Day 36 — Process series 5/7: “Lean UX”
In an Agile team running Scrum or other fast pace delivery methodologies, how can design team be effective to help deliver solutions for great product quality? When the goal is to validate and pivot toward the right direction, except for Google Design Sprint, Lean UX is a powerful tool to quickly verify assumptions by testing with real users.
Developed by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, Lean UX is a design process that focuses on collaboration and quick design cycles in order to get things built fast and tested early. Lower fidelity UX artifact is encouraged, so that the key business assumptions can be tested in the market early. So, how does Lean UX actually work? Let’s break it down:
Lean UX’s “AEIOU”
- Activities: Instead of putting energy on perfecting design deliverables or generating design specification, Lean UX focuses on creating quick prototype and test it in the market.
- Environments: Lean UX is very effective when your team is running on a fast pace fashion like adopting Scrum or XP types of Agile methodologies.
- Interactions: Similar to other design process, a designer still interact with all sorts of stakeholders. The difference is, lots of co-creating work is great for boosting the delivery speed, so that we can quickly “get it out of the building”.
- Objects: Since the goal is to create testable prototypes, any software/tools the facilitate the process can be handy. Whiteboard is helpful for collaboration on quickly defining the problem and general workflow; any prototyping software, with or without coding, could be helpful to demonstrate ideas and test it with people.
- Users: Lean UX is best suited for designers who is experienced in facilitating collaborations between different types of stakeholders. Also the designers needs to be comfortable of think on their feet in whiteboarding session. Another important attribute is that designers need to understand the value of “learn fast and learn often” rather than “pushing pixels” in deliver and get feedback fast.
Process of Lean UX
For the process itself is not too far from other design processes, the focus on Lean UX is more around quicker delivery with lower effort on the deliverables fidelity. The idea behind it is that if the high level business assumption is incorrect, the UI nuances (2 pixels left or right) wouldn’t make much of a differences.
When to adopt Lean UX
- When upfront UX research cannot/ will not be done effectively: There are times that project has certain budget/timeline limitations, and therefore proper research cannot be achieved. In some scenarios, the team simply doesn’t have access to users to conduct user research. Or in other cases, the design/product team doesn’t have professional resource who’s capable of upfront UX research. Whatever the reason is, since upfront analysis is limited, post-production research becomes the key for product success, and Lean UX can help make it happen cheaper and faster.
- When larger UX engagement model is not welcome: There are certain time & places you have the ammo and the team to take on design work with great plan, but you’re told not to do so. For example, in the organization of adhocracy culture, formal/ structural process is not welcome. Instead, they’d prefer whiteboard exercise and quick delivery. In some other cases, UX team doesn’t have “a seat at the table” because of the low UX maturity in the organization. Therefore formal UX process is too new or foreign for the group to swallow. In these types of situations. Lean UX tends to be something that they can see the ROI quickly, and the UX team can gradually build credibility and raise the UX maturity of the organization.
Growing Pains
Although Lean UX brings in lots of benefit for it’s speedy learning, there’s a cost of “learn fast”, from the sacrifice people make in order to gain velocity in the process. If you’re in an Scrum team working as a designer, you’re probably familiar with the limitations from Sprint timeline for you to be effective. Some common pain points listed below:
- Change of direction or SOW: While designers try to define the key problems to solve though working with business team, a lot of time scope could change drastically and requires more collaboration between business and design team. What happens then is all of sudden designers don’t have enough time during the concepting stage and get buy-in. In a complex or high-risk product when upfront analysis is required, fundamental analysis need to happen in order to consolidate the general direction; fast delivery pace might not be suitable in this types of situations.
- Silo-ed organization: In order to make Lean UX effective, lots of collaborations need to happen. When dealing with a silo-ed organization, where people rather stay in their own work and less collaborative, co-creating method or cross-team exercise could be difficult to do it right.
- Other cultural blockers: Also, there are still teams, agencies, companies believe that delivery of artifacts are the best way to ensure quality products. Some teams tend to keep building features instead of measuring what was success vs. what not, there for the value of user testing and research might not be motivating enough for them to change their current process.
And there’s still hope
There are tools and online resources to help adopt Lean UX process much easier. For example, I found the Lean UX canvas (figure below) a powerful tool to start my conversation with business in order to quickly identify their priorities and key assumptions to verify through Lean UX prototype/testing process.
Also Jeff Gothelf’s post about Value Driven process is also a great way to start a conversation with stakeholder in order to find out what’s the right problem to solve.
Conclusion
- Lean UX ensure fast product delivery so that we can speed up the learning cycle.
- Lean UX is a great methodology if you’ve have insights on users and market; all you want to do is to quickly release the product to verify business assumptions to improve upon.
- With the benefit of running Lean UX, it requires mature problem definition and cultural fit in order to be effective.
Any thoughts/ experience running Lean UX? I’d like to hear from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
