Make an ugly MVP

Piotr Bakker
1 min readJul 11, 2018

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Image: Jack Hamilton, Unsplash

The bar for product design is set higher than ever. Even banking apps look good these days. Apparently, people have standards now. They won’t sleep with just about any app they come across.

So does that mean your new app needs to sport the fit and finish of Instagram or Netflix right out of the gate? Not necessarily.

Here’s the thing — if your app looks terrible but does something extremely useful, will it stop anybody that’s serious about solving that particular problem from trying it out? Probably not.

That’s why you should make an ugly MVP. It will help you answer the key question — is this thing I am working on actually useful? Because if it’s ugly and people are still lining up to use it — you know you are onto something.

Not that you should make your app intentionally ugly. But if you think you are building something people might find useful — test that. Not how pretty your user interface is.

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Piotr Bakker

Product designer and occasional writer 🇪🇺🇺🇸