HOW TO

How to Create UX Design for Your MVP Startup

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
June 16, 2021
HOW TO
How to Create UX Design for Your MVP Startup
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
June 16, 2021
HOW TO
How to Create UX Design for Your MVP Startup
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
June 16, 2021
CEO at Aspirity
Written by
This article was written
in collaboration with
Maria D.
UI/UX Designer at Aspirity
Creating an MVP and its UX design is a great opportunity to test a business idea on a target audience. Does it make sense to put a lot of effort into the design and usability of this product? It turns out it does. Let's learn how to create a high-quality UX design for your MVP.

What Is an MVP?

Let's begin with the basics. What is an MVP?

The Minimum Viable Product (or MVP) in product development is a product that has a limited set of features, enough for working. In other words, to build an MVP means creating a production-ready product based on collaboration with your users or target audience.
Gradually, it undergoes a series of changes and enhancements until a final product is ready. MVP product design interactions are usually based on customer feedback and statistical data. MVP design and development helps product and startup owners to save their money and to provide their idea to the target audience as fast as possible.

Now, let's move on to discussing the set of features for MVP UX design.
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The Role of UX in Developing an MVP

According to Statista, 42% of startups fail because of no market need. To prevent this from happening, you should present your product in its best form and most relevant to user needs and expectations.

Therefore, the fact that MVP in UX design is based on the concept of minimalism does not mean that the product should literally be "minimal." In addition to the features themselves, you must demonstrate to your target audience a smooth user experience to make a good first impression.

As a result, well-thought-out UX design for a minimum viable product of your website or SaaS application often becomes one of the main factors for a successful project.

Step-by-Step UX Design Process for an MVP

How to build UX for an MVP startup or SaaS? What directions should you follow? Let's dive into the specifics of the UX design process for an MVP.

Start with market research

No matter what product you are going to build, your first and foremost task is to analyze the market. You have to make sure that your idea fulfills the requirements of your core audience.

Analyze UX in your competitors' solutions. Visit such resources as Dribbble, Behance, Pinterest, and Muzli Search to get inspired (in particular, you can see options for icons, animation and branding — just enter a keyword that describes your product or its target audience). Moreover, we recommend conducting online surveys and in-depth interviews with target audience representatives to gather as many insights as possible.

Define the values of your product and how they could be implemented

Your next task is to decide what values your product offers and how to present them, providing the best UX for your MVP. Thus, you should build your MVP based on these values and the most effective visualization of them.

Create UI/UX design

To provide the best UI/UX, you should follow the rules we mentioned above. In particular, focus on implementing only the essential functionality, ensuring a one-to-one correspondence with the graphical elements that denote and activate it. You can also use Mobbin, a UX pattern search solution for mobile apps, to find the ready-to-use UX templates for your MVP.

Build the features that you want to incorporate into your product

Your next task is to integrate features into your product based on the created MVP UX design. Think about your users and define what features they will appreciate most of all. Categorize them based on their importance (high, medium, and low priority).

Map out user flow

You need to build UX in the MVP development process with users in mind. Look at your product from their perspective, from opening the app to doing the target action. To map up your user flow, you need to define the primary process stages. You should focus on the main tasks such as creating an account, buying goods, managing orders, working with documents, searching the data, watching the statistics, etc. When you identify your main procedure stages, it will be easier to define the main features needed for each step.

Implement pre-launch product testing

Building a powerful, user-friendly, and engaging product is a time-consuming process that needs to be subdivided into a few sections. After you build your MVP product, it needs to undergo testing. This is where your Quality Assurance team will be working on fixing bugs and improving the quality.

Launch the MVP

After completing the previous stages, we launch the MVP. Beware that an MVP shouldn't be of poor quality as compared to your final product. It should meet the requirements of your users. It must be suitable for your targeted audience and be easy to use.
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Improve the product

After you launch MVP, your next task in the MVP UX design process is to collect user feedback regarding the release. The clients' reaction to your product's UX will help you learn whether your product can fight off the competition on the market or not.

What Are the Main Rules in MVP product design?

How to create a UX design for an MVP?

The main problem with MVP products in UX design is that developers sometimes sacrifice user-friendliness in order to save money. As a result, they get poor UX that doesn't interest even a tenth of the initially planned target audience. So what are the default features for an MVP UX?

Aesthetic-usability effect

At first, in the MVP design and development process, there is the Aesthetic-usability effect, which means that visually attractive things seem easier to use and more comfortable than those that are less beautiful. If the interface of your product is beautiful, then users will subconsciously consider it to be convenient.

Form-follows-function

Another rule that minimum viable product and UX designers should keep in mind is 'form follows function': the product should be as minimalistic as possible and relate to its intended function. If you take something out of it, it will lose its main purpose for the target audience. Therefore, support everything beautiful with the necessary functionality.

Limited CTA options

Go ahead. In creating a UX design for an MVP startup, you need to understand what kind of CTA the user expects. To push the user the most efficiently, you need to reduce the number of options as much as possible.
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Signal-to-noise ratio

Finally, if you want to create the best UX for an MVP, you should increase the signal-to-noise ratio. There are two ways to do this — either to amplify the signal (use only precise and understandable texts, icons, graphics, etc.), or to minimize the noise (remove everything that can be removed and minimize the required elements without compromising the function that they do).

Our Experience

The success of your future product in the digital market depends on a wide array of factors. One of them is a software development team that knows everything about minimum viable product development and will help bring your idea into reality. And this is where the services of Aspirity might come in handy. It's a professional, result-driven team of web and mobile experts from San Francisco.

Our experts in agile software development have decent experience in the IT area and know for sure how to create challenging IT solutions that will surely make your business grow. If you are willing to get started with the new project and create an MVP product, you can surely entrust this task to experts from Aspirity. We know how to tackle that challenge and build an MVP that will make your business grow.

On the plus side, you can go to our website to see our portfolio. Building an MVP project for Helthjem Flash Sales, a popular Norwegian Delivery Service, was one of the recent challenges we tackled successfully. Our main goal was to build an eCommerce web service for small companies and charity projects in Norway. It's a door-to-door service that offers fast home delivery to almost all regions of Norway.
The main requirement of a management team of this delivery service was to build a user-friendly micro-store service that allowed micro-businesses to use this service and try themselves in eCommerce. Plus, they wanted to increase the number of users.

To improve the services of this platform, we decided to add a feature, allowing the customer to buy goods and return them within the marketplace. Our main challenge was to build a clear and convenient service for ordinary managers. To do that, we added an intuitive shop constructor, configured available shopping methods, and made it convenient to use on absolutely each device. The design layouts were created with the Figma Application. Overall, a customer remained pleased with the result.

Final Thoughts

All in all, the main intention behind designing and building an MVP for startups is to launch it and see what your users will say, analyze their reaction, and gain feedback. Overall, it's a superb solution to test the product and focus on building options that will surely have better user experience value. Designing a user experience for a minimum viable product can also save you money! If you have an incredible idea and are currently looking for a trusted and experienced development team that will help you bring it to life, don't hesitate to contact Aspirity. We are always here to help!
This article was written in collaboration with Maria D. UI/UX Designer at Aspirity
CEO AT ASPIRITY
For more than 2,5 years, I've been working as CEO at Aspirity. I help professionals launch digital products by providing dedicated development teams.
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