In the world of software development, we tend to focus on designing and narrowing to the “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP). The idea of an MVP has a lot of perks, including smaller projects scopes, faster turnaround times, easier debugging and faster user feedback loops, so we can make the product better at speed. As long as the company, you may work for, gives a voice to the various disciplines throughout the process, these perks stand true to form, and the development lifecycle will keep moving forward.
What bothers me about an MVP, is that it may become your company’s MFP, or “Minimum Forever Product.” I see it happen all the time. Companies take a lean approach to development, and are constantly producing feature roadmaps that don’t circle back to an MVP. Then some other high priority project or feature comes along and makes changes to it, creating a new MVP without having considered a way to improve upon the original design.
Furthermore, an MVP tends to focus on sensible functionality to prove users will use it, underestimating the power of emotion in design, specifically delight. As a designer, it is my responsibility to strike a balance between user needs and business needs, but in order to do so there needs to be an emotionally holistic concept to work towards. So if we are only implementing basic functionality that is supposed to benefit the company and/or users, but never test emotionally delightful designs, we aren’t actually testing a viable product.
As a designer, I get frustrated when I have spent a lot of time and effort designing something out, holistically, only to be cut down to a functionality that may or may not work. And whether it works and the product is left with bare bones, or it fails but I know the design, even one step up from the MVP, wasn’t given a real chance, I’m left unfulfilled. By no means do I think we have to implement the pie-in-the-sky concepts V1, but an MVP without delight is some early 2000’s internet bull****, therefore, a change needs to be made. Instead of product teams focusing on an MVP, they should turn their attention to MDPs, or “Minimum Delightful Products,” (because there aren’t enough acronyms in a short product development rant) coined by an article I recently read, which I’d be happy to reference if I could find it again.
One might ask, why does an MDP fix the aforementioned problems? With an MDP, designers know that both the business and users have their needs met. Even if the design never gets to V2, we can rest assured that a truly viable option was tested. And when a new feature comes along and is looking to change how that experience works, the aspects that created user delight in the first place will be considered. So whether it’s delight, ease, surprise, etc, the MDP will allow us to plan for the roadmap and build emotionally holistic experiences today.
