing is crucial. Conduct functionality tests, usability checks, and security audits to catch issues early. Implement ongoing quality assurance practices to maintain high standards and deliver a polished, reliable product.
- Launch Preparation and Deployment - Get ready for launch by building excitement around your product. Craft a strategic marketing plan that includes social media campaigns, content marketing, and targeted ads. Identify early adopters and engage them to help refine your product further post-launch.
- Post-Launch Support and Growth - After launch, prioritize customer support, continuously monitor user feedback, and roll out updates and improvements. Address bugs quickly, add enhancements based on user needs, and remain flexible to adapt to changing market conditions.
Succeeding in SaaS development requires more than just a solid product — it demands adaptability, customer focus, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Staying agile at every stage gives your SaaS offering the best chance to thrive in an ever-evolving market.
Types of SaaS applications
Before you can build a SaaS product that truly connects with your audience, it's important to understand the different categories of software-as-a-service currently dominating the market.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software - CRM SaaS platforms help businesses strengthen relationships with their customers and optimize their marketing efforts. An example of a leading CRM solution is Freshsales.
- Content Management System (CMS) SaaS - CMS tools allow users to create, manage, and publish content with ease. Webflow is a great example of a modern SaaS-based CMS solution.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software - ERP systems are comprehensive platforms that help large organizations manage everything from supply chains and manufacturing to HR and finance. Notable examples include Acumatica, Epicor, and Infor CloudSuite.
- Accounting and Finance Tools - SaaS solutions for accounting simplify financial management tasks like invoicing, payroll, and billing. Xero is a widely recognized name in this space.
- Project Management Platforms - Project management SaaS applications streamline task assignments, scheduling, collaboration, and progress tracking. Popular examples include Asana and Monday.com.
- Vertical SaaS Solutions - Vertical SaaS platforms are tailored to meet the needs of specific industries or business functions. For instance, Clio supports legal practice management, SimplePractice caters to healthcare providers, and Applied Epic serves the insurance sector.
- E-commerce SaaS Platforms - E-commerce SaaS tools assist online businesses with product listings, order management, payment processing, and logistics. Wix eCommerce and Squarespace Commerce are among the most popular options.
- Marketing SaaS Tools - Marketing-focused SaaS products help companies launch campaigns, measure results, and optimize marketing strategies. Examples include Mailchimp for email marketing, Buffer for social media scheduling, and Ahrefs for SEO analysis.
- Remote Collaboration SaaS Tools - These platforms support distributed teams by offering cloud storage, communication, and productivity tracking. Dropbox (file sharing), Toggl (time tracking), Microsoft Teams (messaging), and Zoom (video conferencing) are some of the major players in this space.
SAAS Design Guidelines
The SaaS industry remains a powerful arena for designers, with growth in 2025 expected to be particularly strong. This rapid expansion brings both new challenges and exciting opportunities for designers to sharpen their skills and elevate their careers.
Creating SaaS products that meet the complex needs of enterprise clients and end-users demands a thoughtful and strategic approach.
By prioritizing user research, maintaining a consistent experience across all devices, and guarding against feature overload, design teams can build SaaS solutions that are not only sustainable and competitive but, most importantly, centered around an exceptional user experience.
Here are some SaaS design guidelines to make the perfect product.
#1. Establish a Unified Visual Language
Visual consistency is key to creating a seamless SaaS experience. Designers must carefully align branding elements like typography, colour palettes, icons, and familiar interface components to craft a cohesive and instantly recognizable identity for their products.One effective strategy is building a library of reusable UI components that reflect your brand's visual style. Standardizing elements such as buttons, cards, input fields, and modals ensures that styles, behaviours, and user interactions stay consistent across platforms and devices.
Incorporating consistent visual cues is equally essential.
A standout example of this approach is Microsoft 365. Whether on desktop, web, or mobile, the platform maintains a minimalist aesthetic, featuring a predominantly white interface accented with Microsoft's familiar accent colours.
#2. Build Visual Consistency Across Your SaaS Platform
Achieving a seamless SaaS experience starts with visual consistency. Designers should ensure that all branding elements — from typography and colour schemes to icons and interface components — work together to create a strong, cohesive identity that users instantly recognize.
A smart way to maintain this consistency is by developing a comprehensive library of reusable UI components that embody your brand's look and feel. Standardizing design elements like buttons, cards, forms, and models helps ensure a unified style, consistent behaviour, and familiar interactions across different platforms and devices.
Consistent visual feedback is just as crucial. Uniform hover states, focus highlights, and active indicators across your application reinforce user expectations and make navigating your product natural and intuitive. These micro-interactions not only enhance usability but also build trust with your users.
Microsoft 365 offers a great example of visual consistency done right. Across desktop, web, and mobile versions, the platform sticks to a clean, predominantly white layout complemented by Microsoft's signature colour accents. It uses the Segoe UI font for clear readability.
It maintains consistent navigation structures — like ribbon menus, sidebar panels, and floating action buttons — to create a familiar, user-friendly experience across all devices.
#3. Bridge Experience Gaps Through User Research
Companies that overlook their users' goals, challenges, and behaviours risk building SaaS products that feel confusing and fail to gain traction. In contrast, the most successful SaaS businesses put customer insights at the centre of their design process.Adopting a user-centred design mindset starts with actively collecting feedback and analyzing usage behaviour to uncover what users aim to achieve at each stage of their journey. It's important to remember, however, that effective user research isn't about asking generic questions.
Our research revealed that many product managers were heavily reliant on Microsoft Excel for organizing tasks and workflows, favouring its flexibility and simplicity. Although our app technically offered similar functionality, users needed more direct control over tables and fields, something Excel made effortless.
The key takeaway?
Listening to users early on helped us make targeted improvements that served our evolving audience better.
Had we moved forward without this foundational research, we likely would have overcomplicated the product and stunted its potential for broader market adoption.
#4. Tailor Navigation and Features to Each Device
Ensuring a consistent user experience across devices can be challenging, given that each device comes with its own limitations — from varying screen sizes to different user behaviours.A clear example is the mobile version of Google Sheets. Unlike its web counterpart, the mobile app intentionally leaves out advanced features like custom scripts, app integrations, and detailed chart customizations to maintain usability on smaller screens.
Google Apps Script, which allows users to automate tasks and extend functionality in Google Sheets, remains accessible only through the desktop version — highlighting the importance of device-specific functionality.
The lesson from Google Sheets is clear: achieving SaaS consistency across platforms doesn't mean copying every feature from one device to another. Instead, it means delivering an experience that feels native and intuitive for each context.
Designing with these nuances in mind ensures that users have a smooth, satisfying experience, no matter how or where they access your SaaS product.
#5. Prevent Feature Creep by Prioritizing Core Value
Successfully scaling a SaaS product is essential to meeting growing user demands, handling increasing data loads, and staying competitive in a fast-evolving market.
However, one of the biggest risks during this scaling process is feature creep—the tendency to add too many new features without a strategic focus. Feature creep often leads to a cluttered user interface that confuses and overwhelms users, typically fueled by pressure to match competitors or satisfy every customer request.
To avoid this trap, designers and product teams must stay laser-focused on core functionality during the early stages of development. By maintaining a clear product vision, teams can better allocate resources, speed up development, and ensure that new features solve real user problems.
A great example of this approach is Coda, a SaaS platform initially focused on offering a flexible document and collaboration tool for small teams and startups. When Coda first launched in 2017, it delivered a streamlined experience centred around combining documents and spreadsheets into one flexible workspace. Instead of cramming in too many features, the early versions of Coda emphasized simplicity and customization — a strategy that won over early adopters and built a strong, loyal community.
Only after solidifying its core offering did Coda expand, introducing features like advanced templates, integrations with third-party apps, and enhanced project management capabilities to support larger businesses and more complex workflows. Today, Coda has secured over $1.4 billion in valuation and continues to be recognized for its thoughtful, user-centred growth strategy.
From my own experience, I recently led the UX team for a cloud automation platform that pivoted toward offering Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions. To avoid overwhelming the initial product with unnecessary features, we conducted deep industry research to identify the core needs of DaaS users.
Instead of investing months into building a complete feature set, we adopted a "fail fast" approach — creating a minimum viable product (MVP) to quickly validate ideas with real users. Through rapid feedback cycles, we could focus only on the features that delivered the most value, fostering a culture of continuous experimentation, user learning, and agile adaptation.
The takeaway: By anchoring your SaaS product around core user needs from the beginning, you lay the groundwork for sustainable growth without sacrificing usability.
#6. Identify The Main Pain Points of The Audience
To build a SaaS product, the need is to understand the users' frustrations.
Actually, qualitative research is the best way to start, as it simply involves mapping out where users experience friction. Look out for repeated patterns: delayed onboarding, feature overload, or no personalization.
Don't make the product a pipe dream. What do we mean? Make it a real user struggle.
Reducing pain points naturally improves retention and the level of satisfaction.With the recent statistics on the popularity of SaaS applications, this step is very important when you realize that users give up the platforms where their applications don't offer what they need in the first few sessions. Rather than building for everyone, begin solving the sharpest pains for a clearly defined segment.
To make the entire product strategy revolve around that, your product should reduce the effort and maximize the outcomes for that group.
Wrapping up
As you might have realized by now, SaaS applications remain at their popularity peak in 2025.
So, that's a good reason to enter this market as soon as possible and reach your target audience. The right approach will allow you to gain loyal customers, ensuring regular revenue from your product.
However, you should pay more attention to making your SaaS solution focused on users. Some of the top tips include understanding the requirements of potential customers, creating a clear interface, and focusing on real data. If you have a limited budget, it's worth looking for affordable methods of creating a product.
You can also find SaaS design experts to get comprehensive services. We hope that our tips on building user-centered SaaS will help you achieve your goals in the best way possible!
FAQ
1. What are the 7 layout design guidelines for SaaS product development?
The 7 layout design guidelines for SaaS product development focus on creating user-friendly and consistent interfaces.
They include prioritizing simplicity, ensuring visual hierarchy, maintaining alignment and spacing, using consistent typography and colors, optimizing for responsiveness, providing clear navigation paths, and incorporating accessibility standards. Following these SaaS design guidelines in 2025 will be crucial to meet evolving user expectations.
2. How to design a SaaS product successfully in 2025?
To design a SaaS product in 2025, start by conducting thorough user research, defining core functionality, creating a scalable and responsive UI, and focusing on intuitive navigation.
Applying updated SaaS design guidelines helps ensure your platform offers a seamless experience across devices and meets modern usability standards, enhancing user satisfaction and retention.
3. What do you mean by SaaS design?
SaaS design refers to the process of creating the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) for a software-as-a-service product.
It involves building layouts, workflows, and visual elements that make the product easy to use, accessible, and visually consistent.
In 2025, successful SaaS product development will rely heavily on adhering to smart SaaS design guidelines to stay competitive.
4. What are the design guidelines for SaaS applications?
Design guidelines for SaaS applications are best practices that ensure a product is functional, visually appealing, and user-friendly.
Key SaaS design guidelines include creating consistent visual styles, optimizing for mobile and desktop, maintaining a clear information hierarchy, and designing for accessibility.
Following these standards in 2025 is critical for building successful SaaS products that users love.