# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Design can make or break a SaaS

When users stop using your product and there's a new competitor luring them away, it's often a design problem.

Customers need to experience
the value of your product as quickly
as possible. Otherwise, they won't stick around.

When users stop using your product and there's a new competitor luring them away, it's often a design problem.

Customers need to experience
the value of your product as quickly
as possible. Otherwise, they won't stick around.

When users stop using your
product and there's a new
competitor luring them away, it's often a design problem.

Customers need to experience
the value of your product as
quickly as possible. Otherwise,
they won't stick around.

When users stop using your
product and there's a new
competitor luring them away,
it's often a design problem.

Customers need to
experience the value of your product as quickly as
possible. Otherwise, they
won't stick around.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When users stop using your product and there's a new competitor luring them away, it's often a design problem. Customers need to experience the value of your product as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they won't stick around. When users stop using your product and there's a new competitor luring them away, it's often a design problem.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The main reason why startups fail is a misunderstanding of market needs. Of course, it doesn't make sense to create a product nobody wants. But very often the idea of a new product seems great only in our minds (until we implement it).

Therefore, it is very important to test the product to understand if it satisfies people's needs.

For example, when we worked on the design of TextMagic, a customer experience platform, we analyzed users' feedback after creating each prototype. It helped us develop new ideas and understand what improvements we should make (read the case study).

But what if the budget is limited and you can't afford to test every small piece of the product? Moreover, the second reason for startup failure statistics is running out of budget.

The best solution to this situation would be to designing an MVP.

In this article, you will learn what is an MVP, what are its main types, and how to build a minimum viable product to validate your idea and spend minimum resources.

Imagine you've got a brilliant business idea and all your close ones liked it and encouraged you to try. Can you be sure they did so not only because they didn't want to hurt you and break your relations? Before investing every single penny into developing a full-feature solution, you need to check your hypothesis with a broader, not-biased audience.

You can do this by creating a minimal version of your product with core features that address the primary customer's problem you're going to solve. The minimum feature set will speed up showing your product to the market. However, even with limited features, the product should still be "viable," meaning a working one.

The main purpose of an MVP is to test the essence of the product idea, analyze users' feedback, and create a full product version based on the insights. In the B2B world, the experts say that it's not an MVP until you can't sell it. The picture below perfectly illustrates a proper MVP approach.

Many successful companies serve as proof of the usefulness of MVP product development. For example, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon launched a small service in 2006 with one function - music streaming. Today, their product, Spotify has a $ 50 billion market valuation, has partnerships with big recording studios, and has a 50 million active audience.

In 2008, when renting a hotel or accommodation while traveling was a big problem, two enthusiasts found an unusual way to solve this issue and decided to rent out their apartment by fax. In fact, this was also an MVP, which main function was to test. The experiment showed that the product will be in demand, and today Airbnb is one of the largest sites for finding short-term rental housing.

The MVP product shouldn't obligatory have a fancy design, which can distract users' attention from understanding the product value. Though, the UI and UX should be intuitive and easy to follow. We'll come back to this point later when talking about the MVP examples. And before, let's see what perspectives building a minimum viable product gives to a SaaS entrepreneur.

MVP benefits

Strictly speaking, all benefits can be boiled down to one phrase - "market feedback." Elaborating more, we'll find that creating the MVP helps:

Understand if there is a market for your idea

Evaluate product's potential

Gather customers' insights

Reveal a product's weak points

Attract investors for future funding

Enhance your product to satisfy market needs

Reduce engineering hours narrowing down the feature set

Avoid unnecessary expenses

In a nutshell, the minimum viable product is a cost-effective learning tool that helps test the idea and understand whether to invest in the deployment of an extended and feature-reach version.

MVP common myths

Regardless of the MVP concept's simplicity, there are some delusions around it.

MVP is a low-quality product version

This way of thinking can do you a huge disservice. A viable version of your product should contain a limited number of features, this is true. But the quality must be as high as you can ever provide. The MVP's ultimate goal is to attract early adopters, introduce your idea, and see if it is welcomed by the market or not. Poor quality products won't make a good impression by default, bringing to nothing your efforts. A range of unsuccessful products have already proven that MVP design matters. Nowadays, the word viable is often displaced by loveable to underline the importance of making a product that people really enjoy using. We have a separate article about MVP and MLP.

From one side, yes. The early adopters will be your first audience. However, the MVP is not a marketing strategy. It's rather a development technique that enables developers to create better products based on customer feedback.

Not necessarily. It depends much on your product's nature. Landing pages, mockups, or demo videos of a non-existing product will also work. The goal is to deliver the product's idea essence, and the form can be one of the listed below:

To learn more read our article about UX prototype.

Types of MVP

There are many different approaches to create an MVP, let's talk about the most popular ones.

Flintstone's MVP

Do you remember how in the popular cartoon The Flintstones father created the illusion of moving by car (there was no fuel, he was just running inside of a vehicle)? Flinstone's approach (also known as The Wizard of OZ MVP) provides the imitation of the product functions, although those functions are technically not implemented. MVP aims to test a hypothesis, to prove the viability of the chosen business development model.

Initially, this approach had many critics. Nick Swinmurn, the founder of the online store Zappos, proved the consistency of this method. He created a website and posted photos of different shoe models. When Nick received his first orders, he went to the store and bought the pair he needed and sent it to the customer. This way Swinmurn checked the viability of the idea of selling shoes via the Internet, while initially he did not spend money on renting a warehouse and purchasing products, but only imitating their availability. The market value of Zappos reached $2 billion in 2015.

Concierge MVP

This methodology is suitable for online services, the ultimate goal of which is to automate solving problems of the target audience. At the initial stages of implementation, you manually provide the service.

For example, you want to provide a financial accounting service. To test if this idea will be in demand, first you make some financial plans for clients manually through Excel. This way you can see if people are willing to pay you and how much are they willing to spend. As well, you can check what features are the most important for your audience and need to be implemented first.

This model was used in the late 90s by Chuck Templeton, the founder of OpenTable, the service for online reservations. He did not immediately invest thousands of dollars in the technical implementation of the service, but booked tables in restaurants for other people manually. So Chuck checked the viability of the idea, understood how much users are ready to pay, and learned his audience.

Piecemeal MVP

Use the piecemeal MVP method when it is possible to test and implement the idea without developing unique software. To use this type of MVP you collect already existing services and tools and combine them in a single interface. It allows you to save money and time you would spend on developing your own technology.

An example here would be Groupon, an online coupon provider. In the beginning, it was a WordPress site where all user interactions were done via email. Only after receiving feedback and financial results they developed social features, full-fledged email distribution, automation, and finally a popular mobile application.

Single featured MVP

This type of minimum viable product is used when there is a product with a minimum set of functions (usually one feature). We've already mentioned Spotify that used this type of MVP.

The release of a product with only one feature allows your customers to clearly understand what problem they may solve with your service. As a result, you will clearly identify your target audience, get feedback, and then start testing the product.

An example of a minimum viable product from our portfolio would be LittleDate. This app helps people make their dates short and secure. According to the idea, your first date should last no more than 20 minutes. If you stay longer, your rating within the app will go lower. You won't need to make excuses anymore if you want to escape soon after the date starts. Isn't it a relief?!

Our designer team brainstormed on this awesome idea and created the UI/UX MVP design for the LittleDate iOS app. The ultimate goal was to make the app design intuitive and easy to follow, customer-focused, engaging, and not dull.

Not to visually overload an interface, we made a user profile minimal. It includes only necessary information - a user's photo, rating, and the number of dates they had. We used the scroll down instead of the swiping motion, the most popular UI mobile pattern for dating apps, to encourage users to be more serious in finding a match and not just play a "swipe and like" game. Also, we designed availability, scheduling, "running late" features to make the app a handy dates companion. Read more about an MVP app design our team created in LittleDate case study.

When and why you need to develop an MVP

Start developing a minimum viable product at the introductory stage of the product life cycle. The idea of the product can only seem great in theory, so there is no need to risk and invest a lot of money in development. MVP development allows you to spend less and get all the needed data to test your idea.

After the release of the minimum shippable product, you will determine the demand and understand whether you are developing the project in the right direction or not.

But the greatest thing about MVP is collecting valuable information from early adopters. It is the end consumer who will tell about the correct implementation of the project. Use the collected data to plan future upgrades and prioritize which features to implement first.

How to make an MVP

Now, as we've discussed some theory let's talk about the practical part - creating an MVP. Eleken designers strongly recommend using design thinking in building an MVP.

To get a good result, break down the work into steps to build an MVP, outline goals for the team in general, and tasks for each member in particular. But first of all, make sure your team understands the general principles of work and product creation.

Preparatory stage: define the basic principles of creating an MVP

Hold a general meeting of the team that will participate in the development of the MVP. Figure out whether all team members understand what are you going to do and why. Discuss the vision of the MVP, put it all together, and build the first rough plan for further work.

During the general meeting, discuss the following issues:

How to spend minimum resources? Remember you should create an MVP with minimum time, money, and effort. Figure out how to spend less, but still effectively test your business idea. As a rule, a discussion of this issue helps to select the MVP functionality to implement at the initial stage of new product development.

How to interact with users? One of the main goals of creating an MVP is testing hypotheses, determining the demand and relevance of the product. Feedback from the first users of the product helps to reach this goal. In order not to miss any important information, think about how you will interact with the target audience: reviews, surveys, direct interviews, etc.

How to make the first sales of a product? The first sales of the product will provide the means to continue further development and show if someone is interested in your product. You can also consider organizing fundraising (pre-sale) on a crowdfunding platform, like Kickstarter, for example.

How to promote a product? Plan the advertising campaign and the channels you will use for it. The main tool here is usually Google Adwords. Then choose social networks, (Facebook, Instagram, etc) create official pages there, and launch targeting. Social networks are also great channels for collecting feedback.
Develop a selling landing page: describe the product, tell about its features and benefits for the client, give users the opportunity to choose between the paid and free versions of the product.

In this team meeting, try to involve as many specialists as possible to consider the idea and testing options from different points of view.

Stage one: define the problem the MVP will solve

After defining the basic principles of MVP, answer the question: "What problem does the product solve?"

Describe its value in a few sentences. It will be useful for you and your team, and in the future, it will help in creating a unique value proposition, landing page, and advertising campaign.

Stage two: define the target audience

A common mistake aspiring entrepreneurs tend to make is that they believe their product solves the problem of a wide audience. Instead, you should focus on a specific target audience.

Create a user persona, a customer who will definitely buy your product. Describe their gender, age, social status, income level, needs, habits, and even the devices they prefer to use. Define what common problems they have and want to solve.

Don't hurry! It is better to spend a few more hours to define the target audience than spend the entire advertising budget and get the minimum conversion.

Creating the user persona gives an understanding of whom you are going to sell the product to. This information will help in organizing an advertising campaign.

Stage three: research the main competitors

It is challenging to develop a completely unique product or idea. If you have not come face to face with a similar proposition it doesn't guarantee that you haven't got competitors.

You should spend a lot of time learning the market. You are lucky if the idea is still unique. (in this case, we recommend to read about the Blue ocean strategy ).

If you managed to identify some rivals then do the following:

Collect as much information as possible about the main competitors. Analyze your top three competitors: study the history of development, check what products they offer, learn their unique value proposition, and evaluate if you can offer something better.

Study the position of competitors' companies in the market. Determine their strategies, sales volumes, and calculate profitability. This way you will understand how successful they are and what you can do to beat the competition (and most importantly, how much resources will you have to spend).

Learn how those companies present themselves. Find the information that competitors publish about their activities, check out their official websites, presentations, annual reports, ads campaigns, etc. It can give new ideas for your product development.

Learn what other channels say about your competitors. Check news, videos, reviews, interviews, ratings, etc. that present some information about your rivals. It will help you better understand the chosen industry and learn more about the situation on the market.

To know better how to behave in a highly competitive market place read Red Ocean Strategy: How to Overcome Competition.

Stage four: create a user journey map

It's super important to design a usable and easy-to-navigate application. To understand if your product provides a good user experience test it yourself. If you have some troubles while using the service, then the consumer will definitely not be able to figure out how your product can help them.

To avoid such a problem, when creating the minimum viable product, build a customer journey map. It will show what the user does when interacting with the product. You must understand what content, design, and interface the audience expects to see.

As well, do not forget to make edits to the user journey map after receiving feedback from the first customers. Feedbacks will show you what is working well and what is inconvenient and is better to change. Based on this information, adjust the map so that end-users get what they want.

Stage five: define the features

At this stage, you must define the functionality of the MVP, or in other words, plan the scale of the minimum viable product.

First, define a few basic features, those without which the project cannot exist. This is the wireframe or the smallest usable version of the product.

Next, think of other features you want your product to possess and prioritize them. Define which functions are essential and need to be implemented at once, and which you can add later in the process of project development.

It is better to set function priorities together with the team. Discussions and disputes will lead to the determination of the optimal scale of the minimum viable product.

Stage six: develop and test the MVP

You are almost there! You have a great idea, you've defined tasks, goals, and scope then it's time to develop the MVP and test it.

Test your MVP in two steps. Firstly, when the MVP is ready let your team use the product for several days. If everything is okay give access to the product to the first users. Let them test it for 7-14 days.

Then gather feedback, statistics, behavior analytics, and analyze the entire data set. You will see what features to improve, what functionality to remove, and what to add.

Testing the product will help you come up with an optimal first version that you can bring to market and continue improving.

This was the last out of seven steps of the minimum viable product development process. Let's once again recall each of them:

1. Define the basic principles of creating an MVP

2. Define the problem the MVP will solve

3. Define the target audience

4. Research the main competitors

5. Create a user journey map

6. Define the features

7. Develop and test the MVP

Conclusion

After completing seven stages, you will get a good minimum viable product that can grow into the first version of a full-fledged project. Do not be afraid to make changes during the MVP development process. The sequence of steps we provided in this article is not a strict rule, but only an example with the help of which you can build your own, unique product.

And if you need a UI/UX design for your future product, just drop us a line, and we'll visualize your idea.

‍

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Build a Minimum Viable Product: 7 Steps to Test Your Idea

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The main reason why startups fail is a misunderstanding of market needs. Of course, it doesn't make sense to create a product nobody wants. But very often the idea of a new product seems great only in our minds (until we implement it).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Have an idea of a cutting-edge product that would conquer the SaaS market? We understand your desire to immediately show it to the world, but the launch campaign is not the process to hurry up with. It usually takes long months to go through all the stages to successfully launch a SaaS product. Since Eleken has collaborated with a number of successful SaaS companies, we have prepared a checklist to have everything done in advance.

Find your competitive advantage

Before launching your business, determine whether your idea is effective. The most obvious way to do that is to discuss it with as many potential customers as possible. Besides, you can test your idea for adequacy answering this list of questions:

What problem does it resolve?

Will people buy it?

Does your product have a market niche?

Who are your competitors and what are their advantages?

After you find the answers to the questions above, you can come up with a clear description of your business idea and understand its unique value. As soon as you have studied your competitors in the niche, you should determine a competitive advantage that will allow your product to stand out.

A lot of SaaS businesses try to compete on their market, establishing low prices either directly through cheap services, or indirectly through sales and discounts. This allows attracting more users, but on the other hand you will struggle to win their loyalty. It means that in order to retain them, you will have to constantly stick to low pricing strategy.

Competing on value implies producing the best quality products. The opportunities to add value to your product are endless. All you need is a strong team and enough investments. On the other hand, this may be quite challenging and requires lots of resources.

Besides, you can always mix low price and high value strategies in the proportion that best fits your business.

Set your goals and targets

To achieve the result, you should understand how to measure it. That is why goal-setting is important. Start with the market investigation. Make competitive research, predict the timeline of your product development, and establish the metrics to check up your project at different stages.

You must have already heard about the SMART concept. It means that the goals you set should answer five criteria, such as specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. How does it work with SaaS? Let's see an example.

Imagine, you are ready to launch your product and want to increase your sales by the end of the quarter. This goal meets only one SMART criteria - it is time-bound and you have chosen your deadline to review the results. Nevertheless, this goal is neither measurable nor specific. And it is quite difficult to define if it is specific or attainable.

What would SMART goal look like?

S is for accuracy what you want and how much you want it

M is for specific numbers that would allow you to determine if you have achieved your goals and analyze your results

A is for the real market situation that allows your product to grow

R is for your internal situation, resources you have and abilities of your team

T is for establishing checkpoints to review the results.

Thus the SMART goal looks like: "I expect a 20% increase in customers, 50% website traffic growth, and 15% conversion growth by the end of the quarter resulting in $100,000 revenue."

Develop your brand story

Imagine you enter an extremely competitive niche with products similar in price and quality. Even if you have chosen your competitive advantage before, you need to communicate it properly for your customers to find and follow you. Proper branding is your key solution. The best way to incite customer's emotion is to develop a proper brand concept. Transmit this concept through the design of your product, website and marketing materials; storytelling strategy, brand voice and values you communicate.

One of our customers launched a startup missioned to promote deliberate and eco-friendly lifestyle. The founders have chosen the concept of handprints as a symbol of eco-contributions done by every person in the community, such as travelling to work by bike rather than by car, or planting a tree. The project is called Handprinter. It is a unique product with no analogs on the market. We needed to clearly communicate the idea and create both human and eco-friendly app design with unique and understandable visuals to reflect the main concept. You can study the case precisely and see the results of our work on our website.

Involve influencers to test your product

Influencers are social-media celebrities often connected to a specific market niche. They are highly trusted by their audience, and, according to BigCommerce, influencer marketing is growing at enormous speed. Nearly 89% of all marketers agree that influencer marketing is comparable to or even better than other channels.

SaaS market can benefit from influencers with the same effectiveness as e-commerce. For example, Canva, which is a graphic design software, is closely working with niche influencers and industry leaders. Their cooperation with Guy Kawasaki, an Apple marketing specialist, allowed them to stand out in their segment and reach out to users all over the world.

Looking for influencers to speak for your brand, you should consider their industry, audience, and professional status. According to the statistics gathered by BigCommerce, Instagram and Youtube are the most impactful social media platforms, while Snapchat is considered the least important marketing platform. However, you should follow your target audience and channels they use. You can look for influencers by yourself, or collaborate with a professional agency that can suggest the list of influencers according to your requirements.

Survive during the pre-launch period

The pre-launch period is a very important phase to test your business livability. You attract your first users, start a marketing campaign, test your product, and receive the first feedback. For this reason, let's pay special attention to this phase.

Announce a product launch

The first thing you should do is estimate and announce your product launch date and prepare a Coming Soon Page for your website. Your main goal here is to create intrigue and motivate people to subscribe to your page. You can use different strategies, but the most popular one is to ask people to bring their friends in order to receive a free subscription for a certain period.

Find beta testers for your product

You should also find beta testers for your product through beta platforms or relevant treads on Quora, Reddit, or Hackernews. There are no recommended numbers, but the more people from inside of the industry know and like your product, the more chances it will produce hype after the release.

Prepare a strong product description and short pitch video that will explain your product to users. Prepare to gather feedback and make changes on the spot, as your main task here is to fix all the bugs before the official release.

Consider Freemium VS Free Trial

‍

Freemiums and free trials are specific SaaS business customer acquisition models that help you show the benefits of your product to your target audience. But before you decide, whether to choose freemium or trial, let's have a closer look at both.

Freemium allows your customers to receive part of your product functions free of charge, while free trial gives full access to all of the functions for a limited time period. Depending on your product specifics and go-to-market strategy you choose, you can mix these two models.
Dominant Growth Strategy
This strategy is aimed to win all kinds of users. This is a strategy used by market giants, such as Netflix or Uber, and is based on a combination of freemium and free trial acquisition models. However, it usually works well with high-quality products acting on a big market with a big pool of users. Customers need to understand clearly the value of your product and how it functions. Besides, your niche should be of a really high demand for lots of users. Here you will need to focus on the user experience and attract them with premium features. Otherwise, you will simply give away your product for free without establishing customers' loyalty.
Differentiated Strategy Model
This model is used when you want to compete with popular products that monopolize the niche. You discover their disadvantages or underestimated services they don't suggest and create your own product that covers them all, attracting those users who need these specific features. This strategy usually works with free trials and demos.

Disruptive Growth Strategy means that you create products with more simple features, compared to competitors and charge less. This may not seem to the best idea, but it actually works. For example, Canva functions are much simpler and less variable than those suggested by Photoshop. Nevertheless, they attract those users that don't use all the features, suggested by a more expensive competitor. Disruptive strategy works well with the freemium model mostly, as you need to stick to lower prices.

Prepare to Act Fast

Once you go through all the steps above, you are ready to finally launch your product. But, predicting what happens next, you should understand that the things that worked well during testing and pre-launch period might go wild when you get your first real customers. So, prepare your team to cope with that.

Right after the SaaS product launch, you should gather as much feedback as possible and be ready to make on-the-spot improvements as fast as possible. Work well with your team, build up agile processes, and assign responsibilities in advance. You should be flexible and suggest the best customer experience, despite all the shortcomings.

All in all, starting a project on an extremely competitive market, such as SaaS, has never been an easy task. But we have thousands of successful examples from companies that won their customers and turned into successful businesses. Eleken has prepared design for some of them. Check their cases and get inspired.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Launch a SaaS Business: Start a Campaign from Scratch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Have an idea of a cutting-edge product that would conquer the SaaS market? We understand your desire to immediately show it to the world, but the launch campaign is not the process to hurry up with. It usually takes long months to go through all the stages to successfully launch a SaaS product.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There is no single recipe for a product team. Available resources limit team size, while product ambitions and goals define which roles will be prioritized. In the end, in some teams, the roles of product manager and product designer can be combined into one person. Others may choose to outsource product design to an agency, or maybe they are just a startup with a developer, CEO, and a designer.

On the other hand, big products may have a big product management team and a product design team apart. Knowing the difference between the two is key to finding the team model that suits your product best.

What is product management?
When a product succeeds, it's because everyone on the team did what they needed to do. But when a product fails, it's the product manager's fault.
This is a citation from Marty Cagan's book Inspired: How to Create Tech Products that Customers Love and it couldn't be more precise. This is one of the favorite books of Ilya, CEO of Eleken design agency, included in our list of best books that we wish all product managers and designers read.

One of the ways we can define product management is "creating a product that meets customers' needs and aligning it with the business strategy. If product design can be illustrated in a Behance case without ever being presented in a real world, a product management case can not exist "in vacuum". Product managers have to work with marketing, and sales teams, study the market, and prepare solutions that are bringing value to both customers and the business.

It is common to mistake product management with project management. However, a project manager needs to have additional formation if they want to embark on the role of product manager. As the latter has to be a connecting link between designers, engineers, and other team members, basic knowledge of programming, accounting, product design process, and the principles of design thinking are a must. And this list is not complete.

According to Marty Cagan, the expertise of product managers is based on four whales of deep knowledge:

Customer. Knowing how your customers live, think, and interact with the product is essential for a product manager. It's impossible to create a good product without understanding user needs.

Data. The ability to collect, read, and analyze data is what allows one to make decisions based on proven hypotheses, and not just follow the feelings. With a vast volume of available data, it takes a good grasp to navigate through the ocean of KPIs and not to get misguided by vanity metrics.

Your business. If previous whales were the ones that both product managers and product designers share, deep knowledge of the business is the job of the product manager. They have to know the place of their product in the business and keep in mind all the stakeholders, both inner and external.

Your market and industry. To make a product successful on the market, a product manager has to be an expert in the industry, keeping track of what competitors do, as well as their strong and weak spots. To become a leader in a competitive market, they have to know the field well.

Product management includes working on product development strategy, roadmap, product vision, product-market fit, and so on. In our blog, we have covered many topics related to SaaS product management, so go have a read when you'd like to learn more.

The questions that product managers face:

How can we improve our churn rates?

What changes should we make to our roadmap?

What are the priorities in product development?

What is product design?
Product design is the process of developing a usable product that meets customers' needs by defining the users' problems and finding creative solutions for these problems.
For people not engaged in product design, the difference between product designers and UX designers seems blurry. However, we insist that it is not the same. Product design suggests a more holistic view of user experience and design. It doesn't stop after the launch and goes through many stages of testing, iterating, and evolving whenever there is an opportunity for improvement. We have a detailed explanation of both roles in a dedicated article about product designers and UX designers.

Product design process

So, what does product design mean in practice? It is an iterative process, going through different stages and following them in a circle. Here are these stages:

The religion of product designers is design thinking. Nowadays this term is applied to (almost) anything, from social work to personal development. Can't claim how universal this concept is, but in product design, it is absolutely essential. Here are the key steps of design thinking:

1. Empathizing with users/customers. Designers try to understand what they feel, think, and need. Talk to them, observe them, and put yourself in their shoes. (Yes, it goes even before the competitors' research)

2. Defining the problem. What is their need? The need should be defined by users themselves, not by the urge to fit a solution that designers already have in their minds.

3. Ideation. Once the problem is formulated, designers can start looking for a solution. To get the best results at this stage, it is recommended to use integrative thinking (something that is outside of the regular rational way of thinking) and involve people of diverse profiles in collaboration.

4. Prototype. It's important that the realization of the idea does not go to perfection. The prototype should be just enough to go through testing. Overdoing it would mean wasted time in case it gets rejected at the next stage.

5. Test. This is a moment of truth. The prototype has to be tested, preferably with the very same users that designers were empathizing with in the beginning. If the prototype fails to solve the problem defined in step 3, then the designer goes back to step 1 and starts all over.

The most important characteristic of design thinking is the iterative nature of the process. Every product goes through a number of iterations, and the product team has to understand it. To successfully apply design thinking, designers have to adopt a certain level of optimism and experimentalism to be able to accept the fact that the ideas need to be rethought and the project needs another iteration.

To see how these principles are used in product design, check some examples of design thinking.

The questions that product designers face:

How can we improve user flow?

What are the most challenging points for users?

What can be done to help users reach their goals faster?

To find out more about designer's role in product development, check our article about product designers.

What's common between product design and product management?

Focus on customers

There shouldn't be just one person responsible for getting to know the users. Ideally, each team member has to be familiar with customer profiles and their needs. For product designers and product managers, this is absolutely crucial.

Testing and iterating

Iterative design is a key to success, and the product can reach success only when both product manager and product designer understand it. Whenever one of them just relies on their own intuition trying to launch the product too fast, the whole project falls under the risk of failure. Each idea has to be tested and the team should be prepared to change everything until it gets to deliver the best value to the customer and business.

Research-based decisions

Both product managers and product designers should do the research, analyze results, and avoid bias. For example, we always want to make sure that our clients decide to make a redesign not just because "they want something new", but because the audit showed that the existing design is not performing well enough.

To sum up

Product management and product design both have the objective of making great products that solve users' problems and contribute to business growth. Tools that product managers use are more connected to business objectives, while product designers get to concentrate foremost on users, and how to make the product as usable as possible.

These are two essential product team members. In our work, we insist on tight collaboration of our product designers with product managers on the client side. We don't just receive briefs and deliver the final result. Instead, we do regular meetings, brainstorm all ideas together, and jointly make important product decisions.

Many startups may go with just a couple of engineers/founders, and decide to involve a designer only when the product has already taken shape and is in need of a visual interface. However, we recommend involving a product designer in the early stages, because design thinking is not something that can be applied on top of a ready-made product. Contact us if you are looking for a professional product design team.

‍

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Product Design vs Product Management. Essential Team Elements

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There is no single recipe for a product team. Available resources limit team size, while product ambitions and goals define which roles will be prioritized. In the end, in some teams, the roles of product manager and product designer can be combined into one person.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Build a Product Roadmap. Step-by-step Guide With Examples

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Need to create a roadmap but don’t know where to start? Read the guide to build an effective product roadmap and check a list of online tools to optimize this process.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What does it mean to create a good SaaS product?

The rosy picture is the following: you have an always-growing subscriber base, you're able to monetize your subscribers, and, once tried, customers continue using your product over time recommending it to colleagues and friends.

As a SaaS design agency, we know, building a successful SaaS product is like playing a Rubic's cube - to make it good you need everything to magically click together. Sounds obvious, but the only chance for a newbie to win a Rubic's three-inch beast is to google the winning algorithm.

In the case of SaaS, you don't even have an algorithm to google it. Otherwise, we'd have 100% of successful startups.

However, there are two ways out here:

1. We can investigate what prevents SaaS products from becoming good and gently mark those danger zones with black & yellow warning tape to avoid getting caught.

2. We can analyze popular SaaS companies to figure out what makes them successful and learn from their experience.

Or we can do both! Let's take a closer look at two variants.

What can go wrong with you SaaS and how to cope

Achieve your product-market fit

Despite being a top-line buzzword, the product-market fit is imperative for SaaS success, since for any business to survive, there must be people who will buy what it sells. The lack of market need is the #1 reason for failure, noted in 42% of cases.

The concept is vivid, but what are the indicators of the product-market fit? Sean Ellis, who ran the early growth of Dropbox and Eventbrite, came up with a simple survey.

Ask your users how they'd feel if they could no longer use your product with the three answers given - 'very disappointed', 'somewhat disappointed', and 'not disappointed'. The group that answers 'very disappointed' unlocks your product-market fit.

After going through this survey with almost a hundred startups, Ellis found that the magic number was 40%. Most companies that struggle to grow have less than 40% of 'very disappointed' users, whereas companies with strong traction almost always exceed that threshold. And that's in no way an easy task to keep 40%, as the case of Slack shows.

2015 was the year when Slack's growth skyrocketed and the company called itself the fastest-growing business app ever. That year, Hiten Shah posed the question to 731 Slack users to find out that 51% of them would be very disappointed to lose Slack.

In 2019, a similar question asked by ProfitWell showed the product-market fit decreased to 26% only.

The remarkable reading here is the story of Superhuman. The company built its 'very disappointed' segment up from 22% to 58% and explained their road beyond 40% in the iconic product-market fit article.

Fight customer confusion

If your new shiny fitted-to-the-market solution is buried under the big, clunky, wasteful mess, the good chance is that nobody will notice how fitted it is.

Customers see your product and ask themselves. What problem does it solve? Why do I need it? How do I use it? What do I do next?

SaaS products are systems with multiple design layers and tricky user flows. They are difficult to explain, difficult to design and understand. So the answers to the questions above are not always clear enough.

" X-tech is a flexible and efficient price optimization & management software used for advanced price setting in various industries to ensure your pricing strategy forces you to provide reasons for the users to make a purchase and allows you to automate pricing analytics, optimization, and execution. "

Pfff, goodbye. Didn't get what you do. I'd better stay with my good old app.

One more shot, how we do it at Eleken.
"Eleken is a pragmatic design agency for SaaS".
A bit of cheating here - it's easier to articulate a UI/UX design agency than a never-before-seen X-tech, but you got the idea.

Think different (no kidding)

When in doubt, B2B businesses keep their best serious face. To play safe, they use muted blues and greys everywhere. To decide on their next moves, they look to the left, and then to the right on their competitors to clone their new features and pricing policies.

It seems to be a proven, less risky way to go, but it's completely ignorable.

What is so different about successful SaaS that makes them stand out? They get beyond the boundaries of boring B2B software and create products that are not just convenient but fun to use. People love using them.

Look at Notion with its nerd aesthetics and Slack with its confetti cannon color scheme.

If you're seeking a way to break down the inertia and make people try something new, you can't allow yourself to be an ignorable brand.

If you're making money convincing people to prolong their subscriptions every month, you need to be an addictive brand.

If you're Microsoft - it's alright, skip to the next step.

Define what can be considered a rock concert in your product niche and do it to become a rock star.

Take pricing (more) serious

Pricing strategy, or its absence, is what makes the difference between a fail and growth for 18% of startups. It's no surprise, given that the average SaaS startup spends only six hours to decide on a SaaS pricing strategy. Six hours, overall, to set, test, and sharpen everything.

So much blood and tears and sleepless nights to bring the product close to perfection and at the final stage of purchase, you have no idea whether you're turning the potential clients away with huge price tags or, more likely, leaving your money on the table.

When companies think about growth, they think about customer acquisition and retention. But in fact, improving monetization had the largest impact on your bottom line, followed by acquisition and retention.

Image credit: priceintelligently.com

In the world of tech, pricing rarely depends on production cost, rather on the consumers' needs and willingness to pay.

Think one step ahead

Over time, things are moving according to your product life cycle. As things move, you need to adapt.

When you're launching, it's about going all-in and working hard. When you're growing, it's about hiring the right leadership and climbing your growth curve as high as possible. Being on the top, you should be ready for stuff that comes beyond growth.

Here's what is just around the corner:

Audience saturation, when most of the audience that needs your product already uses your (or your competitors') services and growth starts to slow down.

Channel saturation, when your proven growth mechanism doesn't work so well anymore and growth starts to slow down.

Market saturation, when more and more competitors rush in to capitalize on your market with lower prices and improved products. As a result, again, growth slows down.

Saturation happens sooner or later with any successful product, giving you a narrow window for innovation that can jump-start the new round of growth. So you need to figure out when it's coming, accumulate resources for further expansion and decide in which direction you're going to expand.

There are many other dangers lurking along your way to a good SaaS product, but they can't stop persistent entrepreneurs from building good SaaS products.

Now, let's look at cloud-based companies that managed to make their way to the top.

Top SaaS businesses and what makes them successful

Here are some of the best SaaS businesses that managed to become successful, let's see why people choose them.

HubSpot is a cloud-based marketing and sales platform. It focuses on attracting customers and leading them through the whole buyer's journey. HubSpot is known for its wide range of tools for business growth. They help businesses with email marketing, blog optimization, and social media interactions.

Even though many software companies provide similar solutions, HubSpot stays at the forefront of digital marketing. What makes it different from other services?

Easy to use. HubSpot's UI lets the user intuitively navigate through each component in the platform and learn very quickly how every tool works. The layout is clear and well-categorized so that even a non-technical person would understand how to complete the desired action.
In order to improve its UI and UX, Hubspot has even conducted a drunken user test. Yes, a drunken guy tested their UI design to measure how simple it is to navigate through the website. It's funny, but it proves that HubSpot cares about a user-friendly interface.

To sum up, Hubspot's strengths are inbound marketing, a full stack of tools in one place, and the ease of use of their product.

Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the most profitable software companies that provide a cloud storage service. It allows us to store the information, share data, and synchronize files on different devices.

There are a couple of reasons why Dropbox is more popular than its competitors.

It's platform-agnostic. Dropbox's UX is equally coherent on Windows, iOS, or Linux. You will be able to access your files or shared data on different web browsers, devices, or platforms. Dropbox's team did a great job of designing a consistent experience across desktop, iOS, and Android.

Dropbox does its job really well, it is fast, easy to use and it has great cross-platform support.

Zoom

Zoom is a company that provides cloud-based remote conferencing services. Except for video meetings it gives an opportunity to chat, share the screen, create workspaces, and hold webinars.

Many people are wondering how Zoom managed to become so popular, leaving behind such strong competitors as Skype and Google Hangouts. And again the general answer is the ease of use.

Great UI and UX design. The consumer-centric approach has raised the demand for convenient and simple video conferencing. Zoom made it possible to use their software from any device with only one click. They care about UI so much that when you look at the Zoom interface it almost tells you what actions to perform next. There is nothing that disturbs the visitor or makes them think of some technical issues of the software. The user can concentrate on their online meeting only.

By the way, one more feature that made Zoom so popular is that the user interface is consistent on the smartphone as well as on laptops.

Zoom cares a lot about the usability of their product and this fact makes them stand out.

Shopify is a cloud e-commerce platform for online and retail stores. It provides a complete set of tools to set up, customize, and manage your business. Here are a couple of reasons why people prefer Shopify to other services.

The above features make Shopify especially popular for those who want to save time and don't want to care about any technical issues.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a cloud software for conducting online surveys. Today the name of this company sounds like a gold standard in its niche and there are several reasons for that.

A big choice of templates. This cloud platform offers more than 200 survey templates. They are divided into categories and are especially useful for beginners who struggle to construct an effective form. There is also a possibility to create a survey from scratch.

The logic tool. This tool takes into account the user's earlier answers and based on this information can hide some further questions. Depending on the answers the logic tool can redirect you to different pages.

SurveyMonkey managed to make complex software look user friendly.

Slack

Slack is the best cloud-based software for business communication. This real-time messenger allows employers to organize and manage dialogues according to specific topics, have private conversations, share files, etc. Slack has become a trusted means of corporate communication because of its:

Design. Andrew Wilkinson, one of Slack's designers, said that one of the reasons this messenger became successful is because it looks different:

"To get attention in a crowded market, we had to find a way to get people's attention. Most enterprise software looks like a cheap 70's prom suit - muted blues and greys everywhere - so, starting with the logo, we made Slack look like a confetti cannon had gone off. Electric blue, yellows, purples, and greens all over. We gave it the color scheme of a video game, not an enterprise collaboration product."

Slack's interface was made not just for fun, it helps the user understand how the messenger works and makes it easy to use.

Slack looks and feels different. The way the visual aspect is connected with this platform functionality makes it special and popular among users.

Okay, *slaps knees*

Now, if you're making a SaaS startup, and everything seems too complicated - no worries. Take deep breaths, recall about the pitfalls that are waiting for you (carefully pay attention to your product's market fit, its clear performance, personality, pricing, and life cycle stages), get inspiration from SaaS gurus' best practices, and come to Eleken for a human-centered design that will beat all your competitors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Best SaaS Companies or What Makes a Good Cloud Product

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What does it mean to create a good SaaS product? The rosy picture is the following: you have an always-growing subscriber base, you're able to monetize your subscribers, and, once tried, customers continue using your product over time recommending it to colleagues and friends.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Gallup, an American analytics and advisory company, surveyed employees who worked remotely during pandemics and figured out that only 9% of respondents want to return to offices. 54% say they would ideally split their time between working from home and in the office; 37% want to stay fully remote.

Oh, concludes Gallup, people seem to love remote work!

But if you want to see people who really love remote work, you need to look at Eleken UI/UX agency.

We've been working with our clients remotely for seven years already. Two years ago, as the pandemic started, we got rid of the office and went fully remote. And recently we ran a survey similar to Gallup's, to figure out how the team feels about the current working conditions. What a surprise the result was.

0% of Eleken people need to work in the office;

1 little poor content writer (me) wants back to the office and work in a hybrid fashion;

99% of workers want to work from their couches forever.

How Eleken employees prefer to work

Many surveys show that bosses want workers back in the office after the pandemic. For instance, a global study released by the Future Forum shows that executives, who work remotely, prefer returning to the office three times more than employees.

But it's not Eleken's scenario. It was a good year for the agency, so our boss doesn't mind if we continue working from our couches if we want.

How to build your remote design studio that will be 99% happy with its way of working;

How to make this team communicate and work 100% effectively.

In this article, one little poor content writer figures out what's wrong with all the Eleken people. So keep reading if you want to know:

Step one: Overcome remote management challenges

The shift to remote work inevitably reveals some misunderstandings about tasks or requirements due to the lack of context and details. So you have to detect such holes in your workflow and fix them to make everything work smoothly.

If you're a big team, add more structure

Big SaaS buddies with distributed teams generously share their experience in remote teams management. InVision, for instance, advises putting more structure around the design process to enhance it.

Adding structure means coming up with standard algorithms of how designers investigate, brainstorm, collaborate in teams, or work apart. It's like putting more columns so your design process doesn't fall over.

If you're a small team, remove irrelevant structure

That was the piece of advice from big teams with design processes so heavy, that they risk collapsing under their own weight. But if you are starting to design with remote teams, you probably start small. So, here's some other advice for you from a small design team: remove the irrelevant structure.

If you zoom in to look more closely at the structural columns you already have or are going to have, you'll notice that some of them are irrelevant in a remote mode. You can get rid of them painlessly for the sake of flexibility.

For instance, we at Eleken revised our design requirement gathering process and cut some elements out of it.

Classical requirement gathering demands agencies' clients to fill in a standard brief that causes suffering for everyone involved. Clients have to devote time and effort to write down answers to abstract questions. Designers then have to find the grain of truth in those abstract answers.

A client brief is not the shortest way toward finding some common ground between a client and an agency. The shortest way is a conversation, so we abandoned briefs in favor of in-depth client interviews. Interviews that we have all saved thanks to Zoom's beautiful recording function.

When we got rid of excessive bureaucracy it turned out that project management is another unnecessary structural pillar. So now we don't have project managers anymore - designers communicate directly with clients and their product teams.

Step two: Learn to handle remote design feedback

The remote working boom, along with the consequent rapid growth of collaboration tools, actually worked to the advantage of design communication. One single point that changed for the worse is that working remotely requires you to read minds.

Imagine, you are a designer waiting for feedback, and you see that " typing..." bubble on your screen. Your client or your boss writes something and it feels like eternity. It takes only a few seconds in reality, but still enough to start thinking about mistakes you possibly made or requirements you probably missed.

Use emojis when giving feedback

Our designer Kseniya says that during online communication she can't rely on facial expressions, body language, or tone of voice to tell her which way a conversation is about to go. Even when she gets some feedback in Slack, it can be hard to interpret it, since you can't read the person's intonation. Did this "OK" mean everything is fine or was she mad at me? Did this "thank you" mean they are not impressed or everything is fine?

Kseniya recommends using emojis to compensate for emotional misunderstandings in written feedback: " Our design director does a good job explaining in detail what we've done wrong or right. And he always adds smiley faces that clarify his attitude."

Choose a single source of truth

In big remote teams it often happens that designers get different kinds of feedback from different colleagues. Customer support alerts about bugs after a recent update, the marketing department wants a new feature, and coders say the design is impossible to implement before a deadline.

All those mixed signals come simultaneously and can drive a designer crazy unless you have a procedure of bringing all the requests together and prioritizing them using an Impact/Effort matrix, for instance.

When we were redesigning an app for Acadeum, we used such a matrix together with the client's product team and the following roadmap was arranged according to the chosen priorities.

Arrange regular feedback sessions

There's a temptation for a designer to hide in their UI/UX cave together with all the wireframes and mockups and never show up until a pixel-perfect design is ready. Needless to say, it's a wrongheaded strategy. If a designer made a mistake that nobody noticed at the early stage, it would be super-expensive and time-consuming to re-do everything in the final phases.

Maksym, Eleken's Design Director, says it's crucial for a fast and efficient design process to get feedback from our clients as frequently as possible. Sometimes, even several times a day. It's the only way you can be sure you're moving in the right direction.

Step three: Replicate hallway conversations

When co-located, the crucial moments of the design process emerge organically. This can be as simple as sharing a new idea in an elevator or discussing user personas over lunch. With a remote mode, you need a bit more effort to make small talk.

Set a recurring time for status meetings

Productivity in any workplace depends on predictability and structures. The efficiency of remote teams often suffers due to a lack of rhythm. Establishing and sticking to a regular meeting schedule helps to stay in shape and track your progress.

We at Eleken, for example, create a working rhythm with weekly team calls, where we discuss how things are going, share plans for the future and roadblocks from the past.

Create a remote corner for off-top watercooler conversations

Teamwork is not only about project planning and feedback gathering. It's also nice to have a little place for memes and chit-chats. Eleken is a remote-first company, and since Slack became our virtual office, it also has a watercooler spot.

Step four: Choose the right tools for a remote design team

Design tools

Just like Zoom made design communication irreversibly remote, Figma and other remote design collaboration tools made the same for the design process itself.

You can't really appreciate what Figma did for interface designers unless a decade ago you tried to send numerous .psd files by email.

Oops, impossible to attach, your file is too big.

Figma makes remote designers' collaboration a piece of cake. It's a cloud-based tool, so all the files are held on the web, they don't take up space on your computer and allow you to work on them collectively. All your team members can edit a single file simultaneously, and the changes will autosave.

Remote designer-developer collaboration also became easier. Figma works on all devices, in all browsers, so developers don't need to install anything when they have to check the design out. Moreover, they can extract code snippets from any design element.

Sticky notes sessions and other fancy design-ish on-site stuff got replaced by online whiteboard tools like Miro and Figjam.

User testing that several years ago included tons of hassle like creating prototypes, finding respondents, and finally running a testing session is now possible with minimal designer involvement.

Figma has a tool that makes you clickable prototypes. Next, you can use Maze, for instance. Maze drags your prototypes directly from Figma, tests on real people automatically, and sends you results.

Collaboration tools

In its purest sense, UI/UX design is about visual problem-solving. It means that communicating design boils down mostly to sharing pictures.

Sharing pictures is convenient in a chat, where you can attach a screenshot. It works perfectly in a video call, where you can show your screen. Even people who work in different time zones can discuss designs pretty well by recording screencasts with comments.

Find your perfect cloud toolset, and your design team will never want to work from the office again. Here's what says Aleksandra, the UI/UX designer at Eleken: " Even if we were sitting in the office next to each other, we'd discuss designs on Zoom instead of staring all together at a single screen."

Research tools

We use Google Analytics for quantitative analysis; ⁠

Hotjar is perfect for heatmaps;

Maze is an a-mazing remote unmoderated user testing platform that works with Figma;

Lookback is great for moderated tests;

Miro is our popular choice for the presentation of research results.

Without further ado, here are the Eleken team's favorite tools for UX research:⁠

To sum things up: How can design teams work remotely?

The SaaS market has finally developed an exceptional toolkit for remote UI/UX teams.

Some remote communication disadvantages turn out to be advantages for design teams. Designers seamlessly share and discuss pictures, and Zoom is more suitable for this task than a physical conference room.

You can get the best design talent from anywhere, and you can painlessly try any engagement model, from hiring freelancers to partnering with a design agency.

If you remove some irrelevant rules instead of adding more rules for remote teams, your best talents would get power over their lives working processes in a way people can't have with a traditional desk job.

Thus, your design team would get greater flexibility to deliver the best results.

Designing with remote teams, in-house or contracted, sounds like a good idea. We at Eleken actually believe that small design teams and remote work are meant for each other:

Want the Eleken design team to become your design team? It's easy to do, you know. Just drop us a line. If you feel like doing some great SaaS stuff with us but are still unsure if we're a perfect match, we can give you a free three-day trial.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Designing with Remote Teams: a Guide for Product Owners

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gallup, an American analytics and advisory company, surveyed employees who worked remotely during pandemics and figured out that only 9% of respondents want to return to offices. 54% say they would ideally split their time between working from home and in the office; 37% want to stay fully remote.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to Hire UI Designers to Make Your Product Visually Appealing

# data[].attributes.subject
How to Hire UI Designers to Make Your Product Visually Appealing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Designers are an essential part of the product team. As a UI/UX design agency, our job is to match designers with clients. In this article, we have collected some of the most basic questions that product owners have when they are about to hire a UI designer.

1. Should I hire a UI or a UI/UX designer?

Depending on the project, it can be more convenient to hire one UI/UX designer or a team, including UI and UX designers, as well as a researcher. UI designers have narrower expertise and typically work as a part of a design team along with UX designers.

General rule: if this is the first time you are hiring a designer, go for UI/UX or Product designer (to understand the difference between these two, read our article UX designer vs Product designer). If you are building a visually complex UI and already have a UX professional in the team, go for a UI designer.

2. Why are UI and UX sometimes separated in job titles and sometimes go together?

User Interface and User Experience go hand in hand. They are like chicken and egg, as we explained in the article UI vs UX. The Yin and Yang of Product Design. Some designers choose to do both, while others prefer to deepen their expertise in one part.

Roles and responsibilities of UI designers relate to visual elements: they take care of buttons, icons, typography, illustrations, animations. UX designers conduct user research and analyze what should be changed in the interface to make it enjoyable and easy to use for people.

3. What are the essential skills of a UI designer?

Here is a list of UI designer skills, starting with the most important:

Interaction design

Wireframing and prototyping

Visual communication (work with color, typography, composition, and so on)

Knowledge of graphic software (Figma or Sketch, Adobe products)

Communication skills, teamwork

Prototyping tools (InVision, Figma)

Animation

Empathy (understanding users)

Basic principles of psychology

HTML and CSS

Knowledge of user research, usability testing, and JavaScript are the skills that allow UI designers to have higher salaries, according to Payscale.

4. Where to look for UI designers?

Behance and Dribbble are the most popular platforms where people can upload their designs, comment, and like each other. Both websites have features for hiring, so you may contact a designer, whose portfolio you like the most.

On such platforms, you can upload a task that you have and designers will suggest their ideas, so you can choose from many options. Platforms that focus on design specifically are DesignCrowd and 99designs.

Well-known platforms such as Upwork work for all sorts of freelance tasks. If you are looking for something more tailored to design needs, try Toptal with their curated pool of candidates, and Working Not Working (a platform focused on creative professionals).

LinkedIn would be too obvious to recommend for hiring, but social networks are worth mentioning still. Try posting a request for a UI designer and see if you get any references: it can often get you great talent with very little time spent on searching.

5. What are UI designer interview questions?

Below, we've gathered some of the questions that will help you to understand how the designers thinks and what is their approach to work:

Tell me a situation from your experience when you had to face a real problem and how you solved it

Which project are you most proud of and why?

Guide me through your design process (with a case from portfolio)

What is design?

For more tips, check out our article about designer interview.

6. What is a test task for a user interface designer?

Test task is the moment of truth in the hiring process. Good and easy test task would be something that is related to the everyday work of a designer in your team. As an option, you can ask candidates to redesign a screen that you find imperfect.

Designers at Eleken agency get to work with a wide range of products from different spheres. That's why we chose to give candidates a test task that has no references, where you can find ready solutions: it truly gives you an insight on how designers think and how creative they can get. Here it is:
Create a UI for a mobile AI Messenger App (at least 3 screens)
‍ Imagine you're a very busy person, but your partner/family/friends want to get your attention and message you pretty often. You need to keep working, but still be able somehow to pay some attention to your family and folks.
You need to create a UI for a messenger with an AI + chatbot, which analyzes your previous replies and responds instead of you.
7. How do you know if a designer is good?

See if you can find any references. If you found a designer on a freelance platform, it's easy to do, but otherwise, it would require some effort. Search the information about designers online, see who they worked with, and contact their previous employers.

Check the status of their portfolios on Behance and Dribbble. If you see badges from Adobe, awards, and similar, you may conclude that the designer is promising. This is not a 100% recommendation, but it is a good sign.

Rely on your own opinion. A designer might have numerous awards, but still not be the best fit for you. Check if they have worked with projects similar to yours, and trust your personal taste. Users of Dribbble might be more artistic and professional, but the designs that are popular there may not be the most usable.

8. How to hire the best UI designer?

To get the best talent, you should invest some time in research. Waiting for CVs to fall in your mailbox is easier, but in the end, it takes as much time and is less efficient.

Once you've done good research and have a list of candidates, find them on different platforms: LinkedIn, Behance, freelance websites, and so on. You need to choose the ones that have the best reviews. Don't hesitate to invite for an interview some of the candidates that seem top-notch, even if your budget is limited.

Starting from the first interview, ask some questions that can give you hints on how to negotiate with the candidate later, such as:

What do you value most in your work?

What motivates you?

What is your dream job?

Based on the answers, you can think of some bonuses to offer when negotiating the job offer. Good user interface designers are valued, and often you have to convince them to take your offer.

Extra tip: check your inbox for UI designer offers. Sometimes, you can find emails from people who want to work in your company - this is an easy way to find motivated candidates and hire dedicated UI designers.

9. Is it possible for a UI designer to work remotely?

Shortly, yes. The work of a UI designer can be done 100% online. Designers at Eleken work with clients remotely, most of them are located in different time zones. With all the cloud features of Figma, team collaboration goes smoothly.

10. How much does a UI designer cost?

The average salary of a UI designer in the US varies from $ 65,554 (according to Payscale) to $ 77,773 (Indeed), and $ 93,440 (Glassdoor). Entry-level salaries start from $ 50,000. Salaries of senior UI designers in LinkedIn and Apple go up to $ 150,000, and up to $ 400,000 in Netflix (according to reports on Glassdoor).

If you want to hire a freelance UI designer, expect to pay $50-150 per hour. On average, the salaries of UI designers tend to be lower than the salaries of UI/UX designers or product designers.

If you have a restricted budget, try hiring a designer remotely. When you are hiring a designer from another country, the prices can get 5-10 times lower. Here are some approximate rates from different countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

11. How can I hire a UI designer on budget?

First of all, define the scope of work that you need to do. Talk to your teammates and refer to the product development plan. When the number of tasks is inconstant, having a freelance designer could save you money in those periods when there is not too much work to keep them full-time.

Hire a junior specialist. As mentioned above, typically a UI designer is hired when there is also a UX professional in the team. So, when you already have one seasoned UX professional, they can mentor a fresh designer and prevent them from making typical beginner mistakes.

Find a remote employee. As you can see from the table above, hiring a designer abroad can cost up to 10 times cheaper than in the US. Nowadays, when people are used to remote work, many companies go for this option. Even finding a designer from Omaha to work for California can save you 10-15% in salary.

If you have very little idea of the number of hours needed and how many designers you need, try talking to an agency and start over with someone who is already experienced. After all, saving on design is risky: try it only when you know how things really work.

12. Why should we hire you?

This is a popular interview question that some employers like and most employees hate. For us, the answer is easy: we are a team of professionals in user interface and user experience design, and we know how to make your SaaS product as easy to use as possible. We are that remote team that can help you save some budget and we even offer a free 7-day trial. Contact us to try!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Answers to 12 Questions You Will Ask When Hiring UI Designers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Designers are an essential part of the product team. As a UI/UX design agency, our job is to match designers with clients. In this article, we have collected some of the most basic questions that product owners have when they are about to hire a UI designer.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Designer for Your Startup?

# data[].attributes.subject
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Designer for Your Startup?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A product can be developed without any participation of designers, but it can't be launched to the public without a designer's hand. If this is your first time looking for a product designer, read this article to grasp an idea of how much they charge, what their rates depend on, and where to find a good fit for your team.

As a UX design agency, we monitor the market regularly. Here is the short overview that will help you to understand the designers' price ranges.

What makes a designer salary?

There are many websites that collect data about salaries, such as Glassdoor, Payscale, Indeed, and so on. You can filter information by job title, years of experience, location, find average and median salaries, compare them with previous years... Seems like now we finally have the answer to the question that has interested humans for centuries: how much do others earn?

However, to rely on this information, you have to understand the source of the data. Websites like Glassdoor collect information based on questionnaires that their users fill in, others base on the salaries offered in job postings, and some combine both sources (for example, Indeed).

Crowdsourcing works well when the number of responses is big enough, but it is not always the case. Even though Glassdoor claims that the average number based on 10 responses is highly credible, we recommend checking the data on multiple resources and analyzing the numbers wisely.

The first thing you notice when looking for "designer average salary" is that the numbers can vary a lot. So, what makes it so different?

Experience

For UI/UX designers, working experience often replaces years of education. It takes 3-5 years of working experience for a designer to get to the middle level and the salary level of above the average. Seniors with 6-10 years of experience are the ones who reach the highest range of salaries, over $100,000.

Specialization

Inside of UI/UX design, there are different roles that require different skills. While smaller companies can have one UI/UX designer with a wide range of responsibilities, big products divide their teams into UI, IxD, UX, Product designers, Information architects, UX researchers, writers, and analysts (to understand how they interact, read our article on design team).

When UI and UX split into two, we can see that the salaries of UI designers tend to be lower than those of UX and product designers.

Location

Place of work is one of the key factors influencing the salaries. In San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Chicago, where headquarters of the biggest tech companies are located, UI/UX designers are paid more than in places where the IT sector is not among the leading ones.

The picture below shows this difference: "cheaper" states are colored in pink, and "more expensive" in blue (black - no data).

The average salaries can be 40% different between the states. That is why some employees are searching for employees that don't have to pay the rent in the Bay area. Actually, when we look at the bigger picture, it appears clear that a designer from another continent would cost you even less than a designer from Ohio.

There is not yet a single trustable database with designer salaries from all over the world, but we can overview the situation with this map by uxdesignersalaries.com, where they collected data across 107 countries. The darkest blue areas are the ones where the designers have higher earnings (USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, UK, Switzerland, Germany, and Nordic countries).

Here is data about a few countries from the different sides of the world: North America (USA, Mexico), South America (Colombia), Western (Germany) and Eastern (Ukraine) Europe, Asia (India and Indonesia), and Africa (Kenya).

Of course, outsourcing design abroad is not as easy as it seems: employing people overseas means having meetings with 6-10 hours difference (Europe), or even 11-17 hours difference (Asia), and knowing that your colleagues go to the beach party for the New Year's Eve (South America).

Headhunting for employees in other countries is a whole new quest. If you wonder where you can look for good candidates from all over the world, check our guide on finding designers.

Form of collaboration

In-house designers, freelancers, and agencies would have different costs. There is no way of estimating the cost of agency services unless you ask for a quote personally. The cost would be higher, but the time of searching, hiring, onboarding, and explaining what to do would be saved. By the way, we have a separate article describing all pros and cons of in-house designer vs agency.

Typically, designers on the agency side would be paid less, but as a product owner working with an agency, you would pay extra for their operational costs. However, it is not just one or another: there are some other pricing models that offer a balance between quality and price, such as retainer model (if you are not familiar with it, we have a separate article explaining how it works).

Some other lines on a CV that can make a product designer ask for a higher salary

To be a good professional, a designer needs to have a good command of basic skills (we have a list of these skills in our article about UX designer's responsibilities). Then come all those extra skills such as French language, which won't matter to most companies except for that one working with French clients that will be willing to pay extra for it.

Here are some of the bonus points that help UX designers negotiate higher salaries.

Coding

Of course, in the CV it should be specified what programming languagethe UX designer is familiar with. CSS and HTML are more of a "basic" set, but XML or Java are quite uncommon among UI/UX designers.

A designer with relevant skills can make changes to code thus saving the time of developers, and, overall, can understand their colleagues better and speak the same language.

Profile education

As we have previously said, you can become a good user experience professional without a degree. Most of the successful UX designers don't have that degree, not because they did not study, but simply because there are very few professional courses and some years ago there were almost none. But, as it is so rare to see a "UX design master" in CVs, having a solid formal education makes a candidate stand out.

Most companies don't consider profile higher education among the most important criteria. However, when you see a candidate who has spent two years of their life studying UX, expect to pay more compared to someone who learned it through a short online course.

Graphic design skills

Finding a UX designer with a background in graphic design is easier than the one with a profile degree. It is a common career path. For many companies, having a person who can design a product, landing page, logo, promo materials, and create author vector illustrations means saving some budget, so naturally, they would be willing to pay more to a candidate with these skills.

The flip side of graphic designers switching to UX is the lack of understanding of UX research specifics: some of them use their skills to make a nice user interface instead of working on its usability.

How to get the best design talent for less

Just to make it clear, we would not recommend saving money on design. Successful companies heavily invest in design, and this report says that these investments do pay off. But of course, there are ways of getting great talent to work on your project without breaking the bank.

Negotiate bonuses other than salary

One of the most common is sharing stock. In big companies, employees can get to this level after years of work, but with a startup, you can make this deal early in the process of collaboration. This way, designers get the additional motivation to contribute to the final product quality. Overall, team collaboration gets to a whole new quality when people see themselves not just as employees, but as partners.

Give more freedom

Freedom is worth a lot, both in working schedule and creativity. Many designers would appreciate the opportunity to work fewer hours, work remotely, or have a flexible schedule. Also, it is important to let employees know that they can participate in the decision-making, realize their vision of the product, and see how the final design is changed according to their findings. This is the reason why some designers would prefer a small startup to a big company with high salaries: they want to see the direct impact of their work (and some cool projects in their portfolio).

Outsource

Bet you have already thought of it when you saw the table with salaries all around the world. Hiring employees abroad is the easiest way to lower the costs while still getting a good level of skills. When choosing a designer from a different country, check if they have worked with foreign clients before, and look for references. Working with an agency would be safer than picking a freelancer, both in terms of quality and data protection. For more hiring tips, read our essential guide on hiring UX designers.

To sum up

Typically, you know exactly how much you pay and what you pay for only when it is time to sign the contract. However, understanding how the pricing works and how you can get the best deal is important.

In a world where we are not allowed to know how much our closest colleagues earn, the prices will remain quite obscure. Have you noticed that we haven't written our own prices? If you want to know how much the quality design of your product will cost when working with us, drop us a line!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Product Designer? Salaries Guide for Product Owners

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A product can be developed without any participation of designers, but it can't be launched to the public without a designer's hand. If this is your first time looking for a product designer, read this article to grasp an idea of how much they charge, what their rates depend on, and where to find a good fit for your team.