There’s been a revolution. A move away from big design up front and isolated specialist teams throwing specs over the wall to each other. Applying the principles of Lean Startup. Lean UX can transform the way you bring user experiences to life.
We need to change the way our products are built because even the smartest teams can’t predict market and user behaviour. Lean UX enables you to build cheaper, faster, and most importantly better experiences.
Organisations are jumping onto the testing band wagon in large numbers. Many have come to the realisation that theres more to testing than just swapping images, content and text. Customer journeys, check-out flows, pricing and product offerings can be tested to enhance the customer experience and improve KPIs.
What does bad UX look like?
Heres some quotes by thought leaders. If your organisation sounds similar to this – chances are you are not practicising lean UX
Ha Phan:
“your collaboration sessions with the team dont include business goals and strategies.”
{Solve user problems but consider where we are headed as a business and whether the activity fits in.}
“you are not defining KPIs and integrating analytics into each release.”
{We need to validate our new releases with real data. We need at least one number to know whether we’re failing or succeeding.}
“you implement every single step in the design process, instead of picking and choosing from the design toolbox.”
{Lean UX is a set of principles and tools – apply as needed. Don’t tick every box in a project management cycle.}
“you’re creating long design specs for the vision of the entire product.”
{Users dont interact with specs and wireframes – the quicker we get to the end product, the better. Let’s not get bogged down by deliverables. Let’s create the lightest thing we can in order to communicate how to apply the thinking to the end design.}
Jeff Gothelf:
“you are not managing towards outcomes”
{We need to consider the bottom line. We are building products, but also a business. Asking whether what we’re doing will make money is important? If it will make money, how?}
“you don’t have a willingness and the freedom or support to experiment.”
[As with Agile we need senior management buy in for our Lean UX methodology.]
Melissa Hui:
“Your development team is not seeing what they’re building until they have to build it.”
[Your development team should be fully involved in the design process. Collaboration is key.]
Assumption based decision making
The trap that many fall into with user is experience is we (Build) where we thought (Think) we improved the experience of our users. We measure (Measure) the performance but from the data we get back (Check) we were not able to learn. The reason? The designs incorporate too many single problems into one.
Deliverables vs user experiences
User experience design has traditionally been a deliverables based industry. Site maps, flow diagrams, wireframes, taxonomies, mockups and the all important spec was the defacto standard. This laundry list represented the value that UX brought to a company.
The deliverable centric process has put UX designers in the deliverables business. Teams measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of “deliverables” instead of focussing on creating winning experiences.
Lean UX to the rescue
Inspired by the Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of focussing on the actual experience being designed with less emphasis on documentation driven deliverables.
Our documents are either discarded or stripped down to the bar minimum. Provide the minimum amount of information necessary to get started on implementation. Long design cycles are replaced with very short, iterative cycles. Feedback comes from all members of the implementation team early and often. Collaboration with our entire team becomes critical to the success of the product.
Get to your customers fast with prototyping
Lean UX is where prototyping shines. With your initial sketches focus the prototype on critical components of the experience. Pick a core user flow or two and prototype only those screens. The fidelity of the prototype is irrelevant.
Now get that prototype in front of everyone who matters internally, and validate whether you are meeting the needs of the business.
Once validated, demo your updated prototype to the team. Explain the flows, the user motivations and why you designed it the way you did. The prototype has now become your documentation. It is “The Spec.” Very little (if anything) more is needed. Regardless, you’re there to answer any questions that come up. The strength of Lean UX here is that, with the design validated, the designer is now freed to move on to the next core component of the experience, instead of spending six weeks creating a design-requirements document and pixel-perfect specs.
Get real user feedback
A step often missed – get the prototype in front of customers! Get them in front of your prototypes on a weekly basis until you are happy you have a winning design. With 5 testers you should have a robust enough focus group.
Lean UX is evolution not a revolution. UX designers need to evolve and stay relevant as the practice evolves. Lean UX gets designers out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business. This is where we excel and do our best work. Let’s become experts at delivering great results through these experiences and forgo the hefty spec documents.
It won’t be an easy road. Culture and tradition will push back, yet the ultimate return on this investment will be more rewarding work and more successful businesses.
Always be testing
In conclusion heres the bigger picture reality – software allows organisations to disrupt existing markets because its so flexible. This creates dynamic and competitive environments but imposes high risks to businesses. The biggest risk – the product is of little or no value to customers – the effort to develop it was wasted.
To reduce such risks, you adopt an experiment driven development approach where you validate your product ideas before spending resources on fully developing them. Experiments allow you to test assumptions about what customers really want and react if the assumptions are wrong.
With Lean UX we can execute continuous experimentation on all aspects of our products and customer experiences enables us to constantly shape experiences based on real customer behavioral data. To take advantage of every business opportunity, you need to always be testing.