Short on Budget? Use These Design Methodologies to Build Your First MVP Without a Full-time Designer

My name is Marina Chernyshova, and in my professional life I often worked with startups at different stages with interface design. Year after year, I notice the same questions arising. I am also a mentor in the Bocconi for Innovation program, where I mentor startups on how to use various design methods and resources to improve the user experience in their products.

In this article, I want to discuss whether an early-stage startup needs a full-time designer and how to approach UX/UI design in general. This article will be helpful for founders and emerging tech entrepreneurs who are just beginning to think about their first tech products, with little more than a raw idea and a business plan.

When startups move beyond the simple idea stage and start working on an MVP or first prototype — whether to validate their idea or present it to initial investors — founders can often feel stuck. On the one hand, building a prototype seems to require a profound set of skills, making the involvement of designers appear essential. On the other hand, startups often lack resources, raising the question of how to pay designers for building a prototype.

In this article, I argue that an early-stage startup doesn’t always need a full-time designer. Product-oriented founders can often build their first prototypes on their own by following a clear and logical approach.

I’ve split this topic into two parts to help founders better understand it. In the first part, I provide an overview of how to approach designing the first prototype, which includes several essential steps and methods such as persona development, interviews, customer journey maps, and user flows. You will see that UX is not just about design; it’s more about perspective — it’s how a user interacts with the company through various touchpoints. In this context, this work can and should be done by more than just designers. For founders, taking these steps will help shape the perspective of the future business as a whole. In the second part I will share useful tips and resources which can help founders to build the first MVP using available community resources.

The personas method

To move from your idea to what will constitute the first prototype, I insist on starting with the Personas Method. Although it emerged as a design technique, I find it essential for other aspects of building the product.

The personas method is a research-driven technique used in design, marketing, and product development to create fictional but realistic profiles representing different types of users or customers. A persona method helps to understand your target audience more specifically, its priorities and potential channels of communication with it.

A persona can contain: name, age, profession, interests, goals, values, etc. You can add some additional information relevant to your idea: which devices they use, in which social networks they sit, what kind of sports they do etc.\

How to organise: My tip is to your ready-made Figma Template. But if it is too complicated, simply build it in the Google Doc or in your notepad.

The Ultimate goal: understanding the profiles of the potential users helps to correctly format messages on banners and achieve better UI.

Interviews

Based on the insights unlocked after applying the personas method, you can target your audience and invite them for an interview.

Tips for successful interviews:

• Formulate open-ended questions to encourage participants to provide detailed responses;
• Start with some light conversation to create a comfortable environment
;
• Observe and listen more than you talk.

Examples of the questions you can ask during an interview:

• Could you please tell me how you usually choose the tickets for your holiday trip?
• Which problem did you try to solve making this purchase?
• What alternatives did you consider before making this purchase?
• What was the most important factor in your decision to buy this product?

How to organise: search people through thematic groups on Facebook, Instagram or other social media. For example: if you are making an application for runners, you can write a request to a group about running with an offer to chat for 15 minutes or you can ask the particular questions in writing. Many people are willing to respond.

The Ultimate goal: understand feelings and emotions of the target audience, what causes their concerns regarding the purchase  — high price, ignorance of the market, fear of making a mistake, something else.

JTBD и User Story

JTBD should be formulated on the basis of the user interviews. Ideally, it's worth talking to real people who relate to your potential audience. If it's difficult for you to communicate with strangers, then you can start with your friends and acquaintances to practice.

Jobs To Be Done is a concept in product development that assumes that "Job" in this context is a specific problem or task that a person is trying to solve in their life.

Job Story has a specific formula that allows you to describe both the needs and the product at once:

For example, "When I want to exercise, but I don't have time and money for the gym, I want to install a convenient and inexpensive online workout app to get in shape without leaving home and save money."

Another similar but a bit different methodology is User Story. A user story is a product description based on the specific characteristics of the user and includes a description of the product's functions from his point of view.

User Story also has a formula:

For example, "As a 30-year-old programmer who often has back and neck pain due to sedentary work, I want to order a massage chair to make my life more comfortable without leaving home."

A User Story may be more difficult to compose than a Job Story if you have not 1-2, but 5-10 or more segments of the target audience. In this case, get ready to describe the "story" for each segment.

You can choose one of these methods, for example, the one that looks more clear to you, and try to apply it to your idea. You can organize it in a more convenient way for you because it’s just some sentences, so you can start from writing it to your notepad.

The main goal of the JTBD or User Story frameworks is to guide decisions during product discovery, design and development by digging deeper into user behavior. It helps to explore why customers choose a product, and how it helps them solve a problem or achieve an outcome.

Customer Journey Map

After completing 3 steps above, we are getting closer to Customer Journey Map (CJM) and User Flow. Both concepts are important for product development but they address different parts.

CJM is a visual representation of the end-to-end experience a customer has with a product, service, or brand. Ideally, the CJM is filled in after the user interviews or even in the process together with them. But if this is not possible, then you can start by filling it in, imagining yourself in the user's position.

Normally CJM includes the following: Awareness > Consideration > Acquisition > Service > Loyalty, but for digital products it often includes: Discovery >  Download>  Onboarding>  Retention >  Advocacy.

The most important thing is to pay attention to pain points and how we can deal with them using the interface of our product. For instance, we can add gamification to overcome boredom, or we can provide contextual hints or templates for complex features.

How to organise: There are a lot of digital boards like Miro or FigJam where you can create and develop your CJM. They are really useful because you can share them with your team and it’s quite easy to onboard them. Personally I prefer FigJam because the work on the product design most likely is carried out in Figma and they match perfectly with each other.\

FigJam has its default template for CJM and a guide on how to use it. For me it’s effective and works very well.

But it’s also totally fine to use a real sticker board for that and if you find that this methodology suits you, you can move your CJM to digital format later at any time.

Ultimate goal: Among other things, CJM is crucial for identifying the pain points of potential customers and the opportunities next to them. With CJM, you can formulate an informed development strategy and prioritize the features within the product that are worth developing.

User Flow

After creating your CJM you can transfer it to User Flow. If CJM is an approximate user way without binding to specific screens or interface elements, then User Flow is already the first top-level scheme of your product or service.

A User Flow is a visual diagram that maps out the path a user takes through a product or website to accomplish a specific task or goal. It breaks down the sequence of steps users follow, showing how they navigate through screens or pages, interact with elements, and make choices. User flows are essential in UX/UI design for understanding user behavior and creating an intuitive user experience.

Common recommendations for user flow creating:

• Clearly define the purpose of the product or features for which you are developing user flow. This will help you focus on the key steps and user needs.
• Consider the business goals of the product. Design the product so that each step of the user leads him to the target action. For example, the target action may be to increase the number of registered users, which means that the user flow should always lead the user to registration form.
• It is important to build the user flow so that it works without delay. For example, extra fields in the input form or too long onboarding can spoil the user experience  in comparison with competitors.
• Think over all possible points of contact of the user. For example, if we are talking about the registration step, you should provide different options: registration via Gmail, Apple ID, phone etc.

FigJam is also great for User Flow building. You can store all your diagrams and data in one project and make it more visual and easy to change.

User flow helps for coordinating the product structure between all team members: designers, developers, product managers, marketers and other stakeholders. It allows you to avoid ambiguity and misunderstandings discussing new features and obstacles.

Conclusion

I hope this article helps founders and other team members choose the right strategy for building their first prototype, especially if they lack the resources to hire a full-time designer. Even if you’ve never seen yourself in the shoes of a designer and have no background in the field, many design methodologies are available that can be understood by people without a professional design background. Methodologies such as customer journey mapping, interviews, and user flows are useful far beyond design work.

In my next article, I will share more practical resources and links to help you move forward with your MVP in a cost-effective way, such as a ready-made design-system. You don’t need to strive for perfection from the very beginning. Just start, and you will gain valuable insights that will make your product’s user experience more organic and smooth. This will save development resources in the future and help avoid negative reviews from users.