MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
On a daily basis we’re faced with businesses wanting to launch their new app and business idea to get them a return on their investment. Believe it or not there are lots of different styles used to do this and whilst some are increadibly effective, some are almost completely ineffective.
The Right Way
Introducing the MVP. The idea of an MVP is that you design user stories to outline the key paths that different types of users will take through your system to achieve it’s main purpose. The reason user stories are good is that they provide insight as well as perspective and help clients to know what functioanlity will be delivered and developers to know what functionality is expected of them. It’s quite black and white really.
Design
Get a design made to take the effort away from a developer. We always ensure that we’re designing an app to a clearly laid out, clean and stylish app design by our designer.
User Stories
User Stories are very specific pieces of text that are constructed in a very particular way. Here’s an example.
As an app user, I want to sign up or sign in to the app using an email address and password.
The reason this is such a significant style of working is that a developer will know he needs a database with fields to store this information, he will know he needs to provide an API for authenticating users within the app and he knows that he will need to create a couple of views at the begiinning of the app that lets the users fill in the required information. The client will know that if the developer has made it so that some arbitrary name is a username they haven’t fulfilled the user story as to how it is suggesting. By building upon these user stories the focus becomes on creating a business and not wasting time on little aesthetic issues that aren’t going to create you a viable business. This approach ensures that despite anything at the end of development a product will be built that will functioanlly achieve what it set out to achieve. In other words, it’s no good having one really nicely designed login screen if the user gets errors when signing up.
Fine Tuning
Once the business has been crafted in to a fantastic piece of functional software the time comes to get all the pixels perfect. The assumption is though, by this point, you’ve already got the app on the stores and your bringing valuable feedback in and even turning over a small profit.
This method reduces your risk to a minimum and helps you get the best chance of using money you’re already making to reinvest in your product.