“Fail often, fail fast,” wrote Don Norman, the father of UX design, in his book The Design of Everyday Things. He claimed that each failure taught him a lot about how to do things correctly.
However, in the world of product creation, where organizations, particularly startups, operate under stringent time, money, and resource restrictions, failure is not always an option. The challenge then becomes how to fail optimally.
In this post, we will look at the role of UX design in MVP (Minimum Viable Product) creation. After that, dispel some myths about MVPs, and examine their benefits.
Understanding MVPs
An MVP is a product in its most basic form with only the most basic set of characteristics necessary for it to function.
They let you test a concept on a specific audience and receive feedback before releasing the next set of advanced and complex features. Creating an MVP allows organizations and creative teams to figure out what works, try, fail, and learn.
An MVP is an initial version of a product that is completely functional and created with minimal effort for a rapid launch. A simple rule to follow while designing MVP is to delete any functionality that does not directly add to the user’s demands.
The purpose of creating an MVP is to test assumptions, gather feedback, and collect data about users and their expectations as early as possible. This is in order to develop the final product with the highest level of user happiness in mind.
Many of today’s popular digital services, such as Uber and Airbnb, began with an MVP. Initially, they offered only basic functionality and then further expanded their offerings based on consumer demands and expectations.
Without a doubt, the MVP approach they used contributed to their incredible popularity and success.
The role of UX design in MVP development
MVPs focus on introducing products with basic features and functionality to meet the demands of the main users. UX design plays an instrumental part right from the start of the MVP process.
UX design’s purpose is to sympathize with people and guarantee that their engagement with a product is simple, meaningful, and engaging. Both the UX design and MVP development processes are based on incremental adjustments and iterative development. MVP development requires a product to be minimal and viable while maintaining usability and usefulness. As a result, a solid UX design strategy is required to guarantee that both company goals and user demands are optimally aligned.
However, the UX design process is extensive and might take months to finish. As a result, organizations may be hesitant to incorporate UX design into MVP development because a quick time to market is a major criterion of this method. A highly collaborative design approach is essential when executing a UX design process using an MVP architecture in order to build successful solutions in the shortest amount of time. This is where lean UX can help.
Lean UX is a design methodology that prioritizes user experience over deliverables. Unlike typical UX design approaches, it does not impose a comprehensive set of deliverables and expectations. The primary purpose of lean UX design is to obtain feedback rapidly so that appropriate decisions may be made. As a result, the lean UX strategy is ideal for MVP development. Lean UX promotes agility among the design team and encourages increased cooperation.
There are three basic processes for producing an MVP in the lean UX model: create, measure, and learn.
Build
The main activity at this level is UX research. Whether developing a brand-new product or improving an existing one, using various UX research methodologies helps to properly identify customer pain areas. This helps to guarantee that the design is based on real facts rather than preconceptions. The study facilitates rapid product development by delivering maximum clarity to the problem. In this case, crude wireframes are developed in this case to meet the testing requirements.
Measure
The second phase in the lean UX strategy is Measure, which involves testing usability. Large amounts of data are collected here in order to measure user reaction and feedback to the MVP. This data defines if the MVP version was a success or failure and dictates the product’s next course of action. Based on the information gathered at this stage, improvements are made to the product.
Learn
Continuous learning targeted at improving the product for maximum success is a crucial feature of lean UX design. Over the course of several cycles, the MVP’s anatomy is modified as a result of continuous learning. The learnings govern what has to be kept, improved, or removed from the MVP throughout each iteration.
Benefits of MVPs
MVP development has various advantages that make it an excellent technique for startups, small businesses, and even corporations when experimenting with high-risk product development.
- MVPs enable companies to earn money faster than they would be able to do if they built and launched a whole product.
- Before devoting significant resources to developing the entire product, MVPs may be used to measure market response. This will enable you to determine whether there is a true need and acceptability for the product.
- In a competitive market, releasing MVPs allows firms to reach customers early, giving them a competitive edge.
- Creating MVPs allows the design team to learn in-depth about user needs and produce a solution that offers exactly what consumers demand through many quick revisions.
- MVPs demand less investment since they create a reduced version of a product that is easier to develop, code, and administer.
- MVPs reduce development time, effort, and resources since they focus on a small set of functionality.
Common myths about MVPs
Many firms regard the concept of MVP as trivial, and there is considerable skepticism around the subject. Many of these are the result of misconceptions regarding MVP. Some common misconceptions concerning MVP include:
- MVPs are easy to create and we can produce quickly. Though the MVP seems simple, this does not make it easy to develop. From the initial objective alignment to the design and subsequent testing cycles, the process may be extremely difficult.
- MVPs are unfinished goods that are released to the market without sufficient preparation and fail to meet any consumer demands. This is a common misconception held by many firms, leading them to assume that there is no sense in developing an MVP. However, MVPs are full products designed to meet specific user demands.
- MVPs remove fundamental functionality. Though MVPs may alter the user flow to accomplish a feature, functionality is never compromised. Features may be reduced in order to provide the simplest product possible, but care is taken not to compromise functioning.
- MVPs concentrate on a particular feature. Aside from circumstances when a single feature is the major emphasis, MVPs often contain a feature set, which is a list of features that support essential functionality. The emphasis is on usefulness rather than features.
Conclusion
MVP is an effective, quick, and low-cost method of launching a digital product onto the market. The concept of developing a basic product and releasing it onto the market as soon as feasible is an excellent technique to test the product’s viability and assess consumer input. The MVP method is a very user-focused strategy, and UX design enhances the approach’s efficacy. MVPs help develop successful products that people find helpful when done with a tight focus and clear goals.
Stimulus UX designers work with creative businesses across verticals as their UX/UI design agency. We feel that the MVP method is the ideal way to test a variety of ideas since it is both business- and user-friendly. Our expertise in MVP development and delivering UX/UI design services for startups and corporations has been incredibly productive and beneficial for our clients. We strongly advocate using the MVP methodology in conjunction with lean UX design approaches.
