UX in a minimum viable product

I gave a talk at Refresh Chicago last week, and afterwards a fellow came up to me with a question. He does UI on a team of mostly engineers, and the engineers are big fans of the “Minimum Viable Product” concept. MVP, if you aren’t familiar, is an idea from the Lean Startup scene. In a nutshell, it means to do as little as possible so you can learn if you did the right thing or not. The fellow who approached me after the talk was having a problem with MVP.

It seemed like their product suffered from bad experience holes. Their team was trying to do the minimum possible to ship, but their definition of minimum didn’t include things like a smooth way to reset your password. Things like password-reset were “never important enough”, so they languished as swamps of bad experience among the dry hills of minimally viable features.

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