Testing Market Interest of Product Ideas Early
Startups often fail at the seed or concept stage due to a lack of product-market fit. The challenge was to create a tool that could help entrepreneurs test their prototypes on real customers and gather market feedback earlier and more cheaply than traditional methods, improving the chances of success. We developed a tool that allows startups to test market interest in their products by using Figma prototypes to gather real-world user engagement data and assess product-market fit.
As the sole designer, I led the design process, conducted over 20 interviews, and worked closely with two developers. I was responsible for developing the UI, branding and animating the product. I also led user testing, workshops and maintained stakeholder relationships.
Successfully developed a tool that allows entrepreneurs to test their Figma prototypes in real-world settings. The tool tracks user interactions, provides engagement metrics, and offers actionable insights to improve product-market fit. The MVP was validated by two startups, with Iterate continuing development post-internship.
UX & UI Designer
2 months
Product Trio
At a 24-hour hackaton, a team at iterate had come up with the idea of gathering data from Figma prototypes. My team's task was to elaborate on their idea in order to create an MVP of the solution which could be used by actual startups. We began by interviewing the team that came up with the idea and investigated the need behind the idea. The initial findings were that innovators tend to sit too long with an idea within a team before probing the market and gaining knowledge about the actual market interest. We therefore set out to better understand how we could tailor this tool towards innovators and help them understand market interest earlier.
We conducted interviews to understand the needs of potential users. We interviewed designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and product managers. Following the Lean startup methodology, we set up seven problem interviews to gather insights. We found that five out of seven interviewees were interested and became co-creators in the process, participating in weekly feedback sessions.
I was the lead designer in the team and we all participated in interviews and activities to ensure everyone was aligned. After conducting interviews, we organized our findings into an affinity diagram, which helped us identify key insights and formulate a problem statement to guide development. We followed a structured weekly process: Mondays were for organizing and prioritizing tasks, Tuesday to Thursday were for development, and Fridays were for solution interviews with stakeholders.
In the process we were taught a lot on the subject of product management. We realized that to make our application have value for our users we needed to implement these theories in a simple way. In several of the interviews we experimented with how we could convey the information with explanations and visualizations. The result of our project relied heavily on what explanations worked with our stakeholders.
The webapp Iterate DEMO allowed entrepreneurs to gain quantitative user-data on Figma prototypes. This was achieved by tracking clicks and time spent in each page of the Figma prototype. This flow showcases how an entrepreneur submits their prototype and how they could flag buttons that were important in the app. They would then recieve a costumizable link they to provide to users through social media or any preffered platform. Once the prototype was sent out to users, the data on each prototype was showcased in realtime on that Demo's dashboard.
Product owners were selected as the primary user group, as they tend to have a holistic view of the product or idea. In interviewing product owners (and others) we found that the acquisition funnel was a good benchmark for analysing the market value of the prototype. The funnel visualised acquisition, engagement, activation and retention of the users – which led to an increased understanding of the products strengths and faults.
In just six weeks, the team and I had created and published a working version of the webapp. The webapp was pilot tested together with two startups; Hjernelæring and Byks and had immediate impact. Byks achieved value by publishing their entire webapp as a Figma prototype – in addition to gaining data on their users in a format that was easy to understand. This allowed Byks to offer a range of workouts to their users and better understand which workouts were the most popular. Hjernelæring tested different types of content with their users and made a decision on which to pursue further. All in all, this project was a success and was continued after our internship.