Make your next digital product idea a MVP using Design thinking

As a business owner, if you ask yourself a question on how you want your product to be? The answer should always be ‘Usable’. With businesses and brands being too occupied and trying hard to make their product sellable, they forget to focus on usability which is extremely pivotal for determining product success. Put yourself in your customers shoes and think why would you as a customer buy your product? Pricing, discounts, availability are not the aspects you need to think of while doing this exercise. Remember there are cheaper smartphone options available in the market yet Apple has customers who wait in queue once a new iPhone is launched. That’s the power of designing a product that is usable, achieved by exploring and catering to user needs.
Do you have a product/service idea? Want to know its feasibility and usability? Or are you a company working on improving your product to get more users by enhancing features and platform experience?
Yes I do. How do I go about my product idea?
If that’s what you’re thinking as you read those questions. Let’s discuss the process of making your idea a MVP (Most Viable Product) using Design Thinking. It’s important to note that this exercise ought to be conducted in a group. Your design and development team along with other stakeholders got to actively participate in the workshop process.
Design Thinking stages — Building a MVP:
Step 1 — Empathise:
What is empathy? Putting yourself in others shoes. Exactly what you and your team has got to do here. Putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and understanding your target audience using following questions:
- What are the challenges they face?
- What is it that they see and hear?
- What is it that they think and feel?
- What is is that they want to say and do?
Gathering information about your customer is the first step towards identifying what is it that your customers really need from your product idea.
Step 2 — Define:
This stage is about digging deep into the information collated by asking questions in the first step. Next, identify your target audience needs. For instance, a food delivery mobile application, the need of their target audience would be to have food in the comfort of their home. The other needs could be the choice of exploring and tasting different cuisines. Identify what would motivate your target audience to use your product. Remember, these are opportunities and not solutions.
Post asking questions and identifying the needs of the user, build your point of view of the user or persona from the information collated. To explain how this works, let’s again consider the example of the food delivery mobile application .
- User: 23 year old Corporate employee
- Needs: To be able to have fresh healthy food in the comfort of his home.
- Insight: The user as well as their colleagues don’t have the patience to cook after a tiring day. Also, they are conscious about what they eat and prefer home cooked food.
Your user needs ought be very specific. Needs here, should be the users needs and not what you think they need. Insight would be a surprising finding that you would make by asking questions in Step 1.
Step 3 — Ideate:
“You can’t have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas. The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” — Linus Pauling, Two time Nobel Prize winner
Jot down as many ideas you can using the point of view statement or the persona you built. Considering the food delivery mobile application example, how can you help your user eat right and not go through the hassle of cooking food themselves.
Don’t think about the cost and the feasibility of designing and developing the product while you ideate. Every member of the team should pen down as many ideas they can and remember not to judge each others ideas. As you go about thinking of ideas, try sketching them out too, that will help others visualise your idea and also help in you explain it well to your team members. Don’t get deviated from your problem statement, stick to it and come up with as many ideas you can.
Step 4 — Prototype:
“Stop talking about your product, build a prototype and test it in the real world” — Justin Ferrell, d.school, Stanford
Designing and developing of digital products come at a cost. Repeated designing and developing products tend to make the product expensive to build, leaving no room for experimentation. Also, the turnaround time of such projects in the real world needs to be quick, there is a possibility there’s someone else working on a similar idea, you would want your product out there in the market as early as possible.
How do you build prototypes to share your product idea with your target audience. Don’t worry! Design thinking has got you covered. Prototyping using design thinking is achieved by sketching your product screens and flow on paper. Sketch buttons and features of your product and explain your user the flow of your mobile application or website idea. This helps in saving time and the cost incurred in designing and developing the actual product. You may also use prototyping tools available online and take printouts of those designs. These are easy to build tools with options to drag and drop features. Your team need not be proficient at design, make your sketches more presentable to your target audience using prototyping tools like UXpin, Balsamiq.
Step 5 — Test:
It’s important to understand that by designing the prototypes you aren’t selling your idea to your target user, you’re simply trying to get feedback and grasp how they might build this app differently. Prototypes are simple representation of your product idea and you test it’s usability in this phase. While you share your paper prototype, you might get answers to the following:
- What features would they want to incorporate or omit?
- Observe how they use your product
- Difficulties they face in the user journey.
- Identify how can you make the experience better for them
This one complete cycle is known as Design sprint. Since, you now collated feedback from your user, build your next prototype using that feedback. For the next design sprint get an artist to sketch your prototypes or use design tools to enhance the visuals. It’s imperative to have minimal number of design sprints, don’t be in haste to build the next sprint, collate as much feedback possible in the first sprint and develop the next. By following all the above steps and with multiple design sprints you would be able to eliminate all risks influencing product failure and make your idea a useable MVP.
