Misetta
0 to 1 startup design to help curious minds find the best ideas on the internet
Misetta was a solo project to scratch my own itch and design a product to stimulate productive online conversations.
Design a place where people who disagree can learn from each other to improve their ideas.
UX Designer
Solo
MVP app design
I use the following process when designing an MVP. My goal is to find the one thing my product can do uniquely well and then get it to market fast.
User research is the foundation of every great product. It helps me design solutions that feel delightful and intuitive. I start by finding a small groups of underserved and highly passionate users and define the pain points between them and their goal.
The best predictor of future behavior is current behavior. So to learn more about potential Misetta users I look in places where people are already engaging in the types of discussions I seek to improve and reach out to learn more about them.
Misetta’s users are “Curious Minds”. Curious Minds love to learn. They’re interested in many topics, and see each of them as galaxies of knowledge waiting to be explored. They like to discuss the results of their explorations with others to gain new perspectives.
At this stage, my biggest priority is to avoid solving what I call 'The founder's problem'. This occurs when the founder puts their needs above those of their users. It's a tricky problem to avoid, as the easiest person to fool is yourself, so I need to focus on honest signals from my users and the market that my user research is on the right track.
Most people want to be nice. They want to tell me the answers they think I want to hear. This means I need to avoid asking questions like 'would you use this?' and focus on questions like 'what do you like and dislike about your current solution to this problem?' to get honest signals I can use to inform my design decisions.
Through customer discovery interviews I identified Curious Minds' problem to be a lack of quality online discourse about the topics that interest them. Users spend an incalculable amount of hours on sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook talking about their ideas. Many wrote extensively about their frustrations with the current process in both user interviews and public posts.
“I'm tired of just trying to play 'gotcha' in the comments and trying to get the other person to sound like an idiot. Is there actually a way we can discuss hard topics, or is it hopeless?”
Once a problem is found, I like to mold it into a “Jobs-to-Be-Done” statement. I like Jobs because they boil a problem down to its simplest solution-agnostic form.
Misetta's Job statement for Curious Minds is “Get the best answers to the questions that matter to me”.
"Deepen my understanding of the topics that matter to me by discussing
"Discover diverse perspectives and gain new insights by engaging in constructive conversations with people who hold different opinions.
Every startup is either “The only…”, “The best…”, or “The I don’t care.” I design my value proposition with the formula Generic Result + Extraordinary Delivery.
For Misetta I settled on "The best ideas on the internet." It’s the place to find the best ideas on any topic that interests you.
The best predictor of future behavior is current behavior. So to learn more about potential Misetta users I look in places where people are already engaging in the types of discussions I seek to improve and reach out to learn more about them.
Misetta’s users are “Curious Minds”. Curious Minds love to learn. They’re interested in many topics, and see each of them as galaxies of knowledge waiting to be explored. They like to discuss the results of their explorations with others to gain new perspectives.
Multi-select filters allowed List Views to pass user acceptance testing with the client and fulfill a $6 million contract for Enovational.
To celebrate I hosted an award show for my team and handed out awards including 'Best Dad' for the best dad jokes and the 'Millard Fillmore' award for most obscure historical trivia knowledge. (If you're aware that Millard Fillmore was America's 13th president you also qualify for this award)
Each product has key attributes its users prioritize. I find those attributes and optimize them to speak my user's language and make sure my product meets those needs better than any others.
Formability was used exclusively by Enovational's employees and government clients, but that wouldn't always be the case. With an upcoming global release, my team turned our attention to identifying the attributes necessary to turn List Views into a productivity superpower.
My research phase informed me that government employees value speed and accuracy above all else. Speed so they can finish their work and move on, and accuracy because they can't afford to make mistakes.
Product usage data gives me a direct insight into my user's behavior. It helps me know what's working and what isn't so I can fix it.
I checked the data to understand how people were using List Views to find where I need to improve speed and accuracy.
The data indicated that users file the same reports all the time. They need to configure their List Views before downloading their report data each time. Can we speed this up?
I enabled processors to save report exports as templates to be used again next time. When generating any report, processors can template it and then use that template to generate reports quickly.
With basic expectations met and key attributes optimized I can start innovating. In this final phase of product design, I focus on creating features that surprise and delight my user to create a product that they can only describe with one word, remarkable.
Processors tend to file the same reports at the same times. Why should they need to gather all that information themselves?
I created auto-reports that can be configured to automatically collect a report's data and send a notification through Formability's notification system when their data is ready to download. This ensures that processors only need to configure their data once and eliminates the possibility of any future user error once configured.
