Software as a Service

At the beginning of 2021, I started working on an exciting SaaS project as a UX Designer. The product's name is DreamDesk, and my task was to design a list-making, kanban-style, project managing and tracking web-based application.

UX Research

At the beginning of the project, my task was to analyse the main competitors in the market in the face of Trello, Jira, Asana, ClickUp and Monday.

Although I already had experience working with Trello and Jira, I tried up the other three web applications to identify each program's key pros and cons. It allowed me to think critically about the product I was designing, consider the elements and functions that need to be included within Dreamdesk and avoid repulsive features I found in other software after my research job.

UX Design

No doubt, there are many different web applications to track projects and manage to-do lists, such as Jira, but the problem is that they involve too many elements and functions. They are essential for big teams working on advanced projects.

Still, if you are a small team working on simple projects, you won't need many different functions and options to track your project, provide tasks to your team members and manage to-do lists.

A mix of Trello and Slack

One of the critical tasks for me was to design a Slack-looking instant messaging program within DreamDesk so that users of the program could easily communicate with other users. When prototyping the instant managing side of the project, I was primarily inspired by popular programs such as Slack, Discord and Telegram.

Critical thinking and UX elements

Designing a SaaS project was a great exercise to develop my UX skills as it challenged me in terms of critical thinking and user-centric design. I had to think about elements placement and how users navigate the application and interact with certain elements.

Design Process

I used Figma to design the product's final look, as Figma has been my number 1 design tool for the last 5 years. Regarding the UI side of the project, I decided to keep it minimal so that stylistic elements wouldn't distract users from usage. This project is more UX over UI, and I am glad I experienced designing SaaS as I enjoyed the challenge of thinking over complex UX design decisions.

Kanban-style board

One of the critical areas of DreamDesk is a kanban-style board, and while designing the board, I got inspired by boards from Trello and Monday, but I tried to keep Dreamdesk'sboard even more straightforward in terms of UX.

Visual communication and colours

In terms of colours, I primarily used blue and light blue. Due to the research, blue evokes a feeling of reliability, and people feel more secure when they see the colour blue. Blue is also a colour associated with optimism. Those are the main reasons I chose this colour as the prime.

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