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A proper approach to building a minimum viable product or MVP will let you fulfil three serious goals. With its help, you will be able to validate your business idea, get useful feedback from customers while significantly cutting your expenses down. Creating a great MVP includes the following steps.
Make Your Market Research
The very first thing you should do before starting working on your MVP is examining your business idea in the market context. Make sure, the concept of your software has an aim of solving a certain problem that users are already facing. Such a product will be a way more valuable than the one developed purely for the sake of innovation.
At the same time, you should investigate similar apps or websites provided by your rivals. You will be particularly interested in the rank, monthly traffic as well as the sources bringing the traffic. Finally, find out the geographic locations where such software is used more frequently.
User Flow of Your MVP and Its Features
The user flow can be understood through the set of interactions between a user and your app that are required for a certain task to be completed. It can be visualized with the help of a user flow diagram that focuses on the entire cycle of software use.
Working with your diagram, you will get better understanding of customers’ expectations, the way your app or website is able to meet them as well as its weak points.
This step is also very helpful for outlining the core features of your product required for meeting the needs of your potential clients. It is also useful to categorize the features into groups for prioritization highlighting the ones that are absolutely necessary for proper functionality, the desired features and the ones that can be added later.
Tips on MVP Design and Development
While the quality of your MVP is certainly important, its design and development should be pretty fast and inexpensive. That is why you should definitely resign from any advanced UI design at this step.
It is also highly recommended to minimize costs and time on adjusting your product to different platforms. It will be sensible to reach for cross-platform development or focus on a single platform for the time being.
Be very specific about the timeframe for development and prepare to get an imperfect product. Constant improvement can be very alluring, however, it will result in an app or website that is neither an MVP nor a final product. For the same reason, you should work exclusively with core functionality needed for proper performance of your software.
You should also define your target group and not to try to adjust your MVP to everyone. This will take extra resources and will still not be possible to achieve.
Considering all of these points, you should still balance the rapid pace of development, minimal budget and quality. No matter how much you are going to save on your MVP, it is crucial to make sure the product is user-friendly, understandable, secure and engaging.
More about impact mapping you can read at How to Plan and Build Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? Step by Step Guide?
