JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

Early product design and development in startup is filled with various challenges due to lack of resources, product idea, finding the targets markets, and so on. Scientific literature did not concentrate on those challenges during the development of the minimum viable product (MVP) in startups.

The aim of this research was to create an MVP to collect user feedback to validate the initial product idea and discover the challenges and benefits when collecting user feedback. A case of FOOODO (web-based food selling application) was considerated as startup situation to validate the idea by collecting unbiased user feedback. The result of the study presented the way of collecting feedback from potential users to validate the first version of the product in start-ups context towards the MVP.

To conduct the research a qualitative semi structured interview, observation and design science research (DSR) was used. The findings of the study presented the way of creating MVP through Lean UX process and various challenges factors subjected to MVP, future product concept, usability of MVP, right user selection and environment settings.

The result of the study suggested that most of the potential user are not able to understand the future product concept until they see something visually, whereas MVP plays an important role for collecting user feedback during the development of the first version of the product.

The research will contribute to the user experience (UX) practitioner’s community to understand the challenges by various factors that start-ups face during user feedback and MVP experimentation session and discover the benefits of collecting feedback with a minimum version of the product.