A Minimum Viable Product, popularly known as an MVP, is the first draft of your app. An MVP helps the company to test out their app idea among the users and get valuable feedback, which helps them develop their app farther. With an MVP, you can be sure of whether your app idea works or not, along with what kind of modification it needs to make it adaptable among the users.
With that being said, it is now obvious that an MVP is the most important element of an app development process. With MVP you can test out the validity of your idea. Since it is an important part of the development process, you need to be aware of the best way to plan an MVP.
Here is a five-step way of planning an MVP for your product. With this, you can create and test out your app idea easily.
Understanding The User Needs
The idea behind any product is driven by user need. No matter what the product is, it is created to solve specific user needs. And that is why understanding the user needs while planning the MVP for your app is an important step.
With interviews and surveys, you can get a better image of what kind of problems the users are facing and what kind of solutions they need. If you hire any app development company NYC, they would help you with surveys about user needs. Understanding the needs of your target audience is going to help you understand whether your app idea is going to work for the target market or not. Chances are the idea you are working with might not be new. Even then, how you can distinguish your app from others in the market can be determined with the feedback of the users.
Analyzing The Market Competition
Even though it might seem like your idea is unique and one of a kind, you should still go for a market analyzation. There are good chances that the app idea you are working with is already out there. Which is why an analysis of your competitors would let you know all you need to know about the uniqueness of your app.
The market analysis is important before you build an MVP because this way you can make sure what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it. Which is why any company for mobile app development NYC would perform a market analysis before they start building your app. You can get an understanding of how they created their MVP, what kind of features they included in it. With market and competition analysis, you can gather very important information that will help you develop your MVP.
Defining The User Journey
When it comes to performing an action on an app, there are certain actions the user is going to perform. If they want to buy a shirt, they will have to go through your app, on a certain path, and select the shirt they want to buy. To facilitate the user to perform these specific actions, there are many things you have to add and develop into the app.
Before you start on the development of the Minimum Viable Product, you have to with the mobile app development company new york you’ve hired and write down all the possible scenarios you think are possible. Figure out the problems the users can face while performing actions on your app, and along with that, also figure out the solutions to those problems. This way you can define a clear user journey before you come out with your MVP.
Listing And Prioritizing Features
Now you have to list down all the features you think you need for your app. These features are going to help you define the user journey so make sure that the features are not just there for show, but they are also useful.
Once you have listed all the features you need, you need to prioritize the features to include them in your MVP. you can’t add all the features in your app from the get-go. So you have to prioritize the features you think are absolutely necessary for the users to perform the minimal tasks in your app. In this, you can ask for help from the users themselves. They can help you with prioritizing the right features for your MVP.
Developing And Testing
After you have defined the scope of work, you need to start with development. And after you have gone through the long process of development, it is a wise idea to have the app tested. With the testing phase, you can figure out if there are any kind of bugs and flaws in the app and its codes.
The alpha testing is limited to a selected number of people within the development company. Whether you have opted for in-house development, or chosen a mobile app development company NYC, the alpha testing is going to help you understand the flaws in the app code, if there are any. Once you are sure that all the flaws have been taken care off, you can move to beta testing. Beta testing will bring in insightful user feedback that is going to help you develop your app to be a better solution for the users.
With MVP you can learn about your product in the most affordable way possible. Once you are through the MVP phase, you will know whether your idea is something valuable or needs to be discarded.
