Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf
Our Product Manager Gareth Murran, shares his highlights of the must read business strategy book, Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf…
If you have an interest in business strategy, you’ll probably have heard of lean. Lean is a business approach, most famously used by Toyota, designed to cut waste and inefficiency, while at the same time allowing a company to be flexible, innovative and customer focused. Lean has been applied to many businesses, from start-ups to established companies, and in many areas, from meetings to product creation. Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf takes the principles of lean and applies them to the world of design. If you want to be more efficient and more creative in your approach to design, read on for some highlights of this must read strategy book!
Is your design team isolated from the rest of the company? A typical process involves a design team being briefed by someone else, and subsequently creating a product based on this second-hand information. If the design doesn’t work, it is then sent back for reworking, a process that can go on forever. Lean UX gets around this problem by putting designers to work with other employees right away, allowing the team to fix problems immediately and move the process along. Basically it’s a mix of design thinking, agile software development and lean start-up.
Lean UX follows the familiar Build- Measure-Learn loop. Prototypes are turned out as fast as possible to test market assumptions early on. This early testing then generates feedback almost instantly, telling you what works and what doesn’t. This way, biased assumptions and weak ideas can be scrapped with little effect, freeing up the resources for stronger ideas to flourish.
The first step in the Lean UX approach is to create your hypothesis. Once you have some assumption, your next task is to turn it into something testable by figuring out your desirable outcomes, personas and features you wish to offer to those personas. The author highlights the importance of testing assumptions, it’s wrong to assume that your customer will behave like you do, they will have very different attitudes.
Secondly you need something to test. The most common approach is to create what is called a minimum viable product. The MVP is essentially the smallest thing you can make or smallest action you can take to test the validity of your product. For instance, say you want to start selling on-line fitness classes, a venture that is both time consuming and costly. You start by questioning the very idea of the classes, asking yourself, “is there enough for paid content with all of the free content on YouTube?” In order to test this, you need an MVP. In this instance, it could be a landing page with 3–5 minute sample video and an email form to capture customer demand. If too few people sign up, you’ll know that the demand isn’t there, allowing you to drop your idea without wasting any additional resources.
Finally it’s important to remember that a commitment to continuous product testing through customers is central to Lean UX. Doing so provides constant market feedback that helps prove or revise the hypothesis quickly. For instance, a common Lean UX strategy is to test your MVP once a week with 3–5 different customers. One customer opinion is interesting but 3–4 saying the same thing means you should take note.
The web-driven economies of today have led to ever-decreasing product life cycles, as the continuous nature of software has made rapid product updates essential. To keep ahead of the competitors, it’s key to experiment constantly while seeking user feedback, tasks that Lean UX is perfectly suited to tackle through its collaborative approach. Collaboration can be as simple as ensuring enough space for white-boards that allow people to sketch things like personas and prototypes, and where team members can leave feedback and support. Whilst each team member has a core competency, such as design, research or development, each member can also contribute to other disciplines using their secondary skills and interests under the Lean UX approach, with faster outputs driving desired outcomes.
