About

During the IDEATE stage of the design process, you will have explored many alternatives and come up with many ideas for the artefact that you are designing. The goal is to converge onto a single, powerful design concept that you will construct in the PROTOTYPE stage. Therefore, you define a minimum viable product (MVP), which is the minimum that your product or system ought to do, or the essential functions and features that your product or service must have. You simply do two things: i. you select the most important functions and features for your product or system and combine them, and ii. you eliminate the least important functions and features. The minimum viable product helps designers to focus their efforts on the important things and discount the optional or unimportant things. Which means that designers will be able to develop their design concept more quickly, test it with users, and unearth problems sooner.
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FIGURE: The MVP chart with three rows for the design team to discuss and decide the essential, non-essential, and optional functions and features of their designed product or system.

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​​​​​​​What you need

• Your sketches and notes from your design process.
• A2 or A1, poster-size sheet of white paper, or you can use a chalkboard or whiteboard.
• Sticky notes, and pens or pencils.
• A place with chairs and tables to work freely without distractions.
   

Method

The design team comes together to define the MVP. An individual designer can do this alone, too.

• Begin by looking through your design sketches and notes from the IDEATE stage to extract the most important functions and features of the thing that you are designing. Write each function or feature on a sticky note, one function or feature per note. Place the sticky notes either on a wall or on a table, where everyone can see them.
• Write the project title at the top of a blank sheet of poster-size paper. Draw three rows, and title them:
  • Essential functions, that your product or system must do.
  • Non-essential functions, that are not essential, but will be useful.
  • Optional functions, that are neither essential nor particularly useful, but would be nice to have.
• The team then picks one sticky note at a time, and discusses whether that function or feature is essential, non-essential, or optional.
  • The decisions that you make here will determine where you will focus your effort during the PROTOTYPE stage.
  • Once you have decided, you simply attach the sticky note to the correct row.
  • You may have to eliminate some functions or features altogether, for example, if they conflict with essential functions. Put those sticky notes aside.
• At the end, you should have a chart that lists the essential functions and features in the top row, non-essential ones in the middle row, and optional ones in the bottom row.
• Photograph the chart, or re-draw the chart in your A4 notepad, for your records.

Tips

• It will be useful to display this chart somewhere visible, while you are constructing your prototype.
• At any point, you may decide to move a function or feature up or down the chart.
  • You may decide that a function Is more essential than you first thought, or you may realise that you have got too many functions, so you must eliminate some, or make them optional.
  • You may even have to eliminate a function while constructing your prototype if, for example, you discover that it is not feasible to build.