Digital Product Design for PLM & MRP SaaS

Challenge: It’s incredible how little attention design is given in engineering-dominant digital products. Most of the products treat design either as an afterthought, or as a second class citizen, which we saw as an opportunity to differentiate Aligni. A classic case of function over form we needed to reshape, and prove that design is a value-add, instead of pure decoration. Designing for engineers is hard, first and foremost because they appreciate different aspects of design than what we as designers — and the general public, for that matter — traditionally tend to appreciate.

Solution: More recently we were given space to rethink and redesign how the Aligni brand is perceived by the world. We’ve invested this budget into designing a new, much more mature visual identity, along with a new marketing website. Aligni’s library of design mock-ups along with its design system became a true single source of truth for the UX of the product, which are assets relied upon by design, development, marketing, and their support teams.

User Group: The nature of the problem space and its users required our design team to study the needs of engineers when they use software, and gain perspective into the materials and tools they are using in their day-to-day. This insight provided us with the knowledge we needed to design — and continue to improve and build — a highly usable, although highly complex SaaS product.