Confessions of a full-stack solo designer in SaaS
By: Liron Ross
Tags: Product Design, User Interface, Team Collaboration, Design Process, UX Design

Every product has different needs but almost all of them will need design work done across three main channels. Product design, Branding & Marketing. It is crucial to understand the range and quantity of projects you will have to handle and weigh it against your own experience and proficiency.

Ones you’ve done that you can outsource the ones that do not necessarily require your personal touch. Outsourcing doesn’t have to mean hiring someone (although that’s an option too), it could also mean using existing libraries and online services when needed.

My younger self with book by Clémence de La Tour du Pin & John Henry Newton

In our case, there was a need for icons to be used on different channels. The product’s UI needed them and the website as well. We also needed to create a weekly illustration for the product’s blog and produce different marketing materials once in a while. Subscribing to an icon library helped in speeding up all those projects. There are a lot of those out there, we eventually went with streamline icons an icon library that fitted our needs in terms of style and formats. This meant spending less efforts on designing icons for every need and it cleared the time for me to focus on more crucial UX assignments.

Icons in use for a blog illustration

Here’s a list of other useful icon libraries:

Orion, Nucleo, Icons8, Material design, The noun project

Another outsourcing decision was made for facilitating a design sprint. At some point it became clear that a design sprint would be very useful for developing the product further. At the time, my own experience in running design sprints was minor but I thought I could probably dive into it and learn the gist of it. In the end, we’ve decided to hire a professional to do it (Shout out to Lisa Weinsberger) for two main reasons:

Firstly, the workload would have kept me from my daily tasks; secondly, it became clear contributing as a participant in the sprint would be way more useful than facilitating it. This helped us not only with the sprint’s facilitation but also organising the logistics around it. Finding and renting the right space, scheduling and coordinating, preparing materials, taking care of meals, snacks, etc so we could focus on the sprint itself.

Services could help relieve your workload as well. One example that comes to mind is testing. It’s pretty much a common understanding that designs need to be tested by conducting users interviews but testing face to face with users is time consuming. You need to find participants, schedule an interview, conduct the tests, build a prototype, document it and draw the conclusions. This approach is still my preferred option for uncharted territories of the product, where the usability flows are completely new and unverified. But smaller pieces of the product’s flows can be tested quicker.

We used Maze.design to hire participants from their panel and automate user tests online. It also made it easier to collaborate with team members on testing these user flows. All they needed from me are the screens uploaded to an Invision project. From there, they could add the hotspots and test the designs themselves. The sessions outputs on Maze are recorded so each of us could look into the results and draw the relevant conclusions quicker and digest it at our own pace.

Commit to a weekly routine

After doing all of the above, you will be left with a general outline of the tasks that require a hands on approach. Next step would be to segment those into general topics and commit to specific days of the week for handling those topics. These will naturally differ according to the specific needs of the product and your own design capabilities but in my case I’ve divided the weekly schedule to handle 4 topics: product, branding, marketing and maintenance.