From Pretty to Practical: Evolving SaaS Product Experience with Ant Design

Hello everyone, today I want to share the relationship between experiential technology and good products.

Last year I discussed a hospital registration and prescription system in Hangzhou, which dramatically reduced queuing costs and eased doctors' work, yet many parents and seniors still struggled to use them, and the prescription system required repeated training for doctors. Many SaaS products in the market are still barely usable.

These products, whether in hospitals or enterprises, have greatly improved overall societal efficiency. Early internal systems at Alibaba, similar to the prescription system, piled many functions on a single interface, required careful reference to documentation, and often needed Excel exports for local operations, causing frustration among employees.

Since 2014, Alibaba has promoted a "big middle platform, small front end" strategy, emphasizing product experience. That year we launched the open‑source Ant Design project, which not only boosted development efficiency but also significantly enhanced the visual appeal of internal products. Aesthetic quality involves information architecture, functional layout, and overall redesign, and many products have adopted Ant Design, resulting in a fresh look.

This marks the first stage of SaaS product experience evolution: from existence to beauty, where visual appeal signals progress.

At Ant Financial, many middle‑office products use Ant Design and look good by default, yet deep usage reveals cumbersome processes and unfluid functions beneath the attractive surface.

While aesthetics represent advancement, they are insufficient; we aim for products that are not only beautiful but also inherently usable.

What defines a good product? Recent discussions reference ten design principles from a WeChat lecture: creativity, usefulness, ease of use, minimalism, honesty, longevity, etc. These principles are emotive and insightful but challenging to apply directly without intuition.

Yu Jun’s product methodology stresses that a good product must deliver user effectiveness, generate profit, and be sustainable. User value can be expressed as: User Value = New Experience – Old Experience – Replacement Cost. For enterprise SaaS, new experience often stems from clear functionality and streamlined processes rather than new technology. For example, an improved leave‑request system kept the same web stack but clarified leave types and simplified the workflow, delivering high new experience and replacing the old system smoothly.

The formula is rational and abstract; applying it requires extensive product experience and practice.

A good product needs both rational usability (utility) and emotional love (affection). Rational usability means meeting real user needs, saving time, enabling quick onboarding, and providing support. Emotional love means users develop affection for the product, similar to how developers love GitHub for its sense of belonging and achievement.

In the fierce competition of enterprise SaaS, emotional love becomes increasingly vital.

We summarize SaaS product experience evolution in three stages:

Stage 1 – From Nothing to Something: Digital transformation creates SaaS products that dramatically improve societal efficiency, though early versions often suffer from outdated interfaces and feature overload.

Stage 2 – From Something to Beautiful: "Experience Tech 1.0" led by Ant Design, raising the visual standards of many middle‑office products; each aesthetic improvement adds beauty to the world.

Stage 3 – From Beautiful to Good: "Experience Tech 2.0" shifts focus from mere looks to true usability, emphasizing rational utility and emotional love, exploring Job‑Centered Design and even Love‑Centered Design to make products feel like friends.

Experience technology continues to evolve, and this is just the beginning.

Experience Tech is dedicated to making products better.