How to avoid lean UX fallacies
#1 – The feature prioritisation fallacy
When basing design decisions such as how to prioritise features on sparse user research, you will find it challenging to stick to good design principles such as the 80/20 rule.
Let us assume that:
- the product has a defined number of features.
- the product has only relevant features and that completely superfluous features have been removed already (Yes! We’re that good).
- the 80/20 rule applies to the significance of set of features, because it pretty much always does.
Where do we go from here?
Because you’re following a good design process, you will be talking to your users, listening to them and observing how they’re using each feature. And because every user is unique, their prioritisation of your feature set will be equally unique.
And because you are building your product in an agile way (because this is the way to go), your UX process will be on the lean side, rather than fully fletched UCD.
As a result, you end up talking to the minimum number of users necessary to keep moving forward. There is nothing wrong with that, don’t beat yourself up about it. Whatever you’ve been taught in your HCI masterclass or UX online course, in the real (start-up) world of agile and lean, there is no such thing as getting enough time for exhaustive user research.
So what’s the problem?
In the real world, you will be talking to 5 to 10 people about each particular feature of your product. Which will inevitably lead to a constant struggle where users will tell you different things as to the significance of particular features.
This is absolutely normal. And in an ideal scenario, you would be able to make a case for more research to really identify how that 80/20 split should work out — but realistically you will not.
As a result, each user voice stands out loud and clear, challenging your current mental model of what the 80/20 feature prioritisation should look like. Of course, this is to be expected and actually desirable.
The crucial next step is to resist.
Do not give in. That may sound counterintuitive at first. But you have to resist, or else you’ll break the 80/20 rule because your lean way of engaging with users (read incomplete) will make you think that ALL features are important — but they’re not, you can be sure of that.
Instead, what you are going to do is consult additional sources of information. Ideally this will be usage metrics, survey data, it could even be domain experts or existing research in the same domain — anything that is accessible in an effective manner.
