What is Minimum Viable Experience?
Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) refers to the minimum 360 brand experience from interfering with the product, including marketing and customer support. It shows how a customer feels about the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and aims at encouraging customers to re-engage with the product in future.
MVE vs. MVP
MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is one of the most well-known concepts that creates the basis for future success. It focuses on the product itself and what a user can achieve with it, be it eating a morning croissant or driving an autonomous car.
Yet, people want more than simple satisfaction of their needs. The same morning croissant also hits their emotions, brings the necessary peace and aesthetics into their routine. When it comes to delighting or surprising users, we speak about MVE, which measures how the product can increase people’s happiness and, in this way, encourage retention.
MVE Elements
MVE always depends on the product or service you deliver – and on the company itself: a startup might have merely a support email address and this will be accepted as sufficient by its first customers, while even a new product from an international giant, like Amazon or Microsoft, is expected to come with a great 360 brand experience from Day 1. Yet, MVE has several core elements to consider:
- Branding and marketing. Even at the beginning of the product journey, it is important to position the company as a particular brand with its own DNA. Think of marketing messages, of the company values and the ways to engage with users.
- Sales and onboarding. Sales and a smooth onboarding process can help users boost confidence in the product and let them anticipate smooth further operation.
- Customer support. Something that even a small business can do, is to let customers feel that you care and will help them out in case of issues or questions that will inevitably arise.
- Integration. Integrating a product into a wider ecosystem, like Slack or AWS, can encourage users to include it to their stack and will make their experience of engaging with the product more seamless.
MVE Metrics
Though experience is hard to capture due to their inherent subjectivity, there are several reliable indicators of customer satisfaction with the MVP:
- User interviews and surveys: since MVE is all about how people feel, it is the easiest way to collect first-hand feedback by listening to people’s voices.
- Retention: the metric showing how many customers decide to re-engage with the product helps understand the value of the experience the product gives them and the chance to succeed.
- NPS Scores: the likelihood of recommending your product to others is another productive way to understand how they feel about the product and put users’ subjective experience into solid numbers.
MVE is especially important in saturated markets, where it is the experience provided by a company as a distinct brand sets the product apart from endless competitors. Besides, as the world of business and product development becomes more client-oriented, MVE is gaining momentum, since in many cases, having a seamlessly working MVP is not enough to motivate users to stay with you after the first try.
