Design's Role During MVP Stage
User Interface Design is one of my favorite industries. You have pretty colors, leading lines, beautiful typography, and all that makes users feel like they are dealing with luxury. However, executing all these things well takes time, and lots of it. When a founder is in the MVP stage they shouldn’t be worried about font size, copy, how many fun animations need to be implemented, and where. What should they be worried about? Building the best freaking feature possible.
When you are in the tech industry, specifically tech start-ups, you know time is of the essence. Getting your product to market as soon as possible is often the goal. There are many reasons for wanting to be quick. If you are the first to release the product, then you can establish your company as a leader in that niche. When you think of streaming music, Spotify probably comes to mind even if you use Apple Music or Soundcloud. Being quick to market also allows you to receive feedback from customers and implement changes earlier than competitors. Being a few steps ahead never hurt. There are many more reasons why being quick to market can help your start-up’s success, however, the time to market fully depends on the time it takes to develop an MVP.
There have been tremendous advancements in the UI/UX space in recent years. This has made it hard to release apps with little thought put into the UI. Even if the software is the best there has ever been, if the UI is not smooth, it won’t be appreciated. If this is true, why shouldn’t the owner worry about designs? Because the developer(s) should.
The UI advancements that have been made on the design side have resulted in UI advancements on the development side as well. Today, it is easier to build seamless, responsive, and clean UIs without designs. Only with one caveat; you hire a good Front End Developer. A good Front End Developer should be able to construct a UI using modern CSS, CSS libraries, and frameworks just based on a user flow/stories. If these things are focused on rather than pretty colors, fonts, and animations, your Front End Developer should be able to handle a clean UI for the MVP release.
This cuts out all the back and forth between the founder and designer at the beginning while the developer is waiting on design approvals. The time this saves will get you to market faster to reap all the benefits discussed above. During this process, if you want to save more time when v1 development starts, start designs for v1. It will be tough, but as a founder, don’t let these designs discourage you from the way the MVP looks. As long as the developer and designer are following the same user flows/stories, it shouldn’t be hard for the developer to make changes to the front end when the designs get approved for v1.
This process offsets design and development so that your developers are not waiting on design approvals or tackling ‘bugs’ about a change in the website header text. All of that gets approved way before the developer starts writing the designs. Anyway, that’s just my two cents. If you try this process, I would love to hear about it and how it helped!