In the world of digital product development, MVPs are most talked about! While developing a digital product is very demanding in terms of time and effort, MVPs help you focus on the app success. How? They have a crucial impact on the real users and make the target audience your only priority. In this blog, we are going to have a brief look at what an MVP is, how it will help you and assist in market validation and what are the steps involved in the MVP development process.
What is an MVP?
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. It facilitates the developer to assess whether or not the basic model of their product and its main functionalities are in line with users’ needs. Stating simply, an MVP validates the customers’ response to product value proposition. It is highly beneficial to collect information and gather user feedback. This comes especially handy in case of start ups where you get a fair idea of the app’s usability before investing a huge sum.
Let us just make one thing clear here, that a basic version of the app doesn’t mean anything less in terms of functionality. An MVP has all the characteristics like the app’s usability, core value, visual appeal and workability.
How does the MVP development process look like?
MVP development is a step-by-step process that requires research, journey mapping, problem solving and feedback collection. Let us look at this process at a little more detail below.
Step 1 – Thorough Research
The first step, is obviously, research. When you think of any idea that crops up in your mind, you need to find out a lot about its usability, target audience, workability and more. Most of the times, a product fails because it is not able to connect to its users. So, you need to conduct proper research about your target user base, their needs and preferences.
Step 2 – Identifying target group and journey mapping
Th next step is to find out who your targeted users are. You need to know them he best you can – their behaviour, likes, patterns and preferences. This will lay down a concrete foundation for building user journeys, user interface and user flows.
Step 3 – Finding out user issue
Once you are done identifying your target audience, you need to define their problems. You will have to work on answering one question mainly – how will your app help in addressing their particular problem?” This is crucial as it will help to decide what features are imperative to your app.
Step 4 – Offering the early version to potential users
You need customer validation for your app success. So, you need to roll out the basic version of the app to your potential users. The app will have all the main features, with the maximum value. At the launch, all the app features should be linked to the final product’s main objective.
Step 5 – Collecting user feedback and making changes
Collecting feedback for your MVP is crucial. In fact, that is the whole point of developing an MVP in the first place! Collect feedback and re-evaluate your MVP. Make necessary changes and fix all the issues that were reported to you by the users.
Now, we have a basic idea of what an MVP is and how its development process works. We will. Now look at why building an MVP might be beneficial for you.
Why MVP Development – Its benefits
There are many advantages of building an MVP before launching the final version of the product.
Better understanding of the market needs
With an MVP, you can better gaze if your product fulfils the needs of your target audience or not. With a team of experts, you can build an app that gives you a fair idea of what changes or features your final app must have.
Higher return on investment
It gives you an opportunity to test your idea at minimum expenses and a short period of time. You will get to know whether or not your audience is willing to pay for your app. Also, with much lower risk of failure, you get great returns on your investment in total.
Saves you development time
Since you would be making the real users a part of your development process, you end up saving quite a lot of resources that you can utilize in other segments like marketing, advanced development, or other projects. Also, you will no longer have to work again and again on your final product as all the changes would have been made in the MVP stage.
Do you have a product idea in your mind, but do not know how to go about it? Are you worried if your product idea is viable enough to be accepted by the target audience?
Connect with us at EOV and find out! We provide comprehensive MVP development services that will benefit you and help you set out on your journey to success!