What is a Minimum Viable Product? How does it relate to and impact UX practice? And what are some strategies we can apply in designing them. MVPs are, in my view, core to an effective Agile/Lean UX practice, and in this talk I offer an introduction to what an MVP is and provide some strategies for how to go about designing an effective MVP. I gave this talk at IA Konferenz 2013 in Berlin. It's an updated version of a talk I gave at Hackers & Founders in Barcelona in 2012.
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What is a Minimum Viable Product?
The shortest path from idea to validated learning.
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An entire organization is struggling to use a 20-year-old
internal enterprise system.
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Pain points
- Entering data into wrong fields.
- Changes sometimes not saved.
- Data often needing to be re-entered.
- Often manually renaming/moving files.
- Some departments refusing to use the
system saying they’d never get any
actual work done.
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“Cool, let’s do some research, model some
personas, create a deck of wireframes, and
start building the new system…”
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“Cool, let’s do some research, model some
personas, create a deck of wireframes, and
start building the new system…”
“No, let’s conduct an MVP experiment:
Find one pain point, try removing it, and see
what we learn...”
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Offered riches both in user and tech learning.
Could be implemented quickly.
A success, even if it failed.
The MVP/Shortest Path to Validated Learning:
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vi·a·ble
/ˈvīəbəl/
Adjective
1.Capable of working successfully; feasible: "the proposed
investment was economically viable".
2.(of a seed or spore) Able to germinate.
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“A minimal viable product is...a rolling
series of releases that iterate and improve
based on a mix of data and vision/judgment.”
—Giff Constable, Interaction 2011
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Focusing on learning over features...
Persist or
Pivot?
MVP #1 MVP #2 Persist
or Pivot?
...etc.
Experiment
and learn
Experiment
and learn
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MVP vs Product Vision
One step toward a destination on the horizon.
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Changing what we measure
“Is this user-friendly?”
“How much would you pay for this”
“How much time would this save?”
vs
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Broadening our design focus
Designing and testing
product viability.
Designing and testing
user experiences.
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Go Ugly Early
Try shipping with the most bare-bones UX possible.
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Fake Storefront (Archetypal Lean Startup landing page)
Try marketing the product as if already completed.
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Be the software (aka “Concierge”)
Try manually simulating the user experience.
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Which pattern should I pick?
- What offers the most learning at the lowest cost?
- What best tests your riskiest assumptions?
- Expect to use a combination of patterns.
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Bottom line
- Designing MVPs is a craft in its own right.
- Broadens the meaning of UX design.
- Requires melding virtually all aspects of Agile/Lean UX.
- A great measurement of your skill level as a modern UX’er.