Personalized emoticons based on the profile picture of users.

Users upload their profile pics for a few different expressions – happy, excited, sad, disappointed, angry etc.

Or a much better UX would be that the app uses image recognition and sophisticated image manipulation algorithms to produce a variety of expressions from a base image.

And now each time a user adds an emoticon along with their message, the relevant expression from that emoticon gets picked up and is applied to their profile photo.

For example, a message like this –

Can’t wait to see you 

Turns into –

Can’t wait to see you   

Now wouldn’t that be awesome!

Think about this for a second – if your prototype or MVP is very well designed, it might in fact be trickier to get objective feedback from potential users. They are bound to get distracted by the beautiful design, and subconsciously base most of their feedback on how it looks/feels rather than to tell you if the core of your product is worthy and solves a real, genuine problem for them.

Design is important, but the timing to focus on it is more so.