Why product design + Bubble is a designers’ dream come true
Products built with no-code have a reputation for looking a bit too scrappy and hacked together. This makes a lot of sense — the entire idea of no-code stems from the ability to ship an MVP as quickly as possible, without any prior development or design skills.
Who cares how it looks when you just need to ship a V1, right?
At Minimum Studio, we reject this idea — we’re big fans of using Bubble (our no-code platform of choice) to build well-designed software, regardless of whether it’s a V1 or a V100.
Luckily, Bubble has progressed a lot these past years and introduced many tools to give us more granular control over our apps’ frontends. Unfortunately (probably because of Bubble’s own not-so-great UI), the design community that’s actively using Bubble remains small.
We think that’s a waste — here’s a few reasons why designing for Bubble development is a really great experience for any product designer to have in their career.
Disclaimer: Yes, there are beautiful SaaS products out there built with no-code tools.
A few great examples are Subsocket and Incomee — just the fact that they are built entirely on Bubble doesn’t disqualify them from being well-designed.
Your work comes alive faster
Most designers are used to designing in a traditional product team, with traditional product timelines. Because building a feature is so ‘expensive’ in terms of development time, design teams need to mitigate a lot of risk by spending more time in the design phase, iterating on existing ideas and researching endlessly.
With Bubble, you can design something in one week and see it come to live a week later. Even tweaking a feature can be done so quickly that you never feel like the dev team is the bottleneck.
“When I design something now, I can expect it to come to life extremely fast! You’d be surprised how much working with something tangible can spark new ideas and reveal opportunities for designing a better product.”
@naelmahouton, Design lead at @minimumstudio
Faster launches = faster iterations
Every designer knows no amount of user research can prepare you for how users behave after a real launch.
With Bubble, building a feature is not as time-consuming, so it’s more likely to iterate on actual product usage than on design feedback.
That changes the dynamic of your design practice a lot — with a higher frequency of actual, real user feedback, you’re more likely to spend time on the right features, or you use the opportunity to experiment more aggressively in a real environment.
Dev & Design blurs together
During the design process, a builder can easily build a prototype or proof of concept to inform the design process or test a potential pivot from the initial idea. This helps avoid things being lost in translation and allows you to make more conscious tradeoffs between dev and design.
Low-code keeps possibilities open.
Although there are some limitations with no-code, when working with a developer with Javascript skills you’ll still be able to handle more complex features by building custom plugins. You essentially keep the speed and flexibility of no-code but build a little custom piece to match apps built with ‘real code’.
Becoming a one-person team
A platform like Bubble is a lot more intuitive and easier to learn for product designers because of its’ visual interface. Designers who are also able to build Bubble apps can prototype, design and build SaaS apps from scratch by themselves. That’s a pretty strong combination if you ask us.
Work with one of the best Bubble studios
If you’re a designer that’s interested in designing Bubble apps, we’re hiring freelance Product Designers at the moment — we’d love to see you apply:
We’re looking for freelance Product Designers to help us create great experiences.
