UI components play a key role in the creation of any SaaS. Using a design system and having a library with ready-to-use components will help you speed up the design process. In this article, we’re sharing design systems and UI component libraries for designing SaaS products.
UI components make up all of the visual components that you see on screen while interacting with an interface. Elements such as buttons, avatars, tabs, menus, popups, and search bars can all be found in these UI component libraries. These components serve as building blocks for your layouts. A UI component library gives you access to everything you could need, neatly organized in one place. There are lots of great libraries out there, but we have selected these few to provide you with some resources that are sure to help you with your UI design process.
Atlassian
Atlassian offers a large, comprehensive library. They aim to create “simple, beautiful, and intuitive experiences” using their end-to-end design language.
Atlassian provides all of the components you could need. They sort the components into alphabetized categories so you can quickly locate the component that you need. This is a great place to look for inspiration or ideas for your design system. You can tell by how well-designed the Atlassian Design System is that the team researched thoroughly, iterated, and designed accordingly.
The information architecture is great and has so much useful content in one place. For example, they have amazing resources, one of which is the Figma library of ADS components which comes fully equipped and ready to download to your own project.
Base Web
Many of the big unicorn companies end up developing certain elements in their tech stack to suit their specific needs. Uber created Base Web, it is the React implementation of Base.
Base Web has a refreshingly plain and simple style. They make it easy for you to find the component you need with the components sorted into intuitive categories as well as a quick find search bar.
You can also change between dark and light modes easily with the lightbulb button.
Their Figma community is an excellent way to help designers with adopting Base Web, as you can find all of the components there.
Polaris
The Shopify Polaris design system is an established set of principles and guidelines that designers can use when building apps or channels in Shopify. Anyone who is a Shopify partner has access to this big library and can use everything that it contains.
Polaris offers a wide range of interface elements that can be used across Shopify’s platform. You can use these elements to create positive experiences for merchants with the greatest efficiency.
Each component is accompanied by relevant information to assist with implementation, such as best practices and guidelines for the component’s use, interactive examples to see how the component really works, and more.
For installing and implementing the components, they offer two options: React and CSS. Additionally, it is open-source, so you can use it for other your other projects as well.
Material Design
Material Design 3 is Google’s design system and uses grid-based layouts, transitions, and animations that are responsive, as well as padding and depth effects including lighting and shadows. It provides tools for design, development, resources, and a component library.
In the component library, you can use the filters to view all of the components or see platform-specific components for Andriod, IOS, Web, or Flutter. Each component is accompanied by thorough, insightful information to help you best use the component. For example, below, you can see that for Image Lists, you can jump to different sections of the content.
Carbon Design System
Carbon is an open-source design system created by IBM. They offer and maintain several design kits including Sketch, Figma, AdobeXD and Axure which is maintained by the community. They also support several coding implementations such as React, CSS, Vue, and more. By using the reusable kit parts, Carbon allows designers to save time designing and use more time to innovate. Additionally, Carbon has a fantastic component library, patterns, and data visualization elements.
Cloudscape Design System
Cloudscape is an open-source design system intended to build engaging user experiences at scale. It was born in 2016 to improve the user experience for AWS (Amazon Web Services) web apps. According to Cloudscape, they offer “a solid base of 60+ components, 30+ pattern guidelines, and 20+ demos to make your work easier.” Additionally, they have a Figma design file which can be used as a sticker sheet and a library.
Tailwind UI
Tailwind UI comes from the makers of Tailwind CSS and provides over five hundred ready-to-use, expertly-designed component examples that you can drop directly into your Tailwind projects. You can customize these components however you want, and it supports React, Vue, and HTML. Every component is fully reactive and looks amazing whether the screen is tiny or giant.
There are three main component sections: Marketing, Application UI, and eCommerce so you can easily find the component best suited to your type of project. To get access to all the components, get free updates and use the components on unlimited projects, you need to buy a license for Tailwind UI. Additionally, they have some great website templates which are included in the license!
These are just a few examples of the many UI component libraries for designing SaaS products to help you out with your UI design process. There are many more great options, but we hope these few have given you a brief and helpful introduction.
