I wrote about design-led companies last week. To my surprise, it received some attention, which prompted me to think in a more practical terms.
As mentioned in the original post, I wrote it to document and further explore my thoughts. So let’s explore how design can serve as an instrument for beautiful business.
When building a product, the team has to deal with four key risks.
- There is a value risk. Does it solve problems for people?
- There is usability risk. Can people use the product to achieve the desired outcome?
- There is a feasibility risk. Can the team develop a valuable solution to the problem?
- And finally, there is the business viability risk. Can the team deliver the product profitably?
How can we overcome those risks with beautiful design?
The double diamond framework guides the design process from exploring a problem to focusing on action.
I have a similar mental model called Framing and Shaping from the book Shape Up.
In the first phase, the framing phase, you aim to narrow down the problem. I find three guiding questions helpful:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- Which slice of the problem are we addressing now?
- What will change when we’re done, and how will we know?
When the problem is not framed concretely, you risk
- shipping things that have no impact,
- getting frustrated because you don’t know what problem you are trying to solve, which makes it even harder to understand why no one is using the feature.
In the next step, in the shaping phase, you narrow it down to one solution.
In addition to prototyping, here are three guiding questions that help drive progress:
- What options do we have?
- What decisions do we need to make before starting to build?
- What moving parts do we need to consider?
If the you don’t spend enough time on shaping, you either overspend your time or resources, or you make compromises during delivery that degrade the customer experience.
Framing and shaping are essential because they keep the team from becoming aimless explorers or hopeful visionaries trying to land on a product that is valuable to someone.
Instead, it helps to move closer to a “Minimum Lovable Product” - the MLP.
Why a Minimum Lovable Product?
Design-driven companies take an iterative approach to their processes. When shipping products, they start with the most constrained feature set.
This means that the product optimally solves a defined problem.
If the product is too flexible or too broad, you run the risk of receiving poor feedback and not learning anything new. Users may also use the feature in unintended ways, providing further learning opportunities.
Why should you choose MLP over MVP?
I do not like the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) because the mantra “move fast, break things” makes it easy to ignore the beautiful details of the product.
A user is more willing to test a new product if it seems trustworthy, high quality and valuable. Therefore, I consider Minimum Lovable Product as something that is
- simple – the interface is obvious and self-explanatory;
- trustworthy - the product shows great attention to detail and care for me;
- valuable - it brings the user closer to their goal.
A user may not take the time to report a lack of consistency in button types or immediately abandon a sluggish product, but these issues can make them wonder if you care and if they can trust you in the long run.
Unfortunately, a valuable and user-friendly product is no guarantee of business success (the last risk when building product).
But MLPs promote user satisfaction, which in turn boosts word of mouth, the foundation for a beautiful, profitable business.
Teams that are committed to design are imaginative and yet grounded in the present.
They are driven by empathy for those who suffer from the problem, rather than enthusiasm for a particular solution.
They are optimistic about the future, but pessimistic about execution.
And they are never satisfied with the current state of their product.