Is design really that important or should I focus on functionality at the MVP stage?

It depends ™

A couple years ago I entered the saturated image cropping plugin market consisting of a million free open source croppers with my commercial image cropper (back then it only supported image cropping).

I wanted to differentiate on “user experience” as it’s the "Why" of my company. This automatically made “user experience” part of the viability of the minimum product. It had to feature a great design and user experience because competing with free products just using the same featureset wasn’t going to fly.

If design and/or user experience is your main differentiator from the competition you will have to make sure it's top notch. If you're competing on something else, for example features, then I'd just follow some good design practices and stick to whatever works.

In general, I'd say functionality, but it depends on the problem you're solving.

For example, if you're doing something for Instagram bloggers that they show to their followers, they will definitely look at the design as well :)

User experience. Minimal design and minimal functionality that works really well and most importantly feels right.

They both important, but is the goal beautiful of functional MVP? if you want to test the future demand you need to clarify the functionality. this is the main part. but usability is very important today so you shouldn't forget about UI/UX. read more here https://linkupst.com/blog/what-is-the-discovery-phase-and-why-is-it-necessary there is a lot of fruitful information.

Hum… it's a tricky question since defining a functionality is design. It's service or/and product design (instead of visual and ux) because resolving problems is a design process. 🤷‍♀️

Both the things have their own importance. They are not inseparable or more important than the other. Design determines the user experience and functionality also is equally important. A good design without functionality is nothing.

i would have the same question.

i would vote 'Design'.

possibly mainly because i'm so bad at it.

and others seem so good at it.

when i think of what the mix is for a successful business, i think it looks something like this:

PromotionMarketingSales (99%) + Design (98%) + BusinessIdeaStrategyProductMarketFitEtc (97%) + Timing (50%) + Functionality (1%) == 100%

maybe said another way, functionality is not nothing, but it's pretty close to it, relatively speaking, and it probably has something to do with the way human brains work.

just a guess, tho.

there have def been plenty of exceptions to the MustHaveAGoodDesign tenet, but...i think that often depends on having an almost perfect score on one of the other factors -- where a project/business idea is basically undeniable/inevitable...regardless of bad design....or maybe even because of it.

I think it is a balancing act of value. So let's say you have high value in the design and low value in the functionality, perhaps you'll get Medium results.
If however, the most important value is in the UX like in management software, then giving there a high value will mask low value in functionality.
If, however, this is an infrastructure software that is supposed to reliably perform webhooks, store data, secure sensitive data, etc... then the value is in the reliability and you will be forgiven for a bad design.

However, do not assume that low value on both will make an MVP. You still have to give enough value for customers to sign up, pay and not churn. Otherwise you just invested a lot of cash in marketing and lost it due to not providing an actual MVP.

Functionality is good. But without great user experience people may not be using the functionalities. if you ask me about my opinion, i will use product s with good UI. No matter if you give me a rocket, if it look sucks, i may not be using it anytime.

hi,

I did ask the same questions with different words not long ago: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-important-is-the-frontend-for-a-mvp-587ccd8afe

It depends on what's your product major selling point is.

I would hesitate to separate functionality from design.

The functionality needs to be designed, not necessarily in terms of how it looks, but how it "functions."

Thinking through the flow from the customer discovering the solution to them using it and getting value from it is important.

In terms of visual design, as many people have said, it depends. If your customers have a burning need for a solution and yours is the one they find, it likely won't matter as long as they understand & trust your solution and know how to use it.

Some focus on visual design can help with credibility, but I think domain expertise, testimonials etc would likely have more of an impact.

Unless your app is a design app, functionality is more important in the early days. People use your app because they want to achieve a certain outcome -- this is solved by the functionality of your app.

While having a great design helps, it's not what they use your app in the first place. Nice design has its place, but not in the early days.

If you can merge the two, best. If you are building for developers, design should probably be the least important at the MVP stage.

The functionality is more important but also you don't have to neglect the design. I mean, before functionality, the design is the first thing that people see, so it would be great if you can make it a little better than just a simple HTML file with no CSS design. Hope it helps!

I agree with @korolvs .
At early stage of the product functionality is more important than the design.