Fast Forward Design: MVP’s with the 90/10 rule
Designers inhabit an amazing landscape where the platforms we work on have very polished UI patterns. iOS, Android, and the web all have standards that we can use to create minimum viable products quickly and with little effort. When it comes to putting your idea out there quickly, 90%, if not 100%, of your minimum viable product should be rooted in these patterns, leaving 10% to focus on custom or truly unique aspects of your design.
With so many well-tested and Lego-like UI pieces out there, designers can suspend the idea that design is the creation of meticulous, pixel-perfect snowflakes until the product is more mature. And by "mature," I mean we've tested our ideas, reduced the risks, and demonstrated that we have a product worthy of further polish and development.
Using patterns is a way out of your own head, and by adopting a lean UX mentality, we shift the focus from pixels to research. We can begin to ask questions about how people will use the product, navigate it, and what we as designers can do to support that.
When designers adopt this rapid approach, some amazing things happen:
The patterns become your wireframe. Since the patterns are closer to the real product than grayscale drawings, it reduces errors in translation by the developer, making it clear what pieces of UI should be employed.
There's a focus on what matters. Whatever is left after the application of stock UI patterns is where the custom work happens. Laboring over the look and feel of a title bar when a custom control is needed elsewhere is a waste of time so early in a product's lifecycle.
Empower developers. Some clients just don't have designers to maintain their products. What are you doing to enable developers to understand patterns better so they can make informed design decisions when you're not there?
You quickly embrace the MVP mindset. With the ideas of Big Design Up Front (BDUF) and pixel-perfect out the window, you can ship code without guilt about lacking high polish. This leads to a tangible product that can be tested, de-risked, and then polished.
Design remains part of the ongoing product development conversation, because design isn't a phase. Again, with the concept of the BDUF shattered, designers focus on smaller bits of research and delivering user value continuously and just in time.
Becoming adept in the ways of the HIG, Google design guidelines, or Bootstrap will change how you see your favorite apps. Most of what you see in an app are re-skinned UI patterns. By understanding the basic rules of UI guidelines, you understand how to move them towards greater brand alignment and visual quality.
These points should reinforce the idea that higher-level design thinking is possible if you let a design system handle the grunt work. How are our products ever to mature if we get bogged down in designing stuff that's already supported or get lost in the weeds over visual polish too early?
Innovation and solid user experience come with maturity, the foundation of which is a more humble approach via the basics. The essence of a minimum viable product design is getting an unfinished idea out there quickly for testing. This is why the 90/10 rule, applied to web, iOS, and Android projects, is a great way to move forward fast.
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