Key Points of MVP Design

When entering a new industry or starting your journey into application development, you need to create something that will help you evaluate your chances. Your application’s minimum viable product (MVP) can still realize your app’s mission, but only at a minimum scale and without additional fruitful features. You’ll probably not boast it to the whole world, but you can test it with groups of users who will agree to participate. The insights you’ll obtain are worth your time, money, and attention, as they will show you which chances your product has and how you can implement them!

Therefore, MVP design is the crucial point for your journey, and as you’ll see, you must be familiar with the user experience (UX) concept to make it right. Let’s start by defining the minimum product and exploring how it should be designed to be successful.

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An MVP Concept

A minimum version of your product will help you approbate your idea and comprehend it better. It is a “naked” product, conveying only your idea without anything additional. For example, if your app is a large AI-driven data analyzer, its MVP will be a small chatbot, analyzing much fewer chunks of data but with similar performance.

The most important quality is the openness for scaling, as it will be expanded after successful testing. If you have a well-developed idea for your product, it won’t be a problem. Another essential aspect is usability, ensuring the product realizes its mission without flaws.

So, let’s see how to reach these qualities!

Design of the Minimum Product

Design is more than an outer look of your product. It is a sum of its interactions and capabilities, each of which should have some purpose. We can use physical products for comparison, such as cars. They have wheels, a cabin, a steering wheel, and constructions that hold these tools together. Mobile applications can also be described in that way: their “wheels” are transitions between screens and menus, and a “steering wheel” is a set of taps, swaps, touches, and other actions which will influence the app’s behavior.

Your minimum product must be viable, which is the key point. All components, crucial for its goal realization and performance should be present, but they should be as lightweight as possible. Let’s see several basic tips.

The core functionality of your app is based on the primary purpose and mission, which is the determinant of your design. Focus on solving a specific problem or addressing a key user need: it will give you insight into which “wheels” and “constructions” your app should have.
User-centric development means comprehending how the user will interact with your product. It includes doing your best to minimize the app’s response time and make switching between screens as easy as possible. User journey maps are sets of pathways and milestones depicting what users will see and experience during the interaction with your product. They are robust tools to ensure that your app’s purpose will be realized. Lastly, testing and feedback analysis are necessary after the minimum version is ready.
Define the minimum set of features that will align with the core functionality and create it according to the UX principles. Avoid adding features that are not directly connected with your idea’s realization. This helps to streamline development efforts and keeps the app lightweight and efficient.
An iterative approach means testing the MVP with real users and improving it based on the feedback, which should be done in several stages. As you’ll see, learning is at the core of its design: you should perceive something new about your product and its functionality. After each iteration, you’ll become closer to your mission’s successful realization despite it may change drastically after several cycles.
Scalability is the process of adding new features and increasing the app’s functionality. As it is a minimum product, it will inevitably be scaled in case of successful reception.

Designing an MVP: An Algorithm

Now, let’s see an algorithmic breakdown of the design process. If you want a short visual depiction, see it below: actually, it is the process of learning and refining your idea rather than creating a ready product. The success of this endeavor is determined by whether you’ll improve your knowledge and can implement it or not. Even if your minimum product is not as successful as you would like, you’ll win in case you’ll be able to record your experience and digest it.

So, let’s see where to start.

User research is your essential information source and the basis of your future project. You need to create a product that will benefit the world – so start by exploring how exactly you can do this! Gather insights through interviews, surveys, and direct conversations. Use LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms for communication.
Goals, mission, and vision are the core of your product’s idea. You will instantly understand what you need to do if they are well-defined and realizable. Based on the information obtained in the first step, you can create
Prototyping is the early stage of MVP creation. First, create wireframes to visualize the app’s structure and layout and understand how to make all your app’s parts easy to use. Then, design a working app prototype based on these schemes.
Design and development include coloring your prototype in your brand’s colors, applying all buttons, icons, and other interactive elements, and coding all essential features.
Testing and refining include bug indication, fixing, and performance optimization. It is like polishing your product.
Launch your end minimum product to see how it will respond in your customer’s hearts. Analyze all feedback, as you’ll probably return to the early stages and make various changes to your product, after which it should perform its functions better.

The concept is based on iteration. You always learn: firstly by creating a prototype, then by analyzing its performance, and lastly, by feedback from your target audience. Be open to all new experiences and notice them. It would be good to write it somewhere, as you’ll probably want to use it for your future projects as well.

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UI/UX: Main Components

As you can guess, user experience is the most important part of your application. In the case of its minimum version, it is even more critical, as it determines the testing and scaling success.

User interface (UI) is the end version of your app’s front end: the interactive set of menus, icons, animations, and screens which will deliver your app’s functionality to the user.

See the UX design process, taken from the Interaction Design guidebook, to understand these stages. Regarding the whole development algorithm described above, UI/UX development starts from the prototyping stage. As it is the core component of your MVP, we decided to focus our attention on it. Let’s see.

User research is the usage of various methods to connect with the target audience, evaluate their psychological and behavioral tendencies, and elucidate their needs, preferences, and pain points. This is where you’ll need your empathy to feel it and develop a thorough map of these three areas. They will serve you as the basis for developing user personas, UX journey maps, and, eventually, a good UI.
Defining is the process of creating user personas: maps that will show your target audience’s motivations, behaviors, and goals. These three crucial points determine how the app’s UI should look to be as convenient as possible. Journey maps, which you already know, are the next stage. You can think of the personas as characters, and journey maps as settings of the play, which will model your app, enabling you to design it in the best way possible.
Ideation and planning is the stage of information proceeding. Organize, structure, and expand the content to prepare it for MVP development.
Wireframing is when the very first version of your app is born. Wireframing is creating the interaction map for your app, while prototyping is implementing this map into the app’s early version. You’ll probably generate many new insights during this stage. The result will show you the app’s layout, interactions, and user flow, gathering early feedback and making iterative improvements.
Testing, optimization, and improvement are the end stages, connected with all previous ones. As you’ll see, they are crucial for refining your app and launching the next iterative cycle of improvement. Usability testing with selected users enables you to identify any usability issues and add them to your user persona, improving the prototype. All performance issues will also be determined at this stage, and you can fix them. As the concept is based on the iterative learning process, repeat these stages until you’ll see that your MVP is warmly accepted by users and fulfills its purpose.

While your project’s mission and vision formulate its core, UI/UX are these wheels and constructions that embody this core. Without them, any idea will be ethereal, and these two components should always be in a bundle.

Cost and Timing

Lastly, let’s evaluate how much all of this will cost. The range is $5,000 – $15,000 for designing only basic functions, such as the home screen, user profiles, and registration. Adding new app screens and essential features, which should be implemented, will increase the price.

Based on approximations from various other web studios, we can summarize that each new app screen will increase the price by approximately $500 and each new feature by at least $1,000, depending on the time necessary for its implementation. See approximate developers’ hourly rates in various parts of the world to clarify your evaluations.

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Conclusion

MVP design will save your resources and teach you many new concepts and ideas about the industry in which you’ll operate. In addition, it will be exciting. It will cost you only several thousand dollars, but in the end, you’ll obtain a working prototype with all the essential features. While it will be weak, it still will embody your app’s mission and purpose. By testing it with customers, you’ll obtain essential insights after each iterative cycle, improving all your processes for a low price.

Remember that a successful product’s two essential elements are a strong and clear mission and usability. A well-established plan and purposes are necessary for the former, and the latter requires UI/UX techniques. We’ve presented you with how to implement these two points, and we hope that your product design will be the best!