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In today’s software landscape, offering a wide spectrum of features is paramount. But if your users can’t understand or access those features with ease, you’ve already lost them. That’s why we built Basil around a simple, unshakable philosophy: design should feel natural, intuitive, effortless, and inclusive.
"Intuitive" Means Less Learning, More Doing
Accountants and business owners are busy. They don’t want another tool that needs a 40-page instruction manual to figure out. With Basil, we obsessed over tiny moments: how quickly can a user add a client, upload a file, or assign a task? Can they figure out how to send out a document for electronic signature without hunting for the button? Are the next steps obvious without needing a tooltip?
The payoff? Basil users often report that their teams are up and running in hours, not days. That’s not just convenience — that’s compounding ROI.
Simplicity Scales From Solo CPAs to Large Teams
A common mistake in SaaS is designing only for the power user. At Basil, we build for the full spectrum — the solo practitioner juggling twenty clients and the operations lead at a thousand-person firm. That means making every interaction feel lightweight, while still keeping advanced capabilities just under the surface for those who need them. This is why Basil users can add "simple clients" without a workspace and also effortlessly add workspaces into a client to represent more complex client structures.
Our philosophy: you should never feel punished for growing. Intuitive design lets us hide complexity behind familiarity, so teams can scale their operations without switching tools or retraining staff.
Accessibility Isn’t Optional Anymore
Good design speaks many languages. We want Basil to be usable by everyone: young and old, tech-savvy and tech-hesitant, desktop PC users with three monitors and iPad users on the go. That means clean layout hierarchies, readable fonts, predictable workflows, and a user experience that adapts gracefully across devices and abilities.
When we talk about “inclusive software,” we mean software that respects everyone’s time and effort.
Art Is Never Done
Design is not a one-time event. It’s a living, breathing conversation with our users. At CoralTree, we have a saying: “art is never done.” Every day we ask ourselves "Which part of Basil can we improve in the next release?" We also listen to unfiltered feedback from our customers.
We use internal ideas and external feedback as design cues that prompt long conversations about how to change our product's user experience. We act quickly with creative solutions: quieter buttons, faster workflows, cleaner layouts, and redesigned dashboards.
We don’t wait for perfection. We iterate. We deploy. We make mistakes and learn from them. Because the real art of intuitive design isn’t hitting a home run only once. It’s a marathon of constant product evolution that leads to a victory for our customers.
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At CoralTree, our goal with Basil has always been to delight the user. That moment when we hear "Oh wow, that was easy!" gives us cause for celebration. By focusing on intuitive design, we help our customers be more powerful, more productive, and more confident in the tools they use every day.
Design that serves everyone is not just good design — it’s the only design that scales.