Has the MVP/Prototype UI/UX quality criteria increased for certain types of B2C mobile apps?
I am writing this article primarily to express my own controversial opinion about early stage MVP mobile app creation. I acknowledge that I may be completely wrong but want to write this article just to express my opinions and add it to my personal blog collection.
Just as a preface to the main text, I have been creating mobile apps for the last 6 years and have a moderately good understanding about the mobile app industry.
I have noticed a lot of new mobile apps that are being released to the App Store and Google Play follow the Lean Startup methodology where the developers, in the early stages, try to create very simple “trashy” prototypes, release them and then hope to get user feedback.
In my opinion, this method will not work for all mobile app startups and here is my reasoning.
The current UI and UX standards of nearly all of the highly rated mobile apps are extremely high. Look at all of the self-help, productivity, meditation, note taking apps that are rated 4.5+ stars with a few dozen thousand interviews and you will notice that they have impeccable user experience and have figured what works and doesn't.
Let’s say, for example, you are a solo developer and you have partnered up with the best human behavioural psychologist in the world, who has created a new and revolutionary framework of note taking and productivity tracking. You decide to create a new note taking and productivity tracking mobile Startup together that will use that framework .
You design a simple app in Figma and prototype an MVP mobile app in Flutter and release it to the general public. You do some basic marketing using Google AdWords or Quora Ads and get your first 1000 users.
We can suppose that most of these users generally use other apps that claim to solve the same problems and have a basic idea and understanding about how these types of products look like and work.
Now, upon entrance into your mobile app prototype, they will be greeted by the semi polished looking screens with no clear user onboarding process, basic fonts, button and label styles and no fancy animations/transitions. From what I have seen, even though the basic concept of the app is revolutionary, users are gonna churn just because they feel that the content of the app is hideous.
As a direct effect, you and your team will get a false sense on why your app is failing to retain users.
After that, the Pandoras box has been opened and your Startup is headed on a downward spiral to failure.
Solution
In my humble opinion, the solution to this problem is just going a few extra miles when designing and creating the initial mobile MVPs and prototypes to the point where they are somewhat clean and usable and have decent UX with a clear user onboarding.
Your early adopters are gonna appreciate that little bit of extra effort and willingness to go one extra mile for them and therefore be more likely to become loyal customers.
Thanks for reading and keep hustling and creating awesome mobile app Startups!
