Lean UX — A Summary from the Ground Floor
“Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve a customer’s problem.” Scott Cook
Lean UX is an Agile project methodology.
Firstly, What is Agile? From the Atlassian site:
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.
The Agile Manifesto outlines four key values:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
Lean UX, by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf gives a definitive summary of the process and opportunities available with by taking advantage of the Lean UX framework.
Inspired by Lean Startup and Agile development, it’s the practice of bringing the true nature of a product to light faster, in a collaborative, cross-functional way.
We work to build a shared understanding of the customer, their needs, our proposed solutions, and our definition of success.
We prioritize learning over delivery to build evidence for our decisions.
The underpinnings of the learning philosophy that this methodology drives can be neatly explained by the Design Squiggle (Newman) which highlights the uncertainty at the start of any project and the iterative, explorative nature of the process. By being humble enough to accept you might not have all the answers and trusting the process you can find that the end solutions are very different to the ones you might have originally set out to build.
The feedback from the customer and the experiments that are run with each sprint drive the development process. Testing specific hypothesis and looking for outcomes based evidence and feedback rather than just feature building. Is it really adding value? Are you delivering solutions that make your customer awesome!
Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf go on to highlight the key principles that underpin the Lean UX framework for team Organisation, Culture and Process:
Principles to Guide Team Organization
…the Lean UX principles related to team organization:
- Cross-functional teams
- Small, dedicated, colocated
- Self-sufficient and empowered
- Problem-focused team
Principles to Guide Culture
Culture and process are inextricable. Adopting Lean UX means adopting a culture of learning and curiosity. Here are the Lean UX principles that can help guide your culture toward that end state:
- Moving from doubt to certainty
- Outcomes, not output
- Removing waste
- Shared understanding
- No rock stars, gurus, or ninjas
- Permission to fail
Principles to Guide Process
Now that we have a sense of the broader organizational and cultural principles, let’s take a tactical look at how teams need to change the way they’re working:
- Work in small batches to mitigate risk
- Continuous discovery
- GOOB (Get Out Of the Building): the new user-centricity
- Externalizing your work
- Making over analysis
- Getting out of the deliverables business
In their follow up book Sense and Respond Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf give a more leader centric summary of the Lean UX process. Amongst other things, they focus on how this philosophy helps drive a learning culture in a business:
Instead of a top-down, order-taking culture, sense and respond methods push decision making out into the organization — allowing the people who are closest to the customer, to the markets, and to the situation at hand to make the decisions.
It values what these people know, and, even more, it values their ability to learn.
…there are seven important elements that make up a learning culture.
- Humility. If we don’t know what the end looks like, we have to explore to find it.
- Permission to fail. Exploring means that sometimes we’ll be wrong. And that’s OK.
- Self-direction. As we discover new evidence, we continue to push our learning in the directions we feel will yield the best results.
- Transparency. Transparency means sharing new information — good or bad — broadly so that others may adjust their exploration accordingly.
- A bias toward action. Analysis and thoughtfulness are important, but learning comes from action. We must encourage people to take action and not wait for permission.
- Empathy. Empathy for our customers, users, and peers helps us find value.
- Collaboration. By bringing diverse points of view to bear on a problem, we find better solutions.
A number of different authors online highlight versions of core values that they apply to teams managed with Lean UX. Some examples are from Beaker and Flint:
Lean UX Manifesto
We are developing a way to create digital experiences that are valued by our end users. Through this work, we hold in high regard the following:
- Early customer validation over releasing products with unknown end-user value
- Collaborative design over designing on an island
- Solving user problems over designing the next “cool” feature
- Measuring KPIs over undefined success metrics
- Applying appropriate tools over following a rigid plan
- Nimble design over heavy wireframes, comps or specs
As stated in the Agile Manifesto, “While there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
Or from Quovantis at their blog Lessons from building a kick ass agile team:
Five core values-
- excellence over mediocrity,
- collaboration over command and control,
- self-managed over directed,
- curiosity over complacency, and
- honesty over impressions
Or from PGS-SoftWare and their article on the related Disciplined Agile Framework
1. Delight customers — this is a key priority; not only should the needs and expectations of clients be met but you should strive to surpass them.
2. Be Awesome — great teams are made of motivated people that work in a positive environment and with the necessary support.
3. Pragmatism Over Purism — effective methodologies go beyond Agile.
4. Context Counts — every person, every team, and every organisation is unique and requires a unique, effective strategy, which should be continuously developed.
5. Choice is Good — different situations require different approaches. Teams should own their processes and must be able to experiment. That way, they find out what works in practice and what doesn’t. The ideal solution can be found early on when teams know the different options to choose from and the compromises that their choices entail.
6. Optimise Flow — an organisation is a complex-adaptive system in which interacting teams and groups develop on an individual basis. A successful strategy requires that teams work in a coordinated way and are constantly improving.
7. Enterprise Awareness — if people view their company as an entity in which they play an active part, they’ll want to understand the needs of the organisation as a whole and achieve its overall goals. Best practices are shared more frequently across the company and used in different contexts — making sure that no one has to reinvent the wheel to get the job done.
So how to get started with Lean UX?
The Daily Eggspert blog highlights 4 Key Stages in Lean UX Design
1. Create Quick Personas of your customers
2. Start From Assumptions — Assumptions help in understanding how things will work, who will be benefited and how. This helps when you’re getting an idea off the ground.
Assumptions can be right or wrong. It can work out or not. But it is essential to begin any project with ideas based on certain assumptions.
3. Create a Hypothesis
Your assumptions are the source of your initial set of hypotheses. From here, you can work with the results of your tests, but you have to start by testing something. That’s why you hang on to your assumptions up to this stage. Paradoxically this process helps you eliminate weak hypotheses more quickly, and identify worthwhile lines of enquiry faster.
4. Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
MVP is the smallest thing that can be developed in the shortest period of time which can offer the highest value to the end-users. In short, MVP is creating designs that are usable. This is a key to any design and development. Such designs fall under the category of being emotional, usable, reliable and functional.
MVP can still be iterative. Once can always examine the feasibility and determine all those features that can be added in the next iteration.
Practically most agile process utilise an iterative approach involving stages highlighted in the double diamond process:
A core tool in utilsing Lean UX is the Canvas developed by Jeff Gothelf
In fleshing out this canvas a number of other design thinking and agile tools will prove very useful.
These can include the Value Proposition Canvas, Customer Journey maps, Kano Model; Moscow Matrix
More like this….
- Kanban your work — The Kanban method is in the Agile suite of tools that can help you visualise and prioritise work.
- Design thinking and lean startup concepts to make your team more agile. — A summary of some of the reference material I have found most useful in exploring design thinking and lean start-up concepts to get to the heart of the problem you are trying to solve
- Swarm Intelligence — Can managers develop simple rules to shape the behaviour of their organizations and replace rigid command-and-control structures?
- Complex Adaptive Systems — Simple Rules, Unpredictable Outcomes — The concept of managing through a series of simple rules is an intriguing one. Could magic in our organisations occur through less rather than more control?
- Questions to get you unstuck… — A good question can be just the trick you need to remove the block and get things flowing again.
- Bayes — How Can you be less wrong? — Bayesean thinking is all about using the information around you to be less wrong.
