The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

Chapter 9 Test Your MVP with Customers (Step 6)

Once you have applied the principles of great UX design to create the prototype of your MVP candidate, the next step in the Lean Product Process is to test it with users. This is where the rubber meets the road. You'll recall that Chapter 7 discussed two fundamentally different types of test you can run: quantitative and qualitative. That is, you'll either pay attention to the details of what you're hearing from a small number of customers (qualitative) or to the aggregated results for a large number of customers (quantitative).

Quantitative tests, such as A/B tests and landing page tests, are relatively straightforward to conduct and analyze. Since they don't involve talking to users, they're just about the data. You track the conversion rate (or other metric) for your MVP test and see how it compares to the target value that represents a successful outcome (or to the value for other alternatives). You need to be mindful of your sample size, which will affect the level of confidence of your results.

This chapter focuses on how to conduct qualitative user testing of your MVP. User feedback is incredibly valuable because it identifies what you don't know. When you are so close to your product, it is difficult—often impossible—to perceive it as a new customer does. You have become more familiar with your product than any new user could ever be. As a result, you have “product blindness”: blind spots for the issues that a new user will ...