How to Find the Perfect Custom Software Development Team

Nowadays, having a company website is as essential as having an office, domain or telephone number. By 2020, approximately 4.5 billion people, or more than half of the world’s population, are connected in some way to the World Wide Web in order to satisfy their entertainment, education, research and consumer needs.

If your business does not have a website, we provide a number of benefits to you:

1.  It sets the first impression

When your audience visits your website, it gives them their first impression of your business. They will judge your business within seconds. In these first few seconds, you can make a positive or negative impact on your audience. The impression you make on them can either get them to remain on your page and learn about your business, or leave your page and turn to a competitor.

2.  Cost-Effective

Use your website to sell goods and services directly to consumers without various forms such as printed media, radio, television, etc. Having the website will make promoting much easier and less expensive.

3. Online 24/7

Anyone, anywhere and anytime, has access to your website and gets business information and details about your products and services.

4. Advertising and Increase Sales

SEO and online advertising are a great way to be the first company that a potential new customer sees when searching for a product or service online. An effective website with great content can attract many more people and increase sales.

5. Customer Service Online

Websites provide an easier way to handle customer service. In the modern world, people buy products and services using mobile phones to browse the internet.  So, it might help customers find your location while they are on the move. This is especially important for restaurants, cafes, and other eateries, but is also relevant for other businesses.

However, there are a few disadvantages of having a website for your business:

1. Reliability

The information on your website might be updated on a regular basis. Otherwise, you will lose some part of potential customers due to unreliable information on the website.

2. Bad Publicity

If customers are unhappy with your products or services, they may feel the need to reference your website in their reviews or comments. This could potentially be damaging, hurting your reputation and your search engine ranking. Of course, not having a website won’t prevent such things from happening, but it might allow you to monitor and be aware of it.

3. Right development team

It is no secret that there are lots of companies that can design and develop a website. Among the sea of designers and developers, you need to find a team that will understand your business goals and the needs of your customers and convert them into a beautiful website.

Having read that, you might come to the conclusion that having a website is a crucial thing in the digital world, and it is a great opportunity to raise your sales.

Darly team understands this fact, and we are going to show how we can provide your business and your potential customers with a great experience.

At Darly Solutions, we offer two main approaches to creating a website:

Creating a website from scratch

Required knowledge and tools:

1. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)

HTML is the basic structure of web pages and web applications, which makes the content semantic to the web browser. Every web page you see on the Internet is written using one version of HTML code or another.

2. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CSS is the language for describing the presentation of Web pages, including colors, layout, and fonts. Without CSS, a web page would look like a large white page with some unordered text and image on it. CSS is the thing that makes it all look pretty.

3. Scripting Languages

HTML and CSS cannot be interactive without scripting languages. To make a dynamic web page that will respond to user actions, you need languages like JavaScript and jQuery. Server-side languages like PHP, Python and Ruby might also be needed over time.

4. Database Management

Database Management allows to organize, store and retrieve data from a computer. Database Management Systems like MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL are used on the server-side to do this job efficiently.

5. FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

FTP is a standard Internet protocol for transmitting files between computers on the Internet over TCP/IP connections. FTP is used to transfer a website’s source files to its hosted server more easily.

Creating a website with CMS

WordPress is extremely powerful and can run most types of websites. Statistics show that WordPress is currently the most popular CMS (Content Management System) in the world. It powers 27.8% of all sites on the web, with about 50,000 new sites being created daily. With more and more people viewing sites on their smartphones and other mobile devices, it’s really important to have a site that is responsive to these digital demands. With WordPress, most themes come mobile friendly by default. Usually, WordPress is used for creating blogs where you have to work with a big amount of texts and need to edit them all the time.

Design

The success of any website entirely depends on how good its web design is. It is important so much that 38% of the visitors will leave a website if they find the design unattractive. When your audience visits your website, it gives them their first impression of your business. They will judge your business within seconds. In these first few seconds, you want to make a positive impact on your audience.

You can think of web design like selling a car – it could have the most incredible engine, but if the appearance is hideous, people will not be interested in buying it.

Good website design needs a wide range of professionals having expertise in different areas.

Here in this article, we’ll outline the 5 steps to create the perfect design.

1. Set your goal and strategy

2. Research the latest web design trends

3. Select a team for cooperation

4. Decide on your branding

5. Think about positioning and optimization of your content

We’ll run through all the steps in detail below.

Set your goal and strategy

Before you jump head-first into designing your website, you need to be clear on its purpose. Keep in mind that your visitors want to understand what your business is all about in the blink of an eye. Having multiple main objectives is likely to result in confusion.

Once your purpose is clear, the focus shifts towards what action you want visitors to take when they land on your website. Is your site there just to display information? To sell products? To get sign-ups? The answer to this will ultimately dictate how your website looks and feels. Using E-Commerce as an example, one crucial element of your design is your landing page.

Research the latest web design trends

It’s important to note that just because a web trend is current, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for you. You can look at what competitors are doing and analyze the things and features that you like and dislike. Each sector will have different styles, so it’s important to consider this fact.

Select a team for cooperation

Design of your website plays a vital role in your online marketing campaign’s success. If you want to drive the best results for your business, you must invest in designing a website that encourages people to learn more about your business. At Darly Solutions, we have over 4 years of experience designing websites.

We are a full-service IT company that specializes in web development, mobile app development, UI/UX design and so on. Our team of experts will bring their knowledge and expertise to your campaign. We know the importance of web design and can help you create a website you’ll love.

Wireframes, prototypes and mockups form three of the earlier steps of product design. The great way to explain them is to imagine a parallel between them and the human body. The wireframe is the skeleton or the structure of the product. The prototype is the brain or the organ that decides how the human should move and interact with something. The mockup is the skin, hair, and facial features, or brand, that make the human instantly recognizable.

Decide on your branding

Color is one of the brand’s biggest communication tools. In fact, according to Color Matters, a signature color can boost brand recognition by 80%. There’s a lot of psychology behind people’s perception of color, so it’s important to understand how it’s used in relation to your industry.

Most brands have one dominant color, then two or three secondary colors. Blue is the most popular color, with one third of the top 100 brands using it in their logo.

There are many factors that should be considered like colors, font style, imagery etc. In this case, a professional designer can help and suggest a solution based on your business and your requirements.

Think about positioning and optimization of your content

There are two things that you need to consider: positioning and optimization.

Recent research shows that website users scan a page in a shape that resembles an ‘F’. This is why navigation bars on websites are nearly always displayed across the top of the page. It’s the first thing people are drawn to when landing on the site.

Optimization is the process that helps content rank higher on search engines (primary example being Google). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can increase the quality or quantity of people landing on your pages.

Conclusion

After all of that, congratulations! Your website is now live. You can publish it, but it’s time to check if everything works before you go live! Ask your family, friends, and colleagues to test the site in preview mode (all website builders and E-Commerce platforms will have this), and see if they find anything wrong. You can even get members of the public to test it too. Always take the time to properly check your website. After that, you’re ready: publish your site!

Now, you’re the owner of a live website. But, if you think that you can kick back and relax now, you are quite wrong. Regularly checking the growth and performance of the site will be your responsibility.

However, you can connect your website to tracking tools or at least have an analytic app to install. Alternatively, you can connect your site to Google Analytics.

The truth is, a web designer’s job is never truly done. If you just sit back and admire your work, others will overtake you. So, you need to keep on top of your site’s performance and check for design trends updates.

If you are working on a digital solution, one of its integral stages will be UX/UI design. While trivial projects usually have “beaten” paths for creating navigation and visuals, any deviation from the standard can lead to dissatisfaction among end users and increase the entry threshold for them. In this regard, no matter how sophisticated the logic of your project is, it is important to understand the usability principles maintained by human psychology to ensure its excellent user experience.

Theories of Perception in UX/UI Design

Generally speaking, there are several popular theories of perception in UX/UI design:

• Gestalt psychology aimed at gaining an understanding of how people associate individual objects with things that are meaningful to them. The main gestalt principles include figure-ground (according to which some objects, depending on their visual appeal, are perceived as key navigation elements, while others serve as background), similarity (according to which elements with identical visual characteristics are perceived as interconnected), proximity (according to which closely placed objects are also perceived as related to each other), and closure (which states that incomplete objects, if sufficiently detailed, can be perceived by users as complete).
• Affordance theory, claiming that to ensure intuitiveness, users should receive some cues from the interface from the very beginning on how to deal with a particular element – one way to do this is to use skeuomorphism;
• Hick's Law, which states that the time it takes a particular user to make a decision is logarithmic to the number of available options (which means that to maximize intuitiveness, the user's choice should always be limited);
• Fitts' Law, stating that the time it takes a user to reach a desired part of the interface depends on its size and distance (which means that to ensure a great user experience, you need to place interactive elements closer to the user's starting point);
• Signal Detection Theory, claiming that users can subconsciously distinguish between meaningful cues (calls to action) and background noise, meaning that they should be visually separated.

Cognitive Load: Its Effects on UI Design

Now let's move from theory to practice and consider individual insights extracted from the above theories of psychology in UX. 

In particular, the first insight is the minimization of cognitive load, that is, the efforts of the human brain that must be applied to perform a specific target action. Thus, the importance of reducing the amount of information or tasks provided to the user becomes clear – otherwise, there is a high probability that the user will begin to act erroneously. 

In practice, such brevity can be achieved by correctly grouping interrelated elements and removing elements whose functionality duplicates each other.

Emotional Response & UX Design

Another valuable insight from UX design and psychology is to establish an emotional connection with the end user through your interface. This is a global task that begins with user behavior analysis and identifying their desires, pain points, and intentions and ends with transforming the obtained information into design elements that resonate with them. 

Ultimately, you will have to walk in the shoes of the average consumer of your software solution to ensure the proper level of empathy with your emotional design. In terms of practical implementation of the emotional response, such user empathy can be achieved through the integration of “user experience stories” that can be presented by a service provider to users as they get acquainted with the digital solution, as well as the use of the right color palette, forms, audio, pop-ups, and text.

The Role of Memory in User Interaction

Since, according to cognitive psychology in design, the average person can concentrate on one object for up to 20-30 minutes, it is important to take this aspect into account if your software solution involves long-term interaction with it. 

Specifically, you can reduce the load on your users' memory by implementing elements and scenarios that work and occur in a way that is familiar to them. Otherwise, if something does not function as expected, it can lead to users’ confusion and erroneous actions. 

Understanding User Behavior Through Heuristics

Heuristics are specific UI design principles that can predict user psychology. Here are some of them:

• Visibility of system status, which implies the importance of informing end users about what is happening with your software solution at the moment through progress bars, loading animations, or status messages;
• Match between the system and the real world, which emphasizes the importance of correspondence between the system's behavior and the knowledge and experience that users received before they became familiar with your software solution;
• User control and freedom, which implies the need to provide end users with the ability to freely navigate your software solution and manage negative scenarios;
• Consistency and standards, which determine the significance of logical connections between elements, terminology, and layouts;
• Error prevention, which consists of preventing erroneous actions by end users by providing them with unambiguous and understandable instructions;
• Recognition over recall, which states that to ensure better intuitiveness, users should “recognize” familiar patterns from the real world in elements and scenarios of your interface.

Thus, you have to perform a heuristic evaluation to check whether your solution is good in terms of usability. Also, note that in reality, there are many more psychology UI design heuristics, but the above list will be sufficient for a basic understanding of what is meant by the term excellent user experience.

The Impact of Attention on User Experience

Many designers, in order to encourage the user to perform a particular action, abuse pop-up notifications and other features to attract attention, thereby increasing the cognitive load, the inadmissibility of which we have already discussed earlier. 

Instead, you can use such approaches as the correct building of a visual hierarchy, optimization of the color palette, breaking down complex processes into several simple ones, etc. And, of course, do not forget to appeal to the memory of users, which already contains some experience of interaction with other digital solutions and can automate some processes of dealing with them due to the familiarity of the mental models implemented.

User Motivation & Reward Systems in UX/UI Design

Finally, from the point of view of UX psychology, many UX/UI designs benefit from gamification, which motivates users to move toward the target action. In general, gamification is aimed at boosting user engagement and creating an exciting user experience that they don’t want to interrupt. Its main elements are rewards and recognition.

At the same time, it is crucial to note that some reward systems are too confusing for the average user and, thus, create unnecessary cognitive load instead of motivation. Moreover, gamification is not considered a universal approach that could be used in any project. Therefore, you have to always start with the appropriateness and the affordance of implementing this concept clearly and simply for the consumer.

Conclusion

We hope that with the help of this article, you were able to understand the importance of UX design psychology and how it is implemented in UI/UX principles like heuristics, emotional response, lowering cognitive load, user motivation, and others. If you are interested in creating a digital solution that fully meets all these psychological principles, feel free to contact us.

According to data from the Precedence Research resource, the worldwide SaaS market is estimated at USD 358.33 bln in 2024 and is expected to grow up to USD 1,251.35 bln by 2034 at a CAGR of 13.3%. Such demand is due to the ease of deployment of such solutions (instead of local installation, access to them is possible from any device with a purchased license where there is an Internet connection), as well as often extensive customization options. If you would like to launch your own SaaS solution, but are not yet sure about the final list of features, you should consider the SaaS MVP development option. 

What Is MVP in SaaS?

A minimum viable product (MVP) in the context of SaaS development is a version of a product where only the key functionality is implemented – that is, the one that determines the value of a specific SaaS solution for the end user. The goal of a SaaS MVP is to reduce development time by cutting down on secondary functionality, and to obtain user feedback to determine the course of implementation of a full-fledged SaaS version. 

SaaS MVP Development Benefits

What are the benefits of SaaS MVP development? Let’s find them out right now.

Ability to competently plan a budget and attract investments

Compared to implementing a full-fledged SaaS solution, MVP development is cheaper, since its task is to allow the target audience to test its key functionality in practice, without any excesses in the set of features and user experience (UX) design. This simplifies budget planning, too, as it does not require colossal expenses from the project owners from the very beginning. Also, thanks to this approach to development, its speed increases. Therefore, the working product can be presented to potential investors a few months from the start of work, and it will not just be a business plan in the form of a presentation, but a functioning software solution that can be applied to solve specific tasks. Usually, negotiations regarding further investment in such a project with this strong attribute (an MVP) are successful.

High productivity of the development team

Since an MVP has a limited number of features, your team will be freed from optimizing user interface. Therefore, work on the MVP will proceed faster. In addition, when developing such a software version, your team may gain valuable insights that were initially overlooked – they can also be implemented over time. Finally, when the solution’s functionality is limited, it is easier for developers to identify possible areas for improvement and, thus, address them in further development cycles associated with the launch of a full-fledged SaaS version.

Reduced time to market

An MVP approach allows you to release your solution first. Indeed, given the rapid development of the global SaaS market, this would be a wise move. A couple of months delay needed for implementing a full feature set could cost you the fact that your product's analog will appear and win the audience's favor first. At the same time, by launching your product as early as possible, you will also be able to start refining it earlier, too, ultimately receiving a SaaS platform with a lot of functions and advanced user experience after 9-12 months from the start of work on the project.

Common Challenges of Building a SaaS MVP

Along with all the benefits, it is also worth considering the possible challenges associated with SaaS MVP development.

Impossibility of applying the MVP concept to absolutely all products

It is worth starting with the fact that MVP development is not a universal approach, and not all products allow for feature prioritization. In particular, this applies to the ones in which all functions are interconnected, and it is not possible to single out the most priority ones among them.

Breaks in development cycles

It is important to understand that the release of the MVP in its first version is not always followed by the development of a full-fledged product. Sometimes, the team has to implement one or two more solutions with limited functionality before its participants come to a full understanding of the concept of the SaaS solution. Since the collected feedback may relate to non-overlapping functions of the product, the preferences and dissatisfaction of real users may not be fully covered in the full-fledged product.

The need to adopt new approaches to software development

Quite often, the development of MVP is accompanied by the introduction of radically new practices, such as Agile development and DevOps. In the long term, iterative development and other methods can increase the team's productivity by about a third, but the adoption and training can also take a lot of time for the team.

Possible issues with the program code stability 

Typically, MVP development of a cloud-based solution implies speeding up each development stage (in particular, the one related to testing the program code and its optimization). In this regard, it often happens that teams pay insufficient attention to the code stability, and the MVP solution itself becomes susceptible to hacker attacks. That is why, regardless of the chosen development approach and methodology, developers are still better off adhering to generally accepted standards for user data security and using proven authentication/authorization methods, reliable encryption protocols, access rights delimitation, etc.

Difficulty of scaling

Even though the MVP is initially hosted in the cloud, its computing power may not be enough if the product becomes really popular. In this regard, when choosing a cloud provider to ensure a scalable architecture, it makes sense to initially focus on options that allow automatic scaling as the workload on the software changes. Today, such type of service is provided by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and some other cloud vendors.

Problems with long-term budget planning

Lack of a clear understanding from the very beginning of what set of functions will be present in the final solution can provoke difficulties with budget planning, which, in turn, carries certain risks for investors. Therefore, it is important for you as a product owner to discuss with them all possible risks and prospects of your MVP launch strategy at the early stages of your interaction.

How to Build a SaaS MVP

So, how to build SaaS product – you may ask. Therefore, let’s consider the main steps you have to perform to develop an MVP. 

Defining the target audience

First, you will need to understand who the target audience of your SaaS solution is and what they expect to get from it. In fact, you will have to collect demographic and behavioral data about your product users to determine the most important functionality for the MVP and provide them with the most comfortable ways to interact with it.

Market research

To give your SaaS solution a unique selling proposition (i.e., to make it stand out from the competition in some way), you will need to conduct preliminary research that will determine both market trends in general and help identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

Identifying core functionality

Now, you have everything ready to determine the functionality that is the highest priority for your SaaS solution. Usually, this is the functionality that allows you to solve one or two key tasks assigned to your product (that is, without it, it will lose its value for the end user).

Choosing a business model

At this stage, you need to come up with ways to monetize your product. Note that in the context of SaaS, this is most often the purchase of either a license for a certain period of use or access to advanced functionality.

Building a roadmap

Now, you can create a step-by-step plan for implementing your solution, from MVP to launching and supporting a full-fledged SaaS product. Note that this is necessary not only for presenting the prospects of your project to investors and stakeholders, but also for the technical team to make them understand in which direction to move.

Creating an MVP

At this stage, your technical team can begin to build MVP, i.e., implement its user interface, server requests, database requests, alpha testing, etc.

Deploying an MVP and collecting user feedback

Once your team is confident that the MVP meets the previously defined specifications and everything works as intended, you can deploy it to the production environment and begin beta testing – that is, testing it on real users to gather feedback on possible improvements. After that, you will have to prioritize the aspects highlighted by users and plan to implement them in subsequent development cycles.

How to Accelerate SaaS MVP Development

Finally, let’s consider a number of best practices that will help you speed up the SaaS MVP development process:

• Use Backend as a Service (BaaS) and low-code solutions to reduce the amount of work for your backend and frontend specialists, respectively;
• Choose a time-tested technology stack that all members of your development team are familiar with;
• Delegate individual tasks within your project or the entire project to an outsourcing service provider to eliminate the need to urgently search for talent with the necessary skills;
• Establish processes for collecting feedback from users from the very beginning of work on your project.

SaaS MVP Development with Darly Solutions

Would you like to build an MVP as a Service solution and are looking for a seasoned team of developers who will bring your business idea to life? In this case, feel free to contact us. MVP as a Service is one of the key areas of our activity, which you can see for yourself by requesting our portfolio. You can also entrust us with individual tasks within your project, such as QA testing or, for example, UI/UX design. Whatever the list of our services you choose, rest assured that you will be satisfied with the results of our cooperation!