The Importance of Software Design
Digital transformation is a two-way road. As beneficial as it is for your company, it also holds a fundamental place in how your customers engage with your brand.
Business-wise, digitalization is the most effective when it comes to increasing efficiency and cutting out a handful of costs. And developing the right software is a crucial part of it.
However, in order for your efforts to pay out, you also need your customers to be willing to interact with your digital platforms.
In this aspect, while developing solid software is vital, it’s as much important that your software design process matches your customer’s needs.
At the end of the day, your business’s performance is as good as your customers’ experience.
What is Software Design?
Software design is the process of defining software methods and functions that satisfy your customers’ needs while being aligned with your business objectives.
It represents the overall structure and interaction of the code that you developed for your software.
Your software design should be functional enough that it provides a decent user experience. However, while functionality is something to be wary of, ease of use of your interface comes across as important.
For a successful design, you need to follow design principles, which will lead you to develop more robust, maintainable & flexible software.
How to Understand If Your Software Design is Good?
Most software developers focus on the functionality and richness of the software, which is perfect, but oftentimes the design aspect is left outside.
While building complex codes and multi-layered functions are good, they mean nothing if your customers don’t respond to your software. If it’s too complicated or time-consuming for them to use your software, you risk all your hard work going to waste.
To prevent that, software design is the key feature you should prioritize.
To understand if your software design is a good one, you should ask these questions to yourself:
- Is it easy to make changes to your code?
- Does a small code change cause a ripple effect for other changes in the code?
- Is it easy to reuse your code?
- Does maintaining your software take a lot of effort?
- Are your customers satisfied with the user experience?
If the answers to these questions point out an easy-to-use code structure and less maintenance effort, you should consider your software design is good.
But if it’s difficult to make changes to your code or it’s not viable to maintain your software continuously, then the chances are that you could benefit from a software designer.
Good design isn’t just about code. It is about being able to express ideas for your software with other developers, other teams, and your clients.
Having a well-thought design makes your software easier to implement, reduces the need for major changes later, and saves you from headaches down the line.
Benefits of Good Software Design
Up to this point, you should’ve already realized that improving your software design, although might be time-consuming, has nothing to offer but benefits.
Of course, depending on your business model and the service you’re providing, the benefits of a good software design can be multiplied. But there are some all-applicable benefits that you would definitely experience.
It’s More Flexible
The first and foremost apparent result of having better-designed software is that it gets more flexible.
And by flexibility, we mean that you can either add or remove some components to the existing software without going through any disruptions or malfunctions.
Ensuring flexible software is also necessary for you to provide a satisfying experience for your customers. Because, if your software crushes every now and then, your customers won’t be hanging out much longer.
It’s More Sustainable
When you design your software well, it should bring the best of both worlds together. It needs to be functional while providing a satisfying customer experience.
So, if you achieve a good design, you can reuse the codes you built for each specific function over and over again without breaking down your software.
This allows you to improve your software without any troubles and you can further build new components over the base code metric.
It’s Easier to Align with Your Business Model
Teams do change. Whether be it your new software developers or the marketing team, there are always going to be new additions to your company.
As new teams emerge, it’s very possible that your business model might change. Therefore, it’s always a better idea to have well-designed software that can be easily transferred to the new additions to your company.
With this, you can realign your software easily for your new business model and educate your new recruitments without much hassle.
It’s Cost-Efficient
Although the bigger portion of the costs emerges at the developing stage of the software, there are actually additional costs that appear at the later stages of maintaining your software.
As we mentioned before, the better the design of your software, the easier it gets to modify and improve it. And the easier it is to improve; the less costly it is for your company.
But there’s more. If your software is not well-designed, it’s very possible that it might cost you some customers in the future. Unsatisfied customers might quit their partnership with you and each customer lost is a big expense if you’re playing in the big league.
So, to get rid of additional costs that might emerge in the future and prevent the loss of customers, you should always give importance to the design of your software.
How Can We Help?
At Quintet Works, we are not only software developers, but we also prioritize building well-design software. Because we know that developing good-enough software is not enough.
When you get in touch with our team and lay out your vision of what kind of software you need for your company, it’s a process of partnership and lots of communication.
We, together with you, build a general outline of the software that fits best with your purpose and start designing every step of it in accordance with good design principles.
So, if you’re looking for a partnership that values you and your company and focuses on delivering the best quality software for your business, contact with our team and take the first step of digitalizing your company.
