[Reading Notes] Lean UX
Design Thinking
Design thinking is innovation powered by direct observation of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported. It’s a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to patch people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.
- Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
Lean Startup Method
Lean startup uses a feedback loop called “build-measure-learn” to minimize project risk and gets teams building quickly and learning quickly. Team build Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and ship them quickly to begin the process of learning as early as possible.
MVP — the smallest thing you can make to learn whether your hypothesis is valid
Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of a product to light faster, in a collaborative, cross-functional way that reduces the emphasis on thorough documentation while increasing the focus on building a shared understanding of the actual product experience being designed.
Principles behind Lean UX
Cross-Functional Teams
Small, Dedicated, Co-located
Progress = Outcomes, Not Output
Problem-Focused Team
Removing Waste
Small Batch Size
Continuous Discovery: the ongoing process of engaging the customer during the design and development process.
GOOB: The New User-Centricity: getting out of the building to do customer research.
Shared Understanding: the collective knowledge of the team that builds up over time as the team works together.
Anti-Pattern: Rockstars, Gurus, and Ninjas
Externalizing Your Work: Getting your work into public view. Whiteboards, foam-core boards, artifact walls, printouts, and sticky notes
Making over Analysis: value marking over analysis
Learning over Growth: ensure that an idea is right before scaling it out mitigates the risk inherent in broad feature deployment.
Permission to Fail: lean UX teams need to experiment with ideas. Most of these ideas will fail.
Getting Out of the Deliverables Business: Lean UX refocuses the design process away from the documents the team is creating to the outcomes the team is achieving.
Lean UX: the goal is not to create a deliverable, it’s to change something in the world — to create an outcome. We start with assumptions instead of requirements. We create and test hypotheses. We measure to see whether we’ve achieved our desired outcomes.
Hypothesis Statement
The hypothesis statement is the starting point for a project. It is composed of the following elements: assumptions, hypotheses, outcomes, personas, and features.
Assumptions
A high-level declaration of what we believe to be true.
Hypotheses
More granular descriptions of our assumptions that target specific areas of our product or workflow for experimentation. Break down the hypothesis when it’s too big into sub-hypotheses.
Outcomes
The signal we seek from the market to help us validate or invalidate our hypotheses. These are often quantitative but can also be qualitative.
Remember success metrics are not all numbers
Personas
Models of the people for whom we believe we are solving a problem.
Features
The product changes or improvements we believe will drive the out- comes we seek.
Collaborative Design
Lean UX is a collaborative process. It brings designers and non designers together in co-creation. It yields ideas that are bigger and better than those of the individual contributors.
The most effective way to rally a team around a design direction is through collaboration. Designing together increases the design IQ of the entire team. It allows every member of the team to articulate his or her ideas. It gives designers a much boarder set of ideas to draw upon as they refine the user experience. This collaboration, in turn, breeds increased feelings of ownership over the work being done by the entire team. Finally, collaborative design builds team-wide shared understanding. It is this shared understanding that is the currency of Lean UX. The more the team collectively understands, the less it has to document in order to move forward.
The essence of the Lean UX approach
Design only what you need. Deliver it quickly. Create enough customer contact to get meaningful feedback fast
Feedback and Research
Collaborative research techniques: allow you to build shared understanding with your team
Continuous research techniques: allow you to build small, informal qualitative research studies into every iteration
Continuous discovery: case study: three users every Thursday
Conclusion
Lean UX is the evolution of project design. It blends the best interaction design techniques with the scientific method to create products that are easy to use, beautiful, and measurable successful. by blending the ideas behind Lean Startup, Agile software development, and design thinking, this approach takes the bloat and uncertainty out of product design and pushes it toward an objectively grounded result.
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