Thresholds or the art of MVP
As UX professionals, when we leave the college environment, we tend to look at the world in extremes on what is helpful for the user and what is not. As a formative experience, this is a good thing because it trains us to identify what to do correctly. Nevertheless, this presents a challenge in the consultancy world where all shades of gray exist, and the user’s needs are not always put upfront.
An example of this is the Minimum viable products or MVPs
MVP in consultancy.
In IT consultancy, often, we face short time to delivery or massive requests for changes during design and development.
To avoid having the design and developer teams overwhelmed with requests, team management resorts to stepping the projects in phases, usually starting with an MVP.
In my experience, it is pretty common to deliver the task of defining the MVP to business analysts since the idea is to build functional thresholds that allow focused build phases with lower complexity and a more straightforward way to achieve goals.
The focus is on the what.
So you would say, what is wrong with having functional teams designing the MVP phases?
Nothing …and everything!
There is nothing wrong with the functional threshold definition of the functionalities to build first to have a minimum product that fulfills the client’s need.
Nevertheless, this is an incomplete perspective because it focuses only on what to deliver and completely disregards how the functionalities are built and presented to the end-users.
Why is the how important.
When defining what to deliver for the MVP, we only focus on optimizing the functional delivery of data and designing the steps to achieve the basic need information and improve its phase after phase.
When we disregard the how, we forget to do a similar exercise on how frontends deliver these functionalities, with cost in the final project budget.
with no participation in the MVP process, the designer will tend to deliver the most streamlined experience by default which might result in a user experience with an associated high difficulty of execution by the developer teams
What can we do?
Having the designer involved in the MVP definition process allows the early definition of design strategies for the user experience that improve delivery time with the minimum compromises to the final product. In addition, having the designer early on allows the design of a scalable design language that focuses on efficiency and doesn’t compromise evolution.
Final note
Defining the how simultaneously as the what will affect the time to market and overall cost of an MVP. Nevertheless, be vigilant; this exercise, to be fruitful requires the collaboration of an experienced designer who is both pragmatic and focused on user value. If you assign a newbie designer to such a task, the risk of ending with a poorly integrated design is high.
References
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/mvp-antithesis-good-ux/
https://www.trymyui.com/blog/2021/11/18/minimum-viable-product-mvp-in-ux-design/
https://increditools.com/how-to-design-a-minimum-viable-product/
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