Chris Bank is the leader in the growth UXPin, Design App UX. He recently co-wrote on UX Guide Design & Process Documentation .
Although the MVP provides a way to test hypotheses as a starting point, it does not mean it is easy to build. The idea behind this exercise is not to see if the product can be built in terms of technical feasibility. Rather, it is whether you should build in the first place and, more importantly, whether solving a problem other people find worth paying for.
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Vladimir Blagojevic, founder of Grant Snap & Lean Startup Circle Brussels writes about the importance of building a product that people want to use and pay. To reach this point, however, you must ensure that your product passes certain tests.
Time and money are precious resources and waste them on building a product that does not meet these criteria is out of the question. MVP tests are designed not only to answer technical questions about the product, but also to test fundamental business assumptions about the viability of the market, it exists in.
For example, a company wants to see if the drones would be useful for collecting data on the health of crops. The project can be considered technically viable, but the MVP would eventually fail because it does not test the viability checking the market and company building. (We talk in detail about finding the right things to test in the Minimum Viable Product Guide.)
The complexity of your MVP depends on the type of product that you build, and different types of MVP may vary tests waves adwords the first prototypes. Once you have determined the assumptions you need to test your MVP, here are some of the testing techniques you can put to use to get reliable data from real users and use:
1. interviews customer
"in a startup no facts exist within the building, as opinions," said Steve Blank, co-author of the creator of the methodology development Manuel the customer and start owner.
In his book "Four Steps to the Epiphany," he talks about the problem for customers presentation, an important part of customer validation process that helps you test your assumptions with actual clients.
This is essentially an impromptu interview with clients to obtain information about the problem your product is trying to solve. These interviews are intended to be exploratory rather than a sales pitch for your product, functional or otherwise.
This process can be continued down listing the problems that you assume your product will solve and ask what the customer thinks about them and how they would rank each problem.
These interviews can be a gold mine of information to share, because even though your supposed problems do not prove to be as important to the customer, you still have valuable information that can help you to rotate your offer.
2. Landing pages
The "landing page" is the first page visitors and potential customers come when they drove into the funnel to your product.
There is a marketing opportunity where you can explain the features of your product and make them sign, but at the same time and for the same reasons, there is also a great MVP that allows you to test your product over expectations of the real world of the market.
landing pages are often misused as a glorified email capture pages but they can be more widely used to test the product. Joel Gascoigne expanded the first landing page for that used to evaluate the application of various features and price plans rather than building a mailing list.
it was as simple as adding a new page between the features page and the registration form; interstitial page showed a price table, and visitors can choose the plan that appeals to them.
The additional clicks not only showed the visitor's interest in the product, but also gave the team real-world data on what kind of price would be appropriate for the market.
Kate Rutter, Tradecraft instructor and co-founder of LuxR, is a big fan of using landing pages to 'sell first, build later. "In order to be more effective , landing pages must be able to provide the right information to customers in the right context.
Remember that the goal is validated learning, thus gathering analysis visitors with tools like Google Analytics, or KISSmetrics CrazyEgg is the most important part of it. You also need a proposal rMS and call to action.
for further learning you can also run A / B tests on the content of the page to help nail down what kind of field works best for conversion.
3. A / B testing
A / B tests are used to test the effectiveness of any changes to your product or marketing. Various analysis tools can be used to test how visitors react to the design decisions you make, eliminating the guesswork when it comes to product improvement.
The A / B testing allows you to test two versions of the page or copy marketing and let visitors interact to determine which one best is performed.
Part of your visitors see version A, while the rest see the version B. Ultimately, to using data collected by analytics as Optimizely, Unbounce or Google Analytics, you can measure the performance of each version of a set of parameters such as bounce rate, conversion or use.
4. Advertising campaigns
Maybe cons-intuitively, advertising campaigns are a great way to perform market validation surveys. Google and Facebook are platforms that allow you to drill down demographics to target the particular customer you are trying to achieve, which allows you to run a low-fidelity test to see which characteristics or aspects of your product are most appealing to them.
Running a campaign through these services, gives you statistics such as click-through-rates and conversions that can be valuable information to determine what your product is and how it will work. These can be combined with tests A / B
Competition in the search marketing space is fierce, so it is important to remember that running an AdWords campaign for your MVP will not get you a lot of exposure. But to test your assumptions and learning, it is priceless.
5. Fundraising
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, among others, also provide a great platform for running MVP tests. These sites are essentially MVP collections where the market response is judged by the interest people show in the form of campaign contributions.
This combines the benefits of learning validated with fundraising for product development and even gives you access to a group of early adopters very interested and actively involved with an interest in the success of your product that is excellent for -Mouth word construction and ongoing feedback along the way.
You do not have to look far to hear about success stories that began as Kickstarter campaigns. The Pebble smartwatch e-paper and the Ouya game console are the most popular, raising millions of dollars and building buzz even before the start of development.
Of course, some of the characteristics Hallmark campaigns include a compelling story, useful and effective video explainer rewards or incentives for people to support the project.
6. explainer videos
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video showing your user experience of products worth a million. The most famous example of a startup with an explainer video to enter the market and sell their MVP is Dropbox.
He started with a 3 minute video that showed the expected functionality of Dropbox, which has resulted in enrollment growing from 5,000 to 75,000 during the night, all in the absence of an actual product. Of course, it also helped that the video has been targeted for early adopters tech-savvy enjoyed Easter eggs and humorous references throughout the video itself.
video explainer Dropbox served as a shining validation of the market before the founding ever had to invest in the necessary infrastructure and development to its high-tech product to achieve a functional level in the real world. Reaching target customers is quite difficult, especially when you design to solve a problem that many users might not even recognize that they have.
For Dropbox, perhaps saying it offered a "transparent application file sync" would not have the same impact. Video explainer walking instead of potential customers through what the product is and clearly demonstrates how it helps, eventually leading to why they want to pay you for it.
7. MVP [19459015fragmentaires]
Like a magician mixture of Oz and concierge techniques, Piecemeal MVP means putting together a demo operation of your product by using existing tools and services to offer experience instead of building anything yourself.
Groupon, in its infancy, was a combination of WordPress, Apple Mail and an AppleScript that generated PDF files manually orders were received on the site.
Rather than invest time and money in building your own infrastructure, the product can be constructed using other existing platforms and services as the basis, effectively using pieces from various sources to make your product version.
8. SaaS and PaaS
Instead of investing in scalable server technology, based on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Heroku and MongoDB, Facebook Connect , services like Chargify, Mixpanel, MailChimp, Google forms and LiveChat or even platforms such as WordPress and Drupal are all great pieces of the puzzle that is your MVP test.
These services and platforms to help you in the development process, speed up the time it takes to get your MVP on the market. Groupon, for example, began life as a custom WordPress website where founders displayed offers and email subscribers PDF files manually in mind validate their market potential.
Design and development frameworks can be useful shortcuts to save time and money. There are multitudes of choices, some of the most popular being bootstrap, Zurb Foundation, Ruby on Rails, Django, or even bootstrap.js frameworks like Node.js
The use of a frame or a library can dramatically accelerate development time. They provide extensive documentation and is extremely easy to get up and running with your MVP.
Many of the problems developers are facing, such as cross-browser compatibility, mobile-friendly design and code optimization are already taken care of, leaving you free to focus on building your MVP rather that the design or development that aims to support.
9. Blogs
Blogs are a great way to validate ideas with the target market in the very minimal effort. Blogging platform Spirit and App.net began in the concept on blogs of their founders, where they continued to develop their ideas and get support from a community of followers and supporters.
The bidirectional communication of blogs provides an ideal platform to create a dynamic and collect customer feedback in the development process MVP.
In addition, blogs can also serve as a first prototype of your product. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup author also began his book as a blog, building a public and demand before signing any publishing deals. Likewise, so did 50 Shades of Grey!
10. Manuel premiere (aka "Wizard of Oz") MVP
Rather than build a video or coding of a frame, another option for the early stages of validation market is to deliver the product or service manually. "Wizard of Oz" MVP comes from the idea to the printing of all the features, essentially fake it till you make.
Customers believe they know the actual product, but in reality the work behind the scenes is done manually.
Arram Sabeti founder ZeroCater started with a giant sheet of calculation he used to keep track of companies and caterers that could connect with. Zappos started the same way, with its founder Nick Swinmurn set up pictures of shoes in the local shoe stores on a website to assess the demand for an online store.
When someone ordered online shoe he would return to the store and buy. Instead of first investing in infrastructure and inventory, which resulted Zappos a chance to answer the question of whether their product would be accepted by the market.
This approach also allows greater interaction with customers at this crucial stage when you are designing the product. Observe first hand real customer is always more useful than a hypothetical survey of customers, and it is the best way to discover if it is to solve a customer problem in the real world
Learning accelerated, albeit on a small scale, provides opportunities to test many assumptions you might make on the product or market. In doing all this manually, you give yourself a chance to try different things on the fly to see how customers react before the scale. For the customer, of course, the product works and working-scenes back does not matter.
These require MVP undoubtedly a major effort, but can be in the end, it is worth for the development they provide on the problem rather than the solution. Zappos for example, eventually became one of the most successful online companies and was acquired by Amazon for $ 1.2 billion in 2009.
11. Concierge MVP
The Concierge test is similar to the Wizard of Oz MVP, except instead of faking a working product, you are ahead of manual labor and the product or service is delivered as a highly personalized service to select customers.
Vacation track tested its business model online dress rental by providing in-person service for students where everyone could try the dress before renting them. This validated its riskiest assumption that women rent dresses and served as a great MVP janitor who put the company in front of customers and the feedback has.
Time is precious, especially at this point and running and through the process manually also reveals other aspects of the customer experience that can be useful later. Instead of putting resources to the construction of an actual product, the MVP of tests can answer the most important question of all: Are you building something that customers will use and pay
12? . digital prototypes
Mockups, wireframes and prototypes can be used to demonstrate product functionality in a way that mimics actual usage. MVP These prototypes can go low fidelity sketches extracts to more complex "dummy" applications that the user experience demo screenshot.
You can use collaborative wireframing and prototyping tools as UXPin that allow you to express what you want to build and share these ideas seamlessly with the team
13. prototypes paper
Similar to digital prototypes unless they are physical, either because of cuts or even sketched out on paper to demonstrate your product and user experience.
The advantage with paper prototypes for MVP tests is that they can be used by anyone on the team, product managers, designers, investors, end-users. and require very little explanation, because it gives you a real representation of the product.
For physical products such as phones or chairs, etc. This technique is invaluable. digital prototyping and paper is covered in more detail in the Wireframing Guide.
14. Single-long MVP
Often it may be better to focus on a single feature of your minimum viable product to save development time and effort as well as prevent users from getting distracted by what the product is mainly meant to be.
Foursquare, for example, started with the simple idea to let users check in on the social network with their location and the first versions of their application reflects this simplicity. Buffer started with just a Twitter support and only one account per user.
These restrictions help you narrow down the first customers and focus on the most important issues, such as product testing and market viability rather than worrying about adding support for web other mobile platforms.
15. Pre-order pages
As for the MVP of the fundraising, the Pre-Order MVP test page allows you to present your product to potential customers for the purpose of the incentive enough to pay for it even before it is built.
Oculus Rift, the virtual game reality kit, launched a pre-order page for its development kit before they started production. Many projects on Kickstarter starting as pre-orders. This can show you how there is demand for the product you are trying to build, giving you an indication of whether you should continue or abandon the project.
The problem of providing a pre-order course is that customers might be wary of the possibility that you will not engage with the product you promise.
Likes vaporware, and users who support a project in the early stages require a return on their faith in you, and of course, their money.
out the door
In some ways, building an MVP actually creates extra work because this iteration process and learning validated requires significant investment of time and energy. That is why it is important not to get bogged down in details and overhead when MVP unnecessary construction.
Ultimately, the goal is to determine if the effort you put in is worth it, and you do not want to spend time working on something users do not find it useful or want pay.
It is also important to realize that when testing your assumptions, you may want to consider using multiple MVP testing techniques. One that fits your business model and cheaper will undoubtedly vary.
But the important lesson to take away here is to go out and build it. Think about the greatest support for your product is made and build a minimum viable product that tested this hypothesis on the market.
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