How to choose and hire a SaaS designer for your app who understands your business

It's true for almost every visitor that they will engage with your app if it has incredible structure and aesthetics. On the flip side, most will leave it if it has a bad design and navigation structure. Doing proper research is one way to know what your users might be interested in when building and designing your SaaS app.

It is important that 80% of profitable companies improve their user experience through customer-based surveys. Other user experience research methods include in-app questionnaires, AB testing, and face-to-face interviews. Proper research will help build what your SaaS customers need rather than what you think they need.

Foundational principles such as color combination theories, visual aesthetics, user flow, user maps, etc., supplement SaaS architectures and patterns. Also, it would help if you remembered that designs are a visually compelling way of communicating your brand vision in the language users may understand. So, instead of spending most of their time learning designs and how to use design tools, experienced designers aim to understand the reasons behind every design, user-product psychology, and how to use their knowledge and skills to solve problems and scale your SaaS app.

Prototyping is essential to building a minimum viable product (MVP). SaaS design professionals must know how to create and prepare prototypes to scale, which requires patience and a strong resolve.

Product testers often face serious pressure, especially when the project is deadline-sensitive. That's why you must hire UX designers with high deadline integrity and composure to get jobs done when the pressure rises.

Building your SaaS app would probably require a team of remote workers. As such, effective communication among the team members is necessary because it is integral to the success of your SaaS project.

To communicate excellently, the SaaS design professional must be versed in verbal, visual, and written communication skills. Most importantly, their communication skills will be evident in expressing their ideas, progress, setbacks, and findings, especially in an agile development setup.

During the preliminary stages of your SaaS development, you'd need to create a 2-dimensional structure that explains the SaaS design architecture and project plan. Like architects design a house plan, UX designers do the same through wireframes. Wireframing provides a skeletal blueprint of the entire project and how it will pan out.

You can tell that a UX designer is a professional from their ability to create wireframes before they begin designing properly. It shows how organized the designer is and their level of dedication and visual and verbal communication skills.

The SaaS industry is complex and faces many economic hurdles and difficulties, such as profitability, scalability, onboarding, market acceptance, customer experience psychology, etc. To overcome them, SaaS design professionals must stay creative and flexible in adapting to market evolutions. SaaS design professionals without knowledge of the SaaS industry will build products without astute purpose or vision.

In addition to learning about the SaaS market, designers should have basic cloud infrastructure knowledge because they form the SaaS architecture. A good starting point would be Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Program (GCP).

There are two kinds of SaaS design professionals: those with software development backgrounds (or full-stack developers) and those with just design backgrounds. Besides UI/UX design tools, every designer should be familiar with popular programming languages like Python or JavaScript and some front-end markup and design languages like HTML or XML and CSS or SASS, among others, to understand limitations and requirements during their work.

Every SaaS application aims to scale, gain market acceptance, beat the competition, and onboard many users. With that being the case, agile development is the best choice to build SaaS applications.

With agile methodology, the team can build the SaaS application bit by bit, giving them room for improvement when expected. They don't have to delete the entire project files or folders; they can simply go to the board, pick the areas that need improvement, and do what's necessary.

SaaS designers should fill in on agile development architecture because that is the modern way of building scalable software-as-a-service applications and services. And that is what they'll probably expect to use in subsequent projects.

You may have an in-house team of SaaS design professionals but need more brains to help generate ideas. Hiring a SaaS designer can come in handy here. More hands on the project accelerates your project's time to market. If you don't want full-time SaaS designers, you can make it an hourly or per-project job type.

Experience and levels of expertise vary for different SaaS designers. While some may only have design skills, others offer project management and resource control expertise. If your team lacks some of the skills you may need to push your SaaS project, then it'll be wise to get expert help or consulting.

Being the first in a perfectly competitive market can be an advantage over your competitors. One way to achieve this is through a faster time to market. Hiring a SaaS designer could speed up your SaaS design process.

With additional human resources, you can build your SaaS app from scratch to completion faster than you would with fewer designers. Nevertheless, the challenge with hiring more hands would be the high cost of paying all the designers. If you have a tight budget, consider setting a realistic deadline for your product launch.

Sometimes, you may need long-term SaaS design services, especially if your project is complex. In that case, you can hire an expert to train your team on the nitty-gritty of the project, especially if the project is irrelevant to your industry. This could save you costs in the long term.

As an online businessperson with no knowledge of UX SaaS development, hiring a SaaS design professional is the only way you can build or design a SaaS product. Even if you knew how to design your SaaS app, you may still need expert opinion in doing other necessary pre-design and post-design activities like market research, data analysis, user flow, or user mapping. A SaaS designer professional can help out in this case.

Hiring a SaaS designer can reduce the time it takes to bring your product from conception to market availability. In a competitive industry, this could give you a market mover advantage, plus you can start generating revenue from your products sooner.

Once you've agreed and made an arrangement with a SaaS design professional, you worry less about budgeting and payment and focus on supervising the project and ensuring it comes right on schedule. By now, you've settled the hiring method and how much to pay for the service. Your payment process becomes organized, and you have clarity in budgeting and can keep track of project expenses.

Generally, employing people with exceptional SaaS design skills gives you access to better tools, expert opinions, and ideas you may not get from your in-house design team. Even if you don't have an existing team of designers, you can rest assured that when you hire SaaS designers with great experience, you've automatically ticked off most concerns you had about your product's infrastructure.

Per Adobe, 59% of global consumers crave stunning UX designs over simplicity. Hiring SaaS designers gives you distinct ideas and creativity, affording you access to a dynamic pool of optimized visuals and stunning UX designs.

As stated earlier, top UI/UX designers adopt effective design processes, such as agile methodology, for best results. Although agile may require detailed planning initially, it allows the teams to react to obstructions and eventually modify the complications. Agile also allows the team to achieve their goals consistently, with less stress.

As the project progresses, you, as the client, can get involved easily and approve project plans, request changes, raise issues and risks, release payments, and accept or decline the project results. So, if you want to hire a SaaS designer, it's best to get a team player who can easily collaborate with others to create mind-blowing products.

According to a PMI report, 37% of projects fail due to the lack of defined project objectives and milestones. Creating a rubric helps the SaaS designers familiarize themselves with your design goals and expectations and get motivated to work with you to achieve them. A Rubric is like a spreadsheet or form that gives your team a clearer perspective of your expectations while working on the project. This document details your project's roadmap, expectations, deadline, competitor information, and approach you may like them to employ during SaaS development.

As the project grows or becomes more complex, you'll need SaaS design professionals with different job descriptions. To ensure the specificity of their expertise, designers often assume titles like product designer, UI/UX designer, digital designer, interaction designer, etc. Make sure you define clearly the job description of the kind of person you might be looking for. This will narrow your search when finding a designer for your SaaS app.

A study on the US employee sector showed that one-third of workers today search for jobs casually without commitment plans. As a result, US employers spend an estimated $2.9 million daily looking for replacement workers. That's about $780 million per year, minus weekends.

The commitment of your team is fundamental to your project's success. If your team lacks commitment to the project, achieving your goals will become challenging. Prioritize hiring SaaS design professionals who understand your brand vision and objectives, and every other onboarding process will be a piece of cake, including welcoming new employees, training them, and transitioning them to their new roles.

After you've considered the kind of talent you want, you'll need to train them to know where and how best they'll fit in and work together for the common good of the project. They'll need to familiarize themselves with the processes and dynamism of the project, which can only be possible through experience or training.

Have a budget. As simple as it sounds, this will help you during negotiations. It will also help you to filter the type of SaaS design professionals to hire. You'll probably be reluctant to hire SaaS design professionals above your budget — unless the prospect gives you sufficient reason to — and keep looking until you find one that fits your financial plan.

Recruitment agencies save you the hassles of talent hunting. They are one of the best ways to find a designer for your SaaS app. In fact, 98% of Fortune 500 companies rely on recruitment agencies for their hiring needs. They do all the dirty work, including interviewing, assessing, and greenlighting people who could be the right fit for your project.

The downside to this method is the hiring cost, which could interfere with your budget. Additionally, recruitment agencies do not promote your brand culture and vision as you'd do on a personal level. This could encourage hiring cultural misfits — people who do not understand your brand culture and may not be committed or motivated to work on the project.

With an estimated 4.88 billion people currently using social media, you have a super-high chance of finding many SaaS designers for hire. You can find most of them using hashtags or keywords that fit your desired job description, which is easier done on LinkedIn and Twitter. However, the challenge to the social media hiring method is the stress it brings along because not everyone on professional social media platforms is who they claim to be.

Some places to check when looking for where to find SaaS designers are freelance marketplaces and job boards. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr allow you to interview prospects and pay them easily through the platform using custom or fixed rates.

Unfortunately, like recruitment agencies, most freelance marketplaces charge a premium for any services offered. You may find desperate prospects who are only after payment and not committed to the project or brand culture, which could make the hiring process challenging.

If you want to avoid second-guessing the quality of the SaaS designers for hire, consider working with a reputable UI/UX design and development firm, such as Dworkz. Dworkz is a renowned UI/UX design and development firm for all forms of B2B SaaS brands. 

With almost two decades of experience and a clientele base across various industries, such as health, education, and marketing, Dworkz has proven it has the requisite team and infrastructure to create any B2B SaaS product with zero hassles.

With Dworkz, you don't need to break the bank to hire a SaaS design professional. You only pay for the services rendered while we handle every other detail, including prototyping, wireframing, testing, and modifying your SaaS product design from scratch until completion.

According to a PMI report, 70% of projects are prone to failure, and 47% of them fail to meet their goals due to poor project management. This makes supervision an essential requirement if your project must succeed. Your project managers should comprise SaaS designers or consultants with experience creating SaaS apps, making the rest of the hiring process easier.

Have a clear job description and a specific title of whom you want to hire. Prepare a brief of the project requirements and expectations. Have a project roadmap and goals, and communicate them well through your brief. Also, it's important to clearly state the compensation package so that only interested candidates will apply.

After defining the talent you want, the next step is to start hunting for talent. In the previous section, we highlighted some top places to look for SaaS designers and how to choose those who could commit to your project.

You may create a job advert on freelance marketplaces or job boards or announce that you're hiring SaaS designers on your brand's social media handle. Or, you can save yourself the hassles and use a UX SaaS design firm like Dworkz. Whatever method you decide on could work for you if you take your time to assess the candidates.

By now, you have a list of potential designers for your SaaS app. It's time to carefully review their applications to filter those who check a good percentage of the boxes in your rubric or job description. If you still have doubts, consider their portfolio, as it gives you an idea of what they can do beyond their resume.

At this stage, you should have shortlisted the candidates that meet your job description. You can now focus on assessing or interviewing them. Organize design tests and ask them about their work experiences and other relevant personal philosophies to hint at how their values may align with your brand culture and goals.

Onboarding is so important that, when done well, it may help you retain up to 69% of your new hires for at least three years. In the onboarding stage, you walk them through the final steps of understanding the project properly, what you expect of them, and the tools they might be working with. Also, you get to introduce them to fellow team members and offer training to help them familiarize themselves with their working environments, tools, and potential focus areas.

Yes. Dworkz has a team of UX/UI designers with high-level expertise and industry experience. We operate a simple onboarding and hiring process for your project: contact us with the details of your project, budget, and expectations, and get instant feedback to kick off the project.

Requesting their portfolios or work samples is a great way to evaluate a SaaS designer's capabilities. With the growing competition, you'll likely find SaaS designers who claim to be what they are not. Their samples will be their evidence. Also, you may give them a paid test to check their expertise.

Interviewing SaaS designers is part of the onboarding and hiring process. Ask about their work experiences and personal values. You can engage them in conversations about abstract design theories, their industry experience, and interpersonal skills other than SaaS designing.

The quality to look for when hiring SaaS designers depends on the job description of the project. For instance, if you need an agile scrum master, you may not particularly go after someone with high design skills. Rather, you'd focus on someone with basic design skills but high organizational, user research, and communication skills.