Haste makes waste

What will happen if you miss UX/UI design stage in creating an MVP?

Eugene Andreev, Delivery manager
4 minutes of reading





Most founders want to bring their project to the MVP stage as soon as possible and the timing is crucial. It forces founders to skip some stages and rely on frameworks and at some points it makes sense but some things should get worked on pretty seriously. Especially when we speak about user flows and the user experience of your product.
startup robot
We had a case when one product had been developed based on Material UX/UI, it was well structured and straightforward in terms of business goals but it was revealed that users find it not intuitive and it is not clear for them what steps they have to make to get the desired result.

One of the main goals for the product was increasing the retention rate and growing new users by 15% per week. But for some reason, the results were not so encouraging. It was hard to find the reason and find the point to grow. So the owner of this product reached out to us.




We went through a time-consuming discovery stage which took about two weeks. It allowed the founder to rethink his project and we even managed to find new features to be done. Our UX/UI navigation expert created a list of user behavior using the «jobs to be done» approach and suggested a new vision. In addition, we run through the audit stage and find out where the software performance can be improved.



It turned out that some stages of user interaction needed onboarding materials during the first usage. We suggested that upgrading design, skipping this stage, and relying on the material framework was not the best solution. It is always important to know who your focus users are and constantly check their feedback even before your project is ready.

After the audit of the project, it was decided to design the UX/UI part first, even though it took efforts to rebuild the front-end and some part of the back-end logic. This step led to an increase of the retention rate up to 30% and increased the number of new users signed up by referral links up two 20% after the rebuild of the app with a new design.
startup robot
The new features which we brainstormed were implemented as the next step after the new upgraded vision of design and navigation scheme. It even allowed to increase the number of paying subscribers and generated additional cash flow.

Now looking back over two years of successful work on this product it is definitely worth it reinventing user flow and auditing the project.

To summarise the above, what kind of conclusions can we make?

  • It is highly important to start testing your potential users' feedback even before you have a ready-to-launch project.

  • While trying to launch your project as soon as possible and with a limited budget don’t skip important stages like user flow research and design. You can start losing your audience.

  • Third-party vendor audits can reveal non-obvious ways to improve your metrics. Generate features that can generate cash flow and paid subscribers.