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3-2 Converge with the 3 Lenses of Innovation

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3-2 Converge with the 3 Lenses of Innovation

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How to Effectively Conduct User Interviews

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How to Effectively Conduct User Interviews

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https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCT_02.htm

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How to Use the Tool

First, take an existing product or service. This could be one that you want to improve, one that you're currently having problems with, or one that you think could be a good starting point for future development.

Then, ask questions about the product you've identified, using the mnemonic to guide you. Brainstorm as many questions and answers as you can. (We've included some example questions, below.)

Some ideas that you generate using the tool may be impractical or may not suit your circumstances. Don't worry about this - the aim is to generate as many ideas as you can.

Finally, look at the answers that you came up with. Do any stand out as viable solutions? Could you use any of them to create a new product, or develop an existing one? If any of your ideas seem viable, then you can explore them further.

SCAMPER Questions

Let's look at some of the questions you could ask for each letter of the mnemonic:

Substitute

What materials or resources can you substitute or swap to improve the product?

What other product or process could you use?

What rules could you substitute?

Can you use this product somewhere else, or as a substitute for something else?

What will happen if you change your feelings or attitude toward this product?

Combine

What would happen if you combine this product with another, to create something new?

What if you combine purposes or objectives?

What could you combine to maximize the uses of this product?

How could you combine talent and resources to create a new approach to this product?

Adapt

How could you adapt or readjust this product to serve another purpose or use?

What else is the product like?

Who or what could you emulate to adapt this product?

What else is like your product?

What other context could you put your product into?

What other products or ideas could you use for inspiration?

Modify

How could you change the shape, look, or feel of your product?

What could you add to modify this product?

What could you emphasize or highlight to create more value?

What element of this product could you strengthen to create something new?

Put to Another Use

Can you use this product somewhere else, perhaps in another industry?

Who else could use this product?

How would this product behave differently in another setting?

Could you recycle the waste from this product to make something new?

Eliminate

How could you streamline or simplify this product?

What features, parts, or rules could you eliminate?

What could you understate or tone down?

How could you make it smaller, faster, lighter, or more fun?

What would happen if you took away part of this product? What would you have in its place?

Reverse

What would happen if you reversed this process or sequenced things differently?

What if you try to do the exact opposite of what you're trying to do now?

What components could you substitute to change the order of this product?

What roles could you reverse or swap?

How could you reorganize this product?

Example

To demonstrate how SCAMPER works, let's imagine that you need to improve a simple thermal flask aimed at the morning commuter. We'll work through some of the questions above to think of ways to develop this product.

Substitute: You could replace the metal cap with a plastic one to reduce heat loss. And perhaps there is a more environmentally-friendly manufacturing process you could use instead, that would make the product more appealing to green-minded consumers.

Combine: You could work with artists and designers to make the flasks more attractive and unique.

Adapt: Flasks are similar in shape to telescopes, though much shorter. Explore how you could adapt the materials and design so that your flask could extend like an old-fashioned spyglass to hold more liquid.

Modify: The flask isn't especially easy or comfortable to hold. You could add a rubber sleeve to aid grip, or make the bottle thinner so that it can be held in one hand.

Put to another use: So far, you've designed the flask around individual commuters, but there are many other groups of people who could also use the product. Take traveling couples, for example. They won't want to carry a flask each, so think about redesigning the flask to include detachable compartments which can be used as mugs. Then two people can share the drink from one flask.

Eliminate: You could eliminate the handle on the side of the bottle so that it fits more easily into a work bag or backpack.

Reverse: If you tried to do the exact opposite, you'd end up with a cold drink rather than a hot one! But this would be useful in summer months or hotter climates. So, explore ways of keeping liquid cool in the flask instead of hot.

SCAMPER Infographic

See our SCAMPER infographic.

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SCAMPER - Improving Products and Services

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First, take an existing product or service. This could be one that you want to improve, one that you're currently having problems with, or one that you think could be a good starting point for future development. Then, ask questions about the product you've identified, using the mnemonic to guide you.

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Back right up. Who are we designing our products for again? No one has all the sure-fire answers to designing a wildly successful product, but there are methods out there that are definitely more likely to help you do it. One of those methods includes knowing who you're designing for in the first place by creating user personas.

The user persona was developed back in the 90s as a way to gain powerful insights into a product's target audience and the user's habits and preferences. It continues to be used today by UX design teams and marketing departments across the world.

User personas are a representation of your app or website's user base segments. They act as a benchmark for design and teams to work with to create the optimal user experience. It is a fictitious profile based on the type of people who would be the main users of your app.

Knowing your users makes it easier to remember who you're designing for, as the users of other products might not be the users of your own. User personas turn "the user" into an actual person you can get to know and conceptualize.

Hanging user persona profiles on the office wall or notice board, uploading them to your UX research tools or sending them as PDF for PP files to your colleagues to refer back to every time they design a new feature helps keep your product on track.

This is because a user persona turns the abstract concept of "the user" into a person with thoughts, feelings and emotions.

This person represents a group of users who share similar characteristics and goals. These goals will dictate the best design patterns for your website or app to provide the best user experience. It will also dictate how best to solve certain design problems.

Even when it comes to simple updates - being on the same page as the user can prevent backlashes against updates, such as the unwanted change Instagram made in 2018 when vastly altered their users' experience by replacing vertical scrolling with horizontal.

Even when it comes to designing enterprise software, user personas can provide invaluable insights for creating smooth user flows, something that until recently, many companies have ignored in favor of price.

Consider the following situation: you're designing a new cooking app and your main idea is to help people compile a list of healthy recipes for during the week. But then it hits you - people generally have varying amounts of time on their hands, money in their pockets, motivation or skills when it comes to cooking. The app should therefore be tailored to its main user base segments.

Your natural inclination might be to create a survey feature when the user downloads and opens the app for the first time. It might ask them questions about their lifestyles, their hobbies, how much they exercise, what their budget is per week, etc.

You can learn more about the role of user personas in any of these awesome UI UX design tutorials.

The survey feature might seem like a great idea at the start, but think about how much more time you would need to design an app that caters to all users, along with the extra time spent in development. For the user, it means the added interaction cost of actually filling in the survey and answering the questions, instead of getting straight into what they downloaded the app for: recipes!

You then realize that the time to do the survey was before the design even started. User onboarding must be quick, otherwise you risk losing them. The worst part is that they might even be your ideal users. You don't want to lose these users by trying to cater to the masses because it's precisely these users that will generate the most revenue for your product.

Therefore, the time to create a user persona is before the design begins, not after. The time to use this user persona is during the design stage, not in the development stage. Sticking to this rule will not just save you time and money, but also ensure your product is a hit with your users. Even your MVP should be tailored to the right user personas.

Instead of trying to develop a detailed cooking app which attempts to tailor itself to every user on the planet, we can go about finding the users that will want to use our app in the first place, and tailor it accordingly. Depending on the amount of research you do, you'll probably find the need for that survey didn't exist in the first place as your main audience only includes a segment of society.

Instead, you could create a user persona for this app who is a blend of the main groups of your potential users which might be:

1. People on a limited weekly budget and schedule

2. People who take an interest in fitness and wellness.

This one user persona will be interested in simple, healthy and cheap ingredients they can prepare quickly but can also turn into interesting dishes that they can bring to work in a tupper. You might discover additional useful information, such as that the app should feature plenty of recipes with quinoa, couscous, brown rice and whole wheat pasta that take no longer than 40 minutes from preparation to finish.

You will have saved the time required for integrating two hour recipes into your cooking app. It will be less bulky to download and will be more concise and intuitive to the types of users that are interested in it.

Netflix is a great example of an organization getting its product right for its users. It avoids the basic, and maybe outdated, business idea - the "lets aim to satisfy everyone" approach. It doesn't contain every movie and series possible, instead it includes films and series (even original) based on research.

Netflix uses Big Data as a means of analyzing its customer database, their patterns of behavior and viewing habits. This doesn't mean that you need to know about Big Data in order to create a UX profile, but it does highlight the importance of basing your users' interests on facts rather than presumptions.

You could compare user personas to novelists' characters profiles; they're not essential, but without character profiles, it's going to be very difficult to maintain a consistent character throughout the story. The character will seem flat and will often go off plot.

Creating user personas will make defining your website or app's product requirements and subsequently designing it much easier. Why? Because it entails doing proper research into your main user base segments. Creating user personas often involves three steps:

1. Gathering data about your users

2. Putting the data together

3. Creating your user persona

Before you begin gathering data about your ideal users, you should first ask yourself three crucial user questions, which Raven Veal over at careerfoundry.com defines as:

1. Who is my ideal user?

2. What are the current behavior patterns of my users/potential users?

3. What are the goals and pains of my users?

Asking these questions will help you plan and shape your user persona research. The third question is the most important, as it will define the reason your product will exist in the first place. You can expand on the third question in the following way:

What do your users want to achieve long term and short term, and why? How important are these goals in their lives? How are they currently trying to achieve them?

Then, what stands in the way of their goals and frustrates them? Have they ever tried to solve these pains before and, if so, how? If they managed to find a solution, did it work and would they do it again, or would they prefer a better solution?

Many wonder about the approach to research they should undertake when researching a user persona. Should the approach be quantitative or qualitative? The answer is that usually the best user personas are created out of both inputs. Why shun one method for another when they can be combined?

Quantitative data will make your user personas more understandable, while qualitative data will make them more believable and will help your team identify with them on a personal level.

For quantitative testing, you'll be trying to gather as much data as possible about your potential user base segment. This involves collecting data such as facts about their day-to-day lives: where they live, the industry they work in and how many times they use certain apps like yours.

If you have a product that already exists and want to improve it, then the chances are that you will already have some quantitative data available to you in the form of transactional data, such as purchase orders, CRM data and site traffic analysis. However, if you're designing a new website or app, then you can use the following methods to acquire quantitative data:

Polls

Closed-ended survey questions

User testing data (based on other products)

Meta data: age, gender, etc.

Acquiring qualitative data requires a slightly different approach. It means observing their behavior patterns, their subjective mental models, their emotions and body language. The best way to gauge these aspects is to try the following:

Interviews (observe personality body language and emotions)

Open-ended questions

Shadow their day-to-day tasks

Observe how they use other products

Direct interviews with your potential users and using surveys with open-ended questions helps reveal more about their thought and behavior patterns.

Shadowing users as they complete their tasks shows how they currently approach their challenges, and whether or not their approach can be improved, i.e. what tools and methods they use. It also shows if there are any differences between what the user does, thinks and says if you compare it to interview data.

Laura Klein, in her book UX for Lean Startups, gives an example of product testers actually accompanying users on a grocery run before making a shopping app. She maintains that observing their behavior is key to understanding their emotions - that what the user wants and what they think they want may differ.

Once you generate enough data, you'll need to create a visual representation of it to make it easier on the eyes. There are many ways to do this, but perhaps among the most helpful are spreadsheets or affinity diagrams.

For survey and user testing results or CRM data, you could display the relevant facts in a Google Sheet.

You could then break the data down further by visually representing it with the use of line graphs or charts. Depending on what exactly it is you need to find out from your user base, or if you're designing to improve an app or website, you might also use columns for pages most visited, time spent on that page, elements interacted with, etc.

Affinity diagrams that use sticky notes are a simple but effective way of taking both quantitative and qualitative data and ordering it into different sections.

If you put the information on different color sticky notes for each section, it helps add further clarity to the visual representation.

Empathy Maps revolve around the target user and are usually broken down into four sections: what they think, feel, say and do.

Using of the data gathered for each user persona, you'll want to separate it under different headings, such as:

Other important elements that should make up your user persona include their influences - what affects his or her opinion (this can be a family member, a blog, certain trends or abstract ideas such as UX design).

The less personas you have, the easier it is to design for each one and the less likely you are to end up with the dreaded product "feature creep". Sometimes you may find that two groups can be fused into one user persona if they share enough similar attributes, but in other cases this may not be possible. Each user persona will then represent your ideal user.

When it comes to designing for more than one user persona, it might be useful to think of a Venn diagram where some features of an app overlap and are shared between personas and others are used only by distinct personas.

The app might be designed to completely satisfy two personas, but have the features set out in a way that each persona would easily and intuitively be able to find the section that's important to them.

Your user persona will need a fictional name and photo. The name should be one that is fairly common (think more along the lines of "John Smith" rather than "Hubert Cumberdale"). The person in the photo should reflect the average age of users in that group, while the clothes they wear should also reflect their occupation and personality. A short bio adds some context to the character by briefly summarizing their background, profession, hobbies, frustrations and goals.

Each persona should obviously be different, easily distinguishable and memorable. Bold color schemes are one way to do this. Think about matching the colors in the image with the general theme of the document.

The bottom line is designers and developers should be able to internalize the persona to the point where it's easy to recall what they represent. Check out Justinmind's very own user persona template below to get a feel for what they should represent!

Note that this user persona has a crucial element throughout and that is consistency. The entire persona can be summed up with the quote in the top right-hand corner: "I want to help my team deliver great user experiences". Everything from the bio, goals, frustrations and even the influences section reflects this quote.

If your user persona is consistent, they will seem much more real and be more memorable. If they are inconsistent, they will feel more like a lie and you're hence more likely to end up with an inconsistent product.

At a glance, and from the colorful persona picture, we can already see that this user is a young innovator who is looking to place more of an emphasis on UX in an attempt to reform old UI design practices at her corporation. She's young, single, full of energy and wishes to take charge and grow the UX team in her company, possibly looking to become a manager at some point. She echoes the type of person we at Justinmind are setting out to help with our prototyping tool.

Normally used in conjunction with lean UX design, the lean persona is a technique advocated by the Agile methodology that we, here in Justinmind, have also adopted. The lean persona can be thought of as a lighter, faster rendition of the typical user persona which aims to provide the basic, most fundamental information about a user base.

Drawing on the principles of the Pareto Effect, lean UX calls for a persona that requires 20% of work that produces 80% of total insights. It relies more on qualitative rather than quantitative data and can be used based on analytics data that you already have at your disposal, reducing the need to invest time and money into empirical research.

There are no straight up rules for creating user personas. You can put a physical persona together using paper and a photo, or you can make one digitally and print it out or share it with your colleagues.

However, if you're not sure where to begin, or the right format your user persona should take (they will be different for each company and purpose), then a great starting point would be one of our user persona templates examples. These templates already have the structure predetermined and are fully editable, or you can leave certain elements in if they already match your current user personas.

Furthermore, if there isn't a user persona template that matches your needs, or you want to get more creative, then you can try one of the following three user persona generators:

Meanwhile, Hubspot does the heavy lifting, by putting your user persona together automatically as you just answer the necessary questions.

The questions you have to answer when generating buyer personas with this tool tend to be more financial-based and business-focused than with the Hubspot user persona generator.

One thing that separates User Forge from the other user persona generators is that, in the same workspace, you can also create user stories and story maps with the personas you generated.

User personas are a fundamental part of ensuring the success of your website or app. It's important to make sure you choose the correct design for your persona, and to ensure that the information it conveys is relevant and beneficial to all teams involved in the development and design process.

If done right, personas can capture your attention and forge a memorable impression in your memory, so that they're with you every step of the process.

User personas are now widely recognized as being an integral part of the user experience. Everyone involved in each stage of the development process should be invested in the personas, from stakeholders and designers to developers - who we'll refer to in this post as "end users".

However, creating user personas can be time-consuming and requires some good old-fashioned rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with empirical data. Choosing a design that not only complements your hard work but helps you get the most out of it is no trivial task either.

But we are here to help, tag along for the tl;dr, including some quick tips on putting user personas together, and for 50 of the best user persona examples out there.

When it comes to design, apart from some general best practices, there are no rules as to what your user persona should look like - the sky's the limit! The type of persona that best fits your purpose will be determined by what kind of app or website wireframe you're designing, as well as the scope of your product, the userbase the persona template will represent and your company culture.

Keep in mind the effect you want it to have on whoever views it - you'll want it to be memorable. How much detail you choose to include depends on what's relevant, but the general rule of thumb is that less is usually more when talking about user personas.

One great piece of advice from Twistlab Marketing is that a user persona's design should ideally be based around the Pareto Principle, whereby they will represent that 20% of your userbase that will use 80% of your products' features, or that will account for 80% of your revenue.

When deciding what information to include in the persona template, bear in mind that while certain details might be relevant to one project, they could be irrelevant for another. Sometimes, depending on budget and time-restraints, a well-researched user persona is in order, whereas, in other cases, a lean persona template might suffice.

Whatever the case may be, you should always bear in mind that too much detail can suffocate a persona, make them boring and less memorable for the end user. You want something you can refer back to again and again through the design process, even as you put your favorite prototyping tool to good use. Below are some general best practices to keep in mind when choosing your user persona template.

Goals and pains should more-or-less take center stage. These are usually the key factors in coming up with your product design and development solution.

Try to make sure that your user personas don't overdo text - the simpler the better, as they will be easier for your end users to internalize their details and mindsets while the product is in development.

Try and make it as visually appealing as possible - you will have put a lot of work into your persona and you want it to stand out - using an attractive color scheme that's indicative of your persona's characteristics, as well as icons and graphics can help in understanding who they are.

Include psychographics - behaviors, attitudes, opinions, and motivations are what make your personas human.

Use an image of the persona. It can be a photograph, a cartoon or a sketch, but it must represent the person well in terms of age, lifestyle and occupation. Never - and we repeat - never use an image of a celebrity or someone from your company. If you do this, you risk creating a bias view of that persona.

Try to include brands. This secondary information can provide great insights into the user's likes and hobbies, which may even include competitor brands.

Maintain a unified design - it not only makes it easier to compare persona traits, but also makes it easier to recall the main facts about all of them.

Certain demographics can be useful, depending on the scope of your app or website. Where they live and their salary range are usually important factors to consider including.

Now you're ready to explore our selection of 50 great user persona templates and decide on which design best suits you purpose!

First up on the list is our template of a UX design persona. In this user persona template we've provided all the important demographic information on the left-hand side superimposed on a colorful photograph of our persona to give an instant impression of lifestyle and personality.

In our example, motivations are in the center to help the end user work towards a design that helps the persona achieve what they aspire to, while having the goals and frustrations close to hand to build a design that answers their pains.

This persona template from Xtensio is all about grabbing your attention. Its loud yellow and orange color scheme screams for attention.

The photograph in this one is strategically located on the right of the persona template, drawing the eyes across the page, making the observer take in the whole page, before returning to the left-hand side to read the details.

A quote lies just under the photograph, helping the end user associate the persona's mindset and philosophy with her image.

The motivations and preferred channels stand out in a clear and colorful bar chart representation and the brand logos represent the user's browsing habits.

This data analyst user persona template largely represents the young working professional. Over a third of this user persona template is designated to a charismatic photo of a young data analyst, with a quote that sets the tone for the rest of the document.
This template gets stuck-in explaining the most important parts, such as a short bio, along with Leonard's goals and frustrations with text.

In true hierarchical fashion, slightly less immediately important categories are denoted with lively infographics, such as Leanorad's personality, technology used on the job and his motivations, to make them easier to retain and revise at a glance.

Getting creative when it comes to design deliverables, whether it be user personas or mood boards, is only ever a good thing. Especially when that deliverable needs to be instantly memorable for multiple people working in a team.

This post-it user persona takes its inspiration from an office environment with typewriter text and the persona's goals, challenges and objectives adjourning separately marked sections of a whiteboard.

Firstly, we have clear dividers when it comes to different aspects of the user traits, with a great visual hierarchy that makes it all easy to read in a second. Secondly, the use of visual elements like bars and tags make it even easier to grasp who this person is, what they like and what they want.

It's true that this user persona doesn't pack as much information as some of the others on this list, but the end goal is achieved just the same. It conveys a clear idea of who this person is, even if it doesn't include every minute detail.

The design of the user persona template itself feels colorful but professional. It's bright and easy to read, with plenty of visual ways to convey information. It feels like a no-nonsense design, much like the persona herself.

We like the general distribution of information around this template, making it easy to read it. This persona representation focuses on her wants, needs and pain points - all of which are useful to designers.

This template focuses on how the designer relates to her craft and her job. It shows us with progress bars her state of mind, using other visual means to convey why her current job isn't a good fit for her. Since this also relates to her and her technology of choice, we appreciate that the template includes which devices she uses on a day-to-today.

We like that despite the lack of in-depth details, all the information presented is useful to any design team. It sticks to her daily life, her feelings and the things she dislikes.

We like the use of bars, tags and bullet points. This makes the information easy to find specific information quickly, with this user persona template offering a minimalist and modern feel. It's to-the-point and doesn't waste space on information that isn't relevant.

It's true that something like this wouldn't work for most projects out there. Most design projects do need crucial traits like preferences and pain points. With that said, there is a use for user persona templates that take a different route - it's just a matter of finding the opportunity in the right project.

We like the design of this user persona. The information is given to us in small bits, using graphic elements and whitespace to let each section breathe. It's easy to read and feels modern, techy - a perfect fit for an aspiring engineer!

This user persona template answers all key questions you would have about the younger millennial persona and the aesthetics fit perfectly the persona described. This user template is modern and fun, and summarizes the user person with a few keywords that appear in the user photo background.

This example by Maria can be particularly useful for any networking, Marketing strategy, or even home decor or similar projects. A stand out category in this template is 'Channels' which clearly summarizes the end user's ability or approach to how to currently achieve their goals.

This end user example presents Olivia, a team leader in a recruiting company. In this template you have only the most basic demographics, but all the additional information is made available in the 'About me' section. It is pretty obvious that other categories such as personality and pain points are very well researched and information is clearly summarized and well organized in a visually appealing way.

The quote and user picture complete this user persona from Dribble by Lucas Swierad for a successful and memorable end user that can help you and your team improve your project design.

Without a doubt, the user persona plays an important - if not fundamental - role in UX design. Whether it's a consumer app or enterprise software - designing with a user persona in mind is always going to increase its chance of success. The reason is that you're giving the user what they need as opposed to what you think they want.

An added bonus is that user personas are also a great way to get interdisciplinary departments on the same page, as well as obtain client and stakeholder buy-in.

Unless you're designing an app or website for yourself, what's the point in designing anything without first consulting your users?

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Why should you use user personas and how do you create them? Get all the steps to build one, as well as a great example and a list of user persona generators!

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Physical Prototypes
- AR Makr https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ar-makr/id1434081130
- Reality Composer https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reality-composer/id1462358802
- TinkerCAD https://www.tinkercad.com/

Digital Prototypes
- Figma https://www.figma.com/
- Marvel App https://marvelapp.com/
- Thunkable https://thunkable.com/#/

Service Prototype
- Notes: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notes/id1110145109
- Keynote: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keynote/id409183694?mt=12
- Miro: https://miro.com

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Tinkercad | From mind to design in minutes

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Tinkercad is a free, easy-to-use app for 3D design, electronics, and coding.

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The art of asking the right questions | Tim Ferriss, Warren Berger, Hope Jahren & more | Big Think

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A Good Benchmark on How Far to Iterate your Solution to

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A Good Benchmark on How Far to Iterate your Solution to

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As product managers, we often concentrate so much attention and effort on new feature releases that we fail to optimize for our most precious resource: time.

If you work in a startup, your goal is to achieve more with less - to deliver value and help the product grow with fewer people, reasonable budgets, and scarce resources. Startups are inherently chaotic, but at any given time, there are only a few actions that would make a real impact. Being lean means focusing on the right actions at the right times, and reducing waste as much as possible.

A core component of the lean philosophy is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Understanding the concept of the MVP will help you focus on the things that matter most while saving you time.

Frank Robinson, co-founder and president of SyncDev, introduced the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in 2001. An MVP is the result of product development and customer development executed in parallel, what he calls "synchronous development."

Frank Robinson's Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Definition
PROBLEM: SOLUTION: The MVP is the right-sized product for your company and your customer. It is big enough to cause adoption, satisfaction, and sales, but not so big as to be bloated and risky. Technically, it is the product with maximum ROI divided by risk. The MVP is determined by revenue-weighting major features across your most relevant customers, not aggregating all requests for all features from all customers." Teams often brag, "We added 800 new features." Some even consider feature count a badge of honor. Unfortunately adding features doesn't necessarily improve the business case. It may take longer, make the product less usable, and carry more risk.
-Frank Robinson, " How it Works: Minimum Viable Product "
"It says, think big for the long-term but small for the short-term. Think big enough that the first product is a sound launching pad for it and its next generation and the roadmap that follows, but not so small that you leave room for a competitor to get the jump on you."
The MVP is the sweet spot between return on investment (ROI) and risk, which correlates directly to effort and time to market. Robinson illustrates MVP with a grid. "Risk or Effort" is on the horizontal axis, and it is plotted against "ROI" on the vertical axis:

In the words of Robinson, the MVP is way more than determining the right set of product features that deliver the highest ROI-it is a mindset for the product and management teams:
"The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort."
Eric Ries' Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Definition
The Lean Startup Diagram - Building MVPs is an effective way to minimize time through the loop.
Eric Ries popularized the MVP concept. In his book The Lean Startup , Ries stressed the importance of learning in the product development process with his definition of the MVP:

A minimum viable product helps product managers begin the process of learning quickly. It's the fastest way to get through the validated learning loop (Build-Measure-Learn) with the minimum amount of effort and risk.

Unlike a prototype, an MVP is not only used to test design or technical. The main purpose of the MVP is to test fundamental hypotheses for your business model.

Minimum viable products can range in type and complexity, and are not always "products". An MVP could be anything from simple smoke tests like driving traffic to a landing page to live prototypes (often with missing features and bugs).

The primary goal of the MVP is to always minimize time and effort wasted by testing how the market reacts to your idea before building the complete product.

As a product manager, MVPs can help you

Validate product idea hypotheses with real-life data.

Reduce time-to-market for new feature releases.

Deliver value to your early adopters quickly. The MVP is the shortest route that delivers the most value to your first customers while simultaneously generating learnings for you.

Test your product/market fit before building a full-fledged product.

Collect viable data on user behavior to shape future product initiatives and go-to-market strategy. MVPs can be used as a leading component in your product prioritization process to help you make data-driven decisions.

Grow a pre-launch user base.

Eliminate waste - save money and time that would otherwise be spent on fruitless ideas.

Let's demonstrate how MVPs work in practice by showing a few examples from the most successful tech companies out there.

Dropbox

Instead of building a full-fledged solution that would require overcoming extreme technical hurdles and months of development, Drew Houston (one of the co-founders of Dropbox), created a simple three-minute video demonstration of the technology. Targeted at high-tech adopters, the video explained how easy it is to use the file-sharing platform.

The video led to 75,000 people waiting for a beta invite, literally overnight. Today, Dropbox is rumored to be worth more than $10 billion.

In the case of Dropbox, Houston used a video as a minimum viable product to validate his hypothesis that people wanted a file-sharing software that "just works like magic". The flocks of people signing up successfully validated his hypothesis.

Facebook

It's hard to imagine that social media juggernaut Facebook was once a website with the sole purpose of connecting students at Harvard University. Thefacebook (Facebook's MVP!), as it was then called, was a simple platform that connected students from the same classes by allowing them to post messages to shared boards.

By introducing Facebook to a super-narrow segment of the market, Zuckerberg managed to validate his idea and gain critical mass that later skyrocketed the adoption of the social media network. We all know how the story ends.

Uber

When Uber (then called UberCab) launched in 2009, it only worked on iPhones or via SMS, and it was available only in San Francisco. Uber's MVP was enough to prove that the idea of a cheap ride-sharing service had a market. Validated learning and data from the first app helped Uber to scale the business rapidly to where they are today. Now, Uber is valued at an estimated $68 billion and active in almost 80 countries across the globe.

AngelList

Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant founded AngelList in January 2010 using another type of MVP: the concierge MVP. When you think of AngelList today, you might envision a vast directory of startups and investors, powered by intelligent match-making algorithms and search functionalities. Throw all that away, replace it with a human, and you get the first version of AngelList.

In the early days of AngelList, Babak and Naval were doing manual email intros between startups and investors using their broad network of contacts. Only once they saw a potential in their idea did they build their first website.
"The aim of this two-page MVP was to check whether people would even consider using the app. I simply tweeted the link and asked people what they thought of the idea. After a few people used it to give me their email and I got some useful feedback via email and Twitter, I considered it 'validated.' In the words of Eric Ries, I had my first 'validated learning' about customers. It was time to gain a little more validated learning."
Buffer

Today, Buffer is one of the leading social media scheduling tools. The founder Joel Gascoigne did something similar to Dropbox's MVP. However, instead of a video, the smoke test was a minimal landing page. This is what the looked like:

In the words of Joel:

A step-by-step process for building an MVP

There are different frameworks available that you can use to validate your product hypothesis and find your MVP.

We're going to share the five-step process developed by Patrick Vlaskovits in his book T he Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development .

The process consists of the following steps:

1. Draw a map of your ecosystem.

2. Define the value proposition for each stakeholder.

3. Posit a final MVP.

4. Identify the biggest risk

5. Create your value path.

Let's dive into each step.

Step 1: Draw a map of your ecosystem

The map of your business ecosystem is a diagram that displays all of the users that are going to use your product. You may have different categories of people using the product.

Draw a box or circle representing each stakeholder: users, customers, partners, media channels, your customers' customers, and other entities.

Next, define the value - what your users receive from using your product. Note that value can also be indirect. For example, money that your customers' customers receive.

Third, draw lines for who pays whom.

Last, illustrate how your product is distributed - the marketing and sales channels that are used to reach the end-users.

Vlaskovtis gives an example with a peanut butter seller named "Hopped-Up PB". It is assumed that the peanut butter will be sold directly to consumers through their website, as well as through health stores.

The ecosystem map for Hopped Up PB looks like this:

Source: "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development"

Step 2: Define the value proposition for each stakeholder

What is the high-level benefit that each stakeholder in the ecosystem gains, and what are they willing to trade in exchange? What are the biggest pains of your users and where you can add the greatest value? Chris Ciligot from ClearBridge calls this a "pain and gain" map .

Customers get an increase in revenue.

Advertisers get exposure to a wide targeted audience.

Channel partners will save money and reduce customer acquisition costs.

The end-users get more free time with the family.

Step 3: Posit a final MVP

According to Vlaskovits, final MVPs test hypotheses for the business model while intermediate MVPs test high-risk components of the business model.

To identify your final MVP, think of the basic features of the product you need to provide to each stakeholder in order to achieve the value you proposed in the previous step. Describe what the final MVP looks like.

Apart from that, in this step, you must define what the user "pays" for using the MVP and what you measure to determine the viability of the MVP - in other words, your criteria for success.

Step 4: Identify the biggest risks

To validate critical assumptions, outline and order the risks of the business model from high-risk to low-risk. The objective of this exercise is to identify potential roadblocks and points of failure early on. That way, you minimize the risk of failure and large capital losses before building a full-fledged product.

Vlaskovits recommends creating a table with all of the risks noting the type of the risk, who to test (which stakeholder), as well as any dependencies and the way to test it.

Source: "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development"

Step 5: Create your value path

In the last step of the process, you're going to map out the value path - the Customer Discovery journey that takes you from where you are today to your final MVP. From the table you created in the previous steps, list the core assumptions you need to test for each Risk. You're likely going to have assumptions that you'll need to test using a mixture of customer development interviews and prototype/product features.

This is how the value path may look for our hypothetical peanut butter product:
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The value path is built of intermediate MVPs that test key assumptions. The first assumption to test is whether or not a market exists for high-energy peanut butter. This can be achieved by creating a simple landing page and tracking clicks on Buy buttons.

If that assumption is validated, the next milestone is to prove the peanut butter tastes good. To test that assumption, one could provide free samples at retail grocery stores.

If that goes well, one can start building the full-blown product and think about things like the jar and the brand label.

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What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? | Productboard

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As product managers, we often concentrate so much attention and effort on new feature releases that we fail to optimize for our most precious resource: time. If you work in a startup, your goal is to achieve more with less - to deliver value and help the product grow with fewer people, reasonable budgets, and scarce resources.

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Understand the 3 Lenses of Innovation Better

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Understand the 3 Lenses of Innovation Better

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https://isaacjeffries.com/blog/2016/3/9/three-lenses-of-innovation

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A large part of my work is teaching people how to use the Business Model Canvas, created by Strategyzer.
It's a profound and minimalistic tool, which can change the way you think about your enterprise and the philosophy behind your organization.
(If you're using the Canvas, you'll love my free Business Modelling eBook, full of tips for inventing and testing ideas that will change the world)

Surprisingly, in order to get good at the skill of business modelling, the canvas isn't the best starting point.

The brain can't handle ten boxes of new terminology machine-gunned at it, especially if you haven't had a coffee. Instead, there's an even better framework.

It's called "The Three Lenses of Innovation", and was created by IDEO.
Tim Fife from Second Road introduced it to me, and now I get to introduce it to you.

Here's how to think about it; in order to run a successful business, we have to create something that is Desirable (people want it), Feasible (we can actually do it) and it has to be Viable (we don't go broke).

We can't afford to get any of these wrong.
Therefore, we need to examine our business through each lens, to see how we're going and what could be improved.

The Desirability lens asks you to look at your customer;
How do they hear about you?
What brings them in the door?
What keeps them coming back?

Maybe you have a few different types of customers; can you articulate what each group finds most appealing?

The Feasibility lens focuses on the "back of house" aspects of your operation.
What needs to go on behind the scenes in order to create the magic for your customer?
Key staff members?
A recognizable and trusted brand?
Partnerships with industry leaders?

Ask yourself; what minor change to our operations would be diabolical?
What do we have in place to prevent that from happening?

The Viability lens is about the dollars.
Where do they come from?
Where do they get spent?
What's our breakeven point?
Which of our customers are most profitable, and are we doing anything to pursue them?

There are no right or wrong numbers, but not knowing your numbers is inexcusable.
How can we make decisions about the future if we don't have financial clarity?

What often happens is a series of gradual adjustments; a change to the Desirability leads to a tweak to the Feasibility, and now our Viability is a little worse.
How do we get back on course?
Another change, leads to another, leads to another, until you spiral inwards towards the intersection of the three lenses, where success lives.

Over time, the market shakes up your model, and will push you away from the centre.
Your job as an entrepreneur is to be vigilant, and constantly re-evaluate things through all three lenses.

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Three Lenses of Innovation - Isaac Jeffries

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A large part of my work is teaching people how to use the Business Model Canvas, created by Strategyzer.It's a profound and minimalistic tool, which can change the way you think about your enterprise and the philosophy behind your organization.

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Design Thinking from the Creators Themselves

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Design Thinking from the Creators Themselves

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Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

IDEO did not invent design thinking, but we have become known for practicing it and applying it to solving problems small and large. It's fair to say that we were in the right place at the right time. When we looked back over our shoulder, we discovered that there was a revolutionary movement behind us.

About this site

This design thinking site is just one small part of the IDEO network. There's much more, including full online courses we've developed on many topics related to design thinking and its applications. We fundamentally believe in the power of design thinking as a methodology for creating positive impact in the world-and we bring that belief into our client engagements as well as into creating open resources such as this.

At IDEO, we're often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We've developed this website in response to that request. Here, we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You'll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution.

(From 2008-2018, designthinking.ideo.com was the home of IDEO's design thinking blog, written by our CEO, Tim Brown. You can find that blog here.)

Design thinking in context

We live and work in a world of interlocking systems, where many of the problems we face are dynamic, multifaceted, and inherently human. Think of some of the big questions being asked by businesses, government, educational and social organizations: How will we navigate the disruptive forces of the day, including technology and globalism? How will we grow and improve in response to rapid change? How can we effectively support individuals while simultaneously changing big systems? For us, design thinking offers an approach for addressing these and other big questions.

There's no single definition for design thinking. It's an idea, a strategy, a method, and a way of seeing the world. It's grown beyond the confines of any individual person, organization or website. And as it matures, its history deepens and its impact evolves. For IDEO, design thinking is a way to solve problems through creativity. Certainly, it isn't a fail-safe approach; nor is it the only approach. But based on the impact we are seeing in our work, the relevance of design thinking has never been greater.

Design thinking today

Design thinking is maturing. It's moving from a nascent practice to an established one, and with that comes interest and critique. People are debating its definition, pedigree, and value. As a leading and committed practitioner of design thinking, IDEO has a stake in this conversation-and a responsibility to contextualize its value in the present moment and, importantly, in the future.

We've learned a lot over the years, and we'd like to share our insights. We've seen design thinking transform lives and organizations, and on occasion we've seen it fall short when approached superficially, or without a solid foundation of study. Design thinking takes practice; and as a community of designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, researchers, and more, we've followed the journey to mastery, and developed maps that can guide others.

Designer's mindset

At IDEO, we are a community of designers who naturally share a mindset due to our profession. Our teams include people who've trained in applied fields such as industrial design, environmental architecture, graphic design, and engineering; as well as people from law, psychology, anthropology, and many other areas. Together, we have rallied around design thinking as a way of explaining design's applications and utility so that others can practice it, too. Design thinking uses creative activities to foster collaboration and solve problems in human-centered ways. We adopt a "beginner's mind," with the intent to remain open and curious, to assume nothing, and to see ambiguity as an opportunity.

To think like a designer requires dreaming up wild ideas, taking time to tinker and test, and being willing to fail early and often. The designer's mindset embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity. And most critically, design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A human-centered designer knows that as long as you stay focused on the people you're designing for-and listen to them directly-you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.

Anyone can approach the world like a designer. But to unlock greater potential and to learn how to work as a dynamic problem solver, creative confidence is key. For IDEO founder David Kelley, creative confidence is the belief that everyone is creative, and that creativity isn't the ability to draw or compose or sculpt, but a way of understanding the world.

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IDEO introduces design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it.

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Root Cause Analysis to find Richer Insights

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Root Cause Analysis to find Richer Insights

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Root Cause Analysis - Tracing a Problem to Its Origins

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Organizational causes - A system, process, or policy that people use to make decisions or do their work is faulty (for example, no one person was responsible for vehicle maintenance, and everyone assumed someone else had filled the brake fluid). RCA looks at all three types of causes.

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The Fascinating History of Design Thinking

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The Fascinating History of Design Thinking

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https://designthinking.ideo.com/history

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Design thinking has deep roots in a global conversation that has been unfolding for decades.

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Innovative examples of Design Thinking in Action

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Innovative examples of Design Thinking in Action

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