“Alive, but not fun to spend time with.” / Cameron Moll / Designer, Speaker, Author

“Alive, but not fun to spend time with.”

published 11 February 2013

Using a [minimum] viable product is like visiting someone in an intensive care unit. They’re alive, but not fun to spend time with. As a result, I see more and more companies who focus on MVP produce products that fail to achieve their goals.

Instead, Ian suggests shifting development focus to creating a “Minimum Delightful Product”:

When a product is delightful it just makes sense. It works the way you’d expect and the experience is highly satisfying. Delightful products are adopted faster, get better word of mouth, and create higher satisfaction.

Those are claims that warrant data to back them up. But I can say from personal experience—and I bet you can too—that I have signed up for many websites and apps, only to leave some of them within 5 minutes after registration, never to return. They functioned, indeed. But they failed to delight and didn’t fill a void.

I side with something said at SXSW 2012 by @TravisBogard: