Go Ahead and Envy Me, I’m the UX of your MVP

Over the years, the push back on user experience in the design process has taken many forms. From practical reasons — no budget, no time — to more wacky ones like that stakeholder with a big ego — I’m sure we all know at least one — who cares more about their vision rather than users’ needs. Recently, it’s taken a more fancy-buzzword form: MVP. Here are a few thoughts about the definition of “viable product”, as well as some tips to help you make sure that users remain the real Most Valuable Players of your MVP.

The reality of digital production is such that other constraints are too often prioritised over users needs.

It’s sad to see that in 2017, still not that many companies truly understand the importance of their audience. I know it sounds ridiculous when you consider that the audience is what will ultimately decide whether your product is successful or not; you’d better not forget about them in the design process! The reality of digital production is such that other constraints are too often prioritised over users needs, certainly because those other constraints are closer to us. That tech lead who doesn’t have enough resources is way more concrete on a daily basis than the million “silent” users. You can’t willingly switch off budget constraints the same way you can do with audience feedback. Also, your product can still be launched without any consideration for users whereas it can’t exist without developers building it, and someone paying for it.

Anyway, all those reasons eventually deliver the same message “user needs aren’t as important”. And as a UX person, this to me sounds fundamentally wrong.

Define viable?

Recently, the push back on UX design has taken a more fancy-buzzword form: MVP. A common example would be “Let’s not spend any time on this feature, it’s just an MVP”. This is something I’ve heard far too many times in the last year and a half. Getting over the frustration — as any UX Designer surely knows how to do by now — I started thinking “Why are these people telling me that UX Design isn’t part of the definition of viable, in Minimum Viable Product?”. What is the definition of viable?

I spent some time with people I work with, from different backgrounds and with different job titles, and I asked them to describe to me what their definition of an MVP was. What does viable mean to them.

MVP: definition(s)

If you’re here for 50 cent, I’m sorry to break the news to you: the MVP we’re talking about here stands for Minimum Viable Product.
It’s a fancy acronym describing the first step of an iterative design process. The purpose of it is to learn along the way, and shape the solution accordingly. Sounds new? Not really. But sounds great nonetheless.
It can be really handy while exploring solutions before choosing a direction, or if your aim is to stagger feature delivery, enabling your audience to learn your product as it evolves.

As I started digging into this topic, I read many articles and examples, trying to figure out how best to describe an MVP. An example I found involved cakes. I love cake, so I stuck with it. It basically stated that if a wedding cake was our final product, the step before would be a birthday cake, and the MVP would be a cupcake.

When I had a chat with one of my stakeholders with a technical/engineering background, he argued that a cupcake was way too much effort; who needs that topping for f***s sake, you just need to eat! He then added that in his opinion, the MVP version should be a plain biscuit. He also mentioned that an MVP isn’t always user facing, which is an interesting point I’ll come to in a minute.

Then I asked a product person, with a background in strategy. I asked her the same question and her answer was similar. She went as far as saying that, in our cake roadmap story, a spoonful of wheat flour would be a sustainable MVP.

I went back to my desk slightly upset, thinking I would never have plain biscuits on my wedding day, and that I should try and avoid gluten anyway.
Their answers aren’t necessarily wrong though: whether you eat a plain biscuit or a spoonful of flour (good luck with that!) you may feel full for a while. It somehow does the feeding job. However I doubt that a wedding cake’s first purpose is to sustain your guests, considering they’ve probably already eaten a 3 meal course beforehand.

An MVP — like any product — needs context and purpose

Making a hypothesis

So, what is it that you want to build, eventually? What’s your goal?
If you’re in the fancy party cakes business, sustainability may not be your number one goal. Your cake is not a random cake, it’s a special one; fulfilling regular cake’s expectations wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be viable. This cake is part of the party and chances are that the guests will better remember its look rather than its taste. Know your business. Benchmark. Research. Do your homework: an MVP isn’t a special privilege allowing you to release something without proper design thinking.

It’s impossible to define what an MVP should be without defining the purpose of your product, and the needs it’s meant to fulfil.

Prioritising features

Given the goal, the context, and the hypothesis we want to test, my cupcake topping becomes a fundamental feature: this is what makes it special. Or at least, this is one way of making it special — let’s test that hypothesis. On the other hand, my plain biscuit option looks like the least appropriate candidate now, as it doesn’t help validating the assumption that a party cake should be a nice looking cake in the first place. More generally, the question to ask yourself is: which features would allow me to fulfil both users needs & business goals, and verify my hypothesis? Cross-check with technical feasibility (and other constraints if applicable: time, budget, legal…): you have the set of features your MVP should contain in order to get some valuable insight from it.

If it’s user facing, it requires user experience design

If you plan on selling these cakes, they must convey your product values and benefits: fancy, good looking and edible cakes. Even in a reduced version of it. A spoon full of wheat flour would be barely edible and certainly not fancy, and wouldn’t be a cake in the first place. Offering this as an MVP would only test the hypothesis that your customers aren’t gluten intolerant. Which may have value in the future, but is not what we decided to test here.

What valuable insights would you get out of an MVP that doesn’t solutionise the hypothesis?

Designing a solution that works

It’s not because it’s the first batch of cakes that they can be half-baked. If you offer half-baked cupcakes on the grounds that it’s only an MVP, the feedback you’ll get will be biased. It will then be nearly impossible to work out if the hypothesis was wrong — “look over taste, that’s what matters” — or if the solution wasn’t appropriate — “purple cream cheese is fancy”.

MVP doesn’t mean no research or user testing at all. You want to keep it simple, cheap and quick? Guerilla test it. Any testing is always better than no testing at all. You don’t even have time for that? Benchmark the hell out of it! Analyse existing solutions in place in your competitors and cross check with their users feedback to make educated guesses.

Implement a solution that works, and a user experience that will give you the best chances to validate your hypothesis, according to your target audience and the context of use.

Minimum Lovable Product

I guess you’ve also heard that alternative name given to an MVP. It usually comes from UX Designers trying to sneak their way into the definition of viable. Although I understand where it comes from, still it bothers me somehow as it reduces UX Design to designing for emotion. I believe it’s way more than that. Good UX Design may, indeed, provoke a positive emotion from its audience (or a negative one actually, depends on what the purpose of your product is), but good UX Design is also smart. Using the MLP approach may indeed help including UX Design in the MVP design process, but it’s not gonna help you communicate what UX Design truly is, in all its breadth and complexity.

The MVP check list

1. Define your product goal: what need is it meant to fulfill? What problem is it supposed to solve?
2. Define your product context: who are our users? What are the identified user journeys and use cases?
3. Define your hypothesis: based on research, what would make your product fulfil its goal? What are you testing with this MVP?
4. Work out solutions based on these hypothesis: How Might We make this solution concrete and efficient?
5. Prioritise features: Map out features based on how well they achieve users needs and business goals, then weight them out based on technical (or other) constraints/complexity.
6. Properly design those features: bake it fully, make it work as intended.
7. Define what good looks like & how to measure it: what are your KPI’s? How do you know that you know?

Design is part of any product making process, whether it’s intended or unintentional.

You can decide to prioritise your deliveries based on your internal resources — that’s an inside-out product strategy — or you can choose to prioritise according to your users needs — that’s an outside-in product strategy. There are two schools of thought and I’m sure you can tell where I stand. However, whatever strategy you may choose, as soon as your product is user facing your users will experience it. Whether you spend time and effort designing for your users or not, your users will experience your product. There’s no way you can avoid it. If your company believes that UX Design doesn’t belong in an MVP then they can’t boast they have a user centred approach. And if in an audience facing product, viable doesn’t mean viable for the audience, then it defeats the purpose of the product. Congratulations, you’ve just launched an MP.