MVP? Better look for the MUP

Diegovz
3 min readSep 10, 2021

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Don’t look for an MVP, look for an MUP

Often we seek to develop the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by establishing a series of features that the product must have as a minimum to go to market, the problem here is: What good are these features if the user is not able to use them? Therefore, we must change the focus and look for the Minimum Usable Product (MUP).

The fact that a product is viable from a business point of view does not mean that it is viable for the user. No one involved in the development of the project can act as the “voice of the user” without proper research.

Many times we fall into the error of using our own assumptions to make design decisions, having the false feeling that we are also users and therefore our opinion is valid for it. While it is true that the vast majority of us are “the users” in other products, when it comes to the one we are developing, the following problem arises:

“You know too much…”

Whether you’re a developer, architecture director, product manager, designer, etc. You know too much about the product, basically because you are building it. Now you might ask yourself: “What difference does it make if I know too much…”. Here’s an example.

What you assume…

You are developing the flow for ordering food in your delivery App and one of the functionalities of your MVP is to be able to remove products that you have previously added, so you suppose that the logical thing to do would be to:

  1. Go to the order summary.
  2. Tap the “Update cart” button.
  3. Remove the product you want
  4. Save changes

*Just Eat’s actual flow in 2021

The user’s reality…

If you have not researched your users, unfortunately you cannot assume that the above flow is correct. In fact, you could ask yourself the following questions to see that you are indeed missing information:

“Do you know if that flow is the most efficient?”
“Will your users be able to perform the task?”
“Do you know if the flow fits your users’ mental model?”
“Is cognitive friction being generated at any point?”

The answers will be found by conducting a proper user research. In this way we can develop a MUP (Minimum Usable Product) with which we can be sure that the included functionalities will be used effectively and efficiently by the users.

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