Iterate, iterate, iterate: the key to sustainable success

The value of knowing your MVP

MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product and this is a key term for a successful agile methodology. This does not mean the minimum amount of work you need to do to a product before you can deliver it, but a strategy for iteratively learning about your audiences and goals in a digitally and financially stable capacity.

Aiming towards an MVP – a 1.0 version – enables the development team to learn more about their goal by having the opportunity to test ideas as they go. 

There is room to adapt a product based on feedback – iterating on what came before, to create versions 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 etc – rather than investing extra time and money in a fully-fledged product before it can be adequately assessed whether it meets the required value.

A digital sustainable strategy

An MVP allows you to test your beliefs in the most affordable way to know that you are moving in the right direction. As a process, it requires both flexibility and discipline. 

It will help reduce risks and make the team more adaptable to change in a digitally sustainable way. 

As well as delivering a product that is more likely to function and tick all the goals for product owners, content editors and end users.

An MVP approach helps to avoid failure and going over budget because as a team you will not waste time and money on unnecessary features and functionalities that are not required for your target audiences. 

Massive corporations like Google, Netflix and Facebook continually work towards an MVP – always iterating a solid, working platform in order to improve functionality and service for their audiences.

When creating MVPs, we’re intentionally building just enough functionality to ask the right questions of ourselves and our goals – is this what our audiences want? 

Do these icons make sense? Does this workflow improve the user journey?

Evaluating our MVPs

Having phase one MVPs successfully deployed, we can now evaluate as a development team and plan towards future iterations of these already stable features.

It's important to remember that although a MVP can be seen as a first draft of a product, it is not a sketch or a wireframe, it has to meet the threshold of a successful iteration, complete a goal and be evaluated. Continual evaluation is a vital aspect of iterative development.

Over the next few weeks we will evaluate our phase one releases, listen to user and stakeholder feedback and work towards further iterations of the features we released if required, as well as planning new ones.

The benefits of sustainable design

Sustainable design is simply design that is efficient and accessible. Creating good experiences for both mobile and desktop users improves accessibility. Our website has long followed a mobile-first web design, which helps avoid loading large assets designed for desktop machines, which improves our site's speed and energy efficiency – a development favoured by Google.

The easier content is to find, the fewer pages a user has to load to locate information. This means fewer server requests are made, saving on bandwidth. 

These small energy savings accumulate over time, which is why it is very important to ensure that navigation around your website – from the homepage to individual landing pages, to global navigation and individual pages – is continually evaluated to produce efficient user journeys to satisfy calls to action.

When developing our website it has been important to think about what impact our site will have on the environment. Just about every website's carbon footprint can usually be lowered.

This is important, because taken as a whole, the internet consumes large amounts of electricity in data centres, across networks and devices. If the internet was a country, it would be the 6th largest polluter in the world and is expected to grow considerably.

We seek to continually embrace a digital sustainability inside the project and with business as usual, working towards creating a web that is good for both people and planet.

As part of our website redesign, we discussed some really high-level questions. For example, what deserves or needs to be on our homepage? What value does each element on a homepage bring?

These questions are an intrinsic part of iterative development and are asked daily as part of the project. And these type of questions will continue to be asked as we begin to scope, test and deliver new features throughout phase two as efficiently as possible. 

When done well, iterative design really can be a powerful method of development to improve not only the web, but other digital platforms and the environment as well.