When do you start to focus on design and UX?
How important are UX and Design in your development process? At what stage of the product life-cycle do you start to focus on design and UX?
I repeatedly hear that making an MVP is to hack your way forward as fast as possible to validate your idea.
I'm always troubled by this way of thinking. I do think UX is of great importance because in the end actual users will validate your idea. A great idea can fall flat if users doesn't feel at home with the interface, or the process of working.
The initial UX will also set a path for future iterations of the product.
What are your opinions on the matter?
You should validate the desirability and viability of the concept/product/business. Usually, a nice concierge MVP can help with that. Though, I hate the term MVP honestly. I feel like it's just a way to send something half-assed out and when no one wants to use your half-ass product, then you can validate it as not being desirable / viable. But, does that really mean the business / product is not viable? Customers/users are finicky and most often want instant gratification and a big piece of that is their experience. Fail to hook them at minimum the first time, they may never want to use the first time or come back if they've tried - even if the end state beyond the "MVP" is exactly something they would want / pay for / use.
Anyways, good question! All I can really say is learn and evolve quickly and delight users all along the way.
There is a quote by Steve Jobs - "design is how it works".
Everything is designed. So you have to consider how your users will feel about your product. By that definition, design is an intricate part of the product that makes the whole experience.
When should you start? Well, think about your product experience. Do you want people to feel amazing using it, or just be satisfied that it works?
From the Hooked book,
Motivation, Action, and Trigger are important things for a behavior. The author suggests prioritizing Action (making it something easier for your users) over anything else.
Hey Simon,
I love this question and have so many thoughts.
The first one is that UX designers hate when you bring them a clunky interface and say “can you make this pretty?” As a developer who has done this too many times, I hope to do better next time.
I think there’s a misconception about MVPs which is that it should be a spaghetti mess of code, visual trash, etc. There’s a place for that kind of development... prototyping. Prototypes shouldn’t be confused with MVPs. You certainly skip some parts of the development lifecycle in an MVP, but the result doesn’t need to be trash.
That said, in my thinking, you need to strike a balance between usable and useful. The point of an MVP is to demonstrate whether or not something is useful by validating the core tenets/risks/assumptions of your product and target market.
However, if your MVP is not usable, it will obscure whether or not the product is useful ... because people won’t use it because it’s confusing and the value isn’t clear. :)
Basically, I think you’ve got to strike a balance between useful and usable. It needs to be useable enough to prove the hypothesis you’re trying to prove.
A good UX designer or product manager involved early in the process will do wonders to understanding your target users, advocating for them, and helping you build features that are both usable and useful. The trap I’ve fallen into too many times as a developer with questionable design sense is to build features that are neither usable... and more tragically ... or useful either.
Haha, yes. I have the similar experiences, but with designers. Out of convenience replaced a pen icon, for a slightly different pen icon and hell broke loose. 😉
Do you usually accept help when you start developing a new product?
To what extent do you limit the product when you want to strike this balance? When is a product good enough for release? I do believe an MVP is about doing few core features really well. Setup a roadmap of future features, and iterate forward based on user feedback.
Sometimes I get a feeling that I'm inflating my own self importance, and certainty of success. But I really just want to build something that I'd want to use myself.
Thanks for the reply @Kansuler.
In an ideal world, I'd be partnered up with a great UX designer right at the start. Unfortunately, I don't always get to work in an ideal world. :)
Ideally, before you start building, you should know what you need to build in order to prove/disprove the hypothesis that you're on the right track.
As soon as it's ready to prove/disprove the hypothesis ... it doesn't need to be able to scale or be polished in all aspects. It needs to be usable and useful for solving the problem for your intended audience; that's it.
Depending on your goals, that's not a bad place to be ... and I used to think like that. However, if you want to be a business, you've got to build something that customers want to use. That sounds obvious, but after building something, I'm usually blind to the fact that other people don't see value in it.
Hi Simon,
I find your post very interesting, the same thing happens to me and it's the discussion that I often have with my partners who are only programmers.
They want to launch the mvp as it comes out,
without caring too much about UI / UX design. After many discussions we agreed that we would launch a product with the minimum to be upgradeable, a modular product.
So as a designer in this situation, I suggest you have a feasible base with the most important parts and make sure that the design allows you to improve components, being as scalable as possible.
it's like having a blank paper where you add free spaces where you can draw in the future
It's great that you've found a method to handle the MVP stage, as a designer. By having you on the team shows that the other partners care about it. 👌
I just reflect over my own reaction to products with poor design choices, I lose trust in the product, even if the product does what I'm looking for. I always treat design as a first class citizen when I build my products. I'm my own critic in a way. 🧐
I've worked as a programmer on projects together with others, where design get treated as a secondary need. Eventually all UX implodes under itself for being illogical, suddenly business decisions for next iteration goes totally against what the rest of the interface is intending to do. I cannot feel proud of what I'm building when this happens.