Suppose you’ve got a ground-breaking product development idea and are about to build its mini version by adopting the approach known as, “Minimum Viable Product (MVP)”. As you move towards its development, you list down the core features or set of features to include within your MVP to test your concept and identify if it's applicable/feasible in the real world before investing a hefty cost to build a full-featured product. You’ve planned out how things going to work and what features are most wanted within your MVP.
At this point, your brain gives you a signal and you wonder who am I actually building this product for, who will be using it? The quick answer to it: Users. Most of the startups or bootstrap founders while building an MVP focus on launching the MVP by implementing only the core features while neglecting the user experience, which plays a crucial role in user adoption, satisfaction, and long-term retention.
However, the best way to build an MVP without neglecting the user experience is to follow the Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) approach. Curious to learn what MVE is, what are its benefits, and why is there a need to build an MVE. Get useful insights and much more about MVE in this blog post. Let’s dive into exploring what minimum viable experience is:
What is a Minimum Viable Experience (MVE)
Think of Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) as a full-starter that covers building a mini version of your product along with prioritizing the user experience from the outset to ensure that users feel delighted and satisfied with your product. This approach isn’t just about adding features; it's about creating an end-to-end journey that provides value to users and leaves a lasting impression.
Instead of just a basic product, you aim to create a minimum delightful product (MDP) that feels complete and engaging to users. Moreover, it allows you to test your assumptions and gather feedback quickly while still offering a delightful experience. By focusing on the minimum viable experience, you can validate your ideas and encourage customers to stay and re-engage with the product regularly.
*Also learn: Explore in our latest blog how to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 2024.
Benefits of the Minimum Viable Experience (MVE)
Adopting the minimum viable experience in developing an MVP features a host of advantages (without bells and whistles) that help you focus on your user experience to meet their basic experience expectations while pulling off your customer's attention so that they stay at least around for the next iteration of your product or service.
- User-Centric Validation: MVE ensures MVP is aligned with user needs, leading to more accurate validation of the product's core concept.
- Early User Engagement: By focusing on the user experience, MVE encourages early user adoption and engagement, increasing the chances of receiving valuable feedback.
- Increased Retention: A well-crafted MVE can boost user retention, as users are more likely to continue using a product that meets their expectations, even in its early stages.
- Competitive Advantage: Delivering a refined user experience in the MVP can set the product apart from competitors who may overlook UX in their initial offerings.
- Efficient Iteration: Gathering feedback on both functionality and experience allows for more targeted and effective iterations, improving the product rapidly.
- Brand Perception: A polished MVE helps establish a positive brand perception early on, building trust and credibility with users.
- Resource Optimization: Focusing on essential experience elements ensures that development resources are used efficiently, avoiding unnecessary features that don’t contribute to the core user value.
- Reduced Risk of Failure: MVE minimizes the risk of product failure by ensuring that even the simplest version delivers a satisfying user experience, reducing the chances of user churn.
- Better Market Fit: By prioritizing user experience in the MVP, MVE helps in achieving a better market fit from the start, increasing the likelihood of long-term success and scalability.
Key Elements of Minimum Viable Experience
Here are the key elements of minimum viable experience using which you can build a user-centric MVP prioritizing the core needs and preferences of users. It helps you seek their validation on how satisfied they are using your product and if not how can you improve their experience by making your product more intuitive, easy to use, and accessible by every user. Let’s dive into exploring the key elements of a minimum viable experience (MVE).
Core Functionality
When building your MVP, ensure that the essential features that solve the user’s primary problem are in place. Focus on delivering the core functionality that directly addresses the user’s main pain points. These features should be the foundation of your Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) and must work seamlessly to provide immediate value. What truly matters is that you can create a product that resonates with them, even in its earliest version. This approach simplifies development and allows you to validate your product’s value proposition quickly.
Customer-Product Fit
Customer-fit product fit is one of the key elements of MVE that drives early adoption and long-term success. Now, what’s the definition of this term? Customer-product fit is when your MVP and its functionality help the user get their job done in the easiest and fastest way possible. It’s about aligning your MVP offerings with the specific needs and expectations of your target audience. By understanding what your users are trying to accomplish and how they prefer to do it, you can tailor your MVP to meet those needs efficiently. This fit is critical to ensure your product remains relevant and valuable to users, increasing their satisfaction and loyalty.
User-Centric Design
User-centric design plays a key role in MVE as it shifts the focus toward designing the MVP by putting users at the center of product design and development. It’s an iterative process in which designers prioritize the user needs in each phase of the MVP design process. When you involve users at each stage of the design process to gather their feedback, you ensure their needs are met more effectively.
Moreover, when you create a user-centric MVP, you need to ensure that it's easy to navigate, with a clear and logical flow to guide users through their tasks without frustration. Even with a limited feature set, your design should empower users to accomplish their goals effortlessly. Overall, placing the user at the center of your MVE design process enables you to create a product that feels natural and satisfying to users.
Feedback Mechanisms
Gathering feedback is one of the most important aspects of MVE development, as it enables you to understand whether you’ve built an MVP that fulfills their needs and expectations. For this purpose, you need to create a feedback loop to iterate and enhance your product based on real user input. This could include in-app surveys, user testing sessions, or analytics that track user behavior. You can identify pain points, discover unmet needs, and make informed decisions about where to focus your development efforts through user feedback. Iterative improvement driven by user feedback is ideal to ensure your product evolves in a way that aligns with user expectations.
Seamless White-Glove Onboarding
As a new user interacts with your MVP, you need to help them understand and engage with your MVP effortlessly. For this, you need to create an effective onboarding as it’s critical to the success of your MVE. To achieve this, you should implement a white-glove onboarding experience that is not only effective but also critical to the success of your MVE. This approach involves providing personalized, high-touch guidance that clearly communicates the value of your MVP and supports users through their initial interactions. Consider incorporating interactive tutorials, tooltips, or a step-by-step guided setup to help users quickly become familiar with your product. Adopting the white-glove onboarding process effectively minimizes the risk of users dropping off early and increases their likelihood of staying engaged with your MVP.
Performance and Reliability
Imagine you’ve built an amazing MVP, but it fails to deliver adequate performance, which can ultimately affect user experience. However, in MVE, performance and reliability are the two most important elements that link to a smooth and seamless user experience. Your MVP needs to function efficiently, load quickly, and respond to user actions without lag. Even a minimal version must be reliable, avoiding crashes, errors, or downtime that could frustrate users. Consistently delivering a smooth experience helps you build user trust and confidence in your product. Overall, prioritizing performance and reliability ensures that users can seamlessly interact with your MVP to meet their needs without disruption, which is crucial to fostering ongoing engagement and satisfaction.
Consistent Branding
To maintain a positive first impression, you need to reflect the brand’s identity consistently across all touchpoints to build trust and recognition. When users interact with your MVE, they should immediately recognize the elements of your brand, from the visual design to the tone of voice used in communications no matter the platform they choose to interact with your MVP. From your website and social media channels to your packaging and customer support, consistent branding helps create a cohesive and memorable experience that reinforces your brand’s identity and values. Integrating your brand’s look, feel, and messaging into every aspect of the user experience enables you to create a strong connection with your audience that encourages loyalty.
Initial Delight
Focus on creating moments of initial delight when users first interact with your MVP. This involves surprising and exceeding their expectations right from the start. Whether it’s through a beautifully crafted user interface or a smooth and intuitive user flow, these delightful elements can make a lasting impression. Additionally, by providing an experience that feels polished and thoughtful, you can immediately capture users’ interest and encourage them to explore further. Initial delight sets a positive tone and helps in building an emotional connection with your users, increasing the chances of long-term engagement and loyalty.
Why is There a Need to Build an MVE? Why Does It Matter?
Building a Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) is essential because it ensures that even the earliest version of a product delivers a satisfying and valuable user experience. While the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) focuses on delivering core functionality with minimal features, the MVE goes a step further by integrating user-centric design principles into that core functionality. This focus on experience matters because it directly impacts user adoption, retention, and satisfaction.
As simple as it is: users expect more than just functionality—they want an intuitive, seamless, and enjoyable interaction with the product. If your MVP lacks a positive user experience, you risk alienating users, leading to low engagement and high churn rates. However, using MVE, you can address this issue by delivering a positive user experience, which is crucial for building trust and loyalty.
Moreover, an MVE enables more effective validation of the product concept. You can gather more meaningful feedback by ensuring that users find your MVE useful and enjoyable. Altogether, building an MVE reduces the risk of failure, optimizes resource use, and sets the foundation for a product that meets and exceeds user expectations.
*Explore more: What’s the difference between POC vs. Prototype. vs MVP.
What are the Challenges of Building an MVE?
Building a Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) presents several challenges that you must navigate to create a successful MVP:
1. Balancing Functionality, and User Experience
Striking the right balance between functionality and a compelling user experience can be difficult. Overemphasis on minimalism might hinder user experience, while too much focus on functionality and features could bloat your MVP.
Solution: Build functionality/features without overcomplex your MVP with additional stuff. Prioritize features that offer seamless usability, and meaningful experience at every stage of a user journey.
2. Resource Constraints
Limited time, budget, and manpower often make delivering a polished user experience in an MVP challenging. Prioritizing which aspects of UX to focus on can be tough under these constraints.
Solution: Focus on high-impact UX elements that offer the most value to users, and leverage lean design and development practices to maximize efficiency.
3. Unclear User Expectations
Without sufficient user research, it’s challenging to understand what aspects of the experience are most critical to users. This can lead to misguided decisions on where to invest in UX.
Solution: Conduct user research early on to gather insights, and continuously refine your understanding of user needs through feedback and testing.
4. Technical Limitations
Constraints in technology, such as platform limitations or integration challenges, can hinder the ability to deliver a smooth and cohesive user experience.
Solution: Work closely with your development team to identify and address technical constraints early, and explore alternative solutions to deliver the desired user experience.
5. Cross-Functional Alignment
Ensuring that all teams (design, development, marketing, etc.) are aligned on the importance of MVE can be challenging. Misalignment can result in a disjointed user experience.
Solution: Foster regular communication and collaboration between teams, ensuring everyone understands the importance of MVE and their role in delivering it.
6. Risk of Over-Engineering
The desire to deliver a strong user experience can sometimes lead to over-engineering the MVP, delaying time-to-market, and straying from the original intent of minimalism.
Solution: Keep the focus on the core experience and set clear boundaries for features, resisting the urge to add unnecessary complexity that could delay the launch.
Major Key Differences Between MVP vs. MVE:
Here’s a table that outlines the major key differences between MVP and MVE to help you decide which to opt for your startup:
| Aspects | MVP | MVE |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Core functionality and basic feature set | User experience, including design, usability, and engagement |
| Goal | Validate the product idea with minimal resources | Validate both the product idea and the user experience |
| User Experience (UX) | Secondary, often minimal or basic | Primary, delivering a satisfying and intuitive experience |
| Risk | Higher risk of user churn if UX is neglected | Lower risk of user churn due to a focus on positive user experience |
| Feedback Quality | Focused on functionality | Holistic feedback, including both functionality and user experience |
You don’t necessarily need to choose between MVP and MVE; both can go hand in hand. While an MVP focuses on delivering core functionality, an MVE ensures that this functionality is presented with a user experience that engages and delights. Together, they help validate both the product idea and the user experience early on.
Things To Consider When Building A Minimum Viable Experience (MVE)
When you begin the implementation of your MVE, there are certain things that you must consider, which we’ve outlined below:
Not All Users Are the Same
When designing your MVE, recognize that your user base is diverse. Different users have varying needs, preferences, and levels of expertise. Therefore, it’s essential to gain insight into user data, such as user behavior, needs, and preferences to ensure the development of tailor-made MVE solutions. Moreover, ensure that your MVE accommodates this diversity by providing flexibility and options that cater to different user segments. This approach helps in creating a more inclusive experience that resonates with a broader audience.
Focus on Customer Experience Success Criteria
To deliver a successful MVE, focus on the three key customer experience criteria: effectiveness, ease, and emotion. Effectiveness ensures that the product solves the user’s problem. Ease ensures that users can achieve their goals with minimal effort. Emotion involves creating a positive, memorable experience that encourages continued use. Balancing these criteria will help you create a more compelling and valuable product.
Personalize and Drive Repeated Value Incrementally
Personalization is key to driving repeated engagement with MVE. Tailor the experience to individual users’ needs and preferences, and deliver incremental value with each interaction. Take some inspiration from MVP examples to understand how to build a product that improves user satisfaction and maintains long-term loyalty.
Prioritize Feedback Loops
When building your MVE, prioritize establishing feedback loops that allow you to gather and analyze user input continuously. This will enable you to iterate and refine the experience based on real user data, ensuring that your MVP evolves to meet user expectations effectively.
Ensure Seamless Scalability
As your product grows, so should the user experience. Designing your MVE with scalability in mind is of significant importance. Ensure the experience remains consistent and enjoyable as new features and functionalities are added. This will help maintain a positive user experience even as the product evolves.
Steps to Execute the Minimum Viable Experience (MVE)
Now, that you’ve got a clear understanding regarding the MVE, let’s take a look at how you can execute it by following the 3 simple steps.
1. Define the MVE
Start by understanding your customers' objectives and mapping out their journey. Identify key moments where your product should deliver value. You can define each customer's objective and place it along their journey, ensuring that you address their needs at critical touchpoints. This helps you create a user experience that aligns with expectations, even in its simplest form. By focusing on these objectives, you can tailor the MVE to provide a seamless and valuable experience right from the start.
2. Align the MVP and the MVE
Once you’ve defined the MVE, align it with your MVP features. Match each customer objective with a corresponding MVP feature, ensuring the product delivers on user needs. Assess the following three criteria when aligning your MVP with the MVE:
- A customer objective matching a feature in MVP: This is when you explore that your MVP features align with your customer objectives and ensure that it will deliver an expected level of customer experience.
- A customer objective with no corresponding feature: At this point, your solution doesn’t align with what your customer expects from your MVP. Consider reassessing its relevance if a feature lacks a clear objective.
- A feature without a corresponding customer objective: If you find a feature that doesn’t deliver any value to the customer's experience, then you can move it to the backlog and add some other feature that delivers value to your user.
This alignment helps to ensure that every feature adds value to the user experience, making the MVP not only functional but also engaging and effective.
3. Monitor and Track MVE
After launching, continuously monitor and track how well your MVE meets customer expectations. Use feedback mechanisms, analytics, and user behavior data to identify areas for improvement. Track user satisfaction, engagement, and retention to figure out if your MVE is delivering the desired outcomes. Further, regularly iterate on the experience by refining elements based on real user feedback, allowing you to adapt to evolving needs and further enhance the product.
Wrapping Up
Hope you’ve now a clear concept of what a minimum viable experience is and how you can follow this approach to build your MVP that isn’t only functional but also delightful and loveable by each user. In this evolving digital landscape, this approach will be more and more adopted by startups and entrepreneurs because today’s users demand more than just a product they crave for a flawless user experience. This user experience is associated with the usability of your MVP; the more users find your product easy to use, the more the chances of users adoring it and re-engaging with your product. As a result, you can build a mini version of your product, find if it has enough demand in the marketplace, and at the same time deliver a great user experience through the synergy of MVP and MVE.
