Five tips to go from viable to lovable

Here are some great insights to help guide your product down a "Loveable" user experience path:

• Focus on value: Most often, teams are laser-focused on what they are building, not why. Users aren't motivated to buy the what (lawnmower); they buy the why (I need to cut my grass). Build stuff that matters.
• Do one thing really well: One solid function or feature is much better than three mediocre ones. Learn from success stories such as Dropbox and Instagram. They created masses of followers that love their products by simply focusing on doing one thing really well.
• Validate and iterate often: Working on moving targets with no end in sight equals lost vision, lost opportunity, lost motivation, and lost revenue. Validate your designs against short cycles. Timebox your MVP to 90-day increments (12-week cycles). 90 days is enough time to deliver on your vision, but not long enough to lose sight of it.
• Make the user first: Zoom in on problems that are real pain points for your customer. Have you validated these pain points, or are they your opinion? Remember, user-centered product design is an exercise in other-centeredness. It's about your audience's response to your products, not yours.
• Talk the talk, walk the walk: Commit to the objective and stay disciplined to the process. If design is important to you, demonstrate it through your actions: bring design in early to collaborate on MVP strategy/vision—start wireframes and protos early. Don't just say that your customer is important to you, show it through your actions: test and validate your MVP ideas.