Lean UX vs. Agile UX — the Final Round

In the last years, UX has been getting a lot of attention therefore more and more senior UX practitioners want to stand out from the crowd and separate themselves from the large number of beginners in this field.

So what do they do? They search through development methods, they apply them in a design process and they give them a nice name.

These development methods have been around for ages and the new ones are grouped under the Agile Methodology. You have lean development, continuous development, evolutionary development and then you have Agile UX, Lean UX, Strategic UX.

As you can see, some UX process terms match the methods and some match the methodology. That’s because there are way too many UX designers that didn’t understand the development processes in the first place.

I have been reading a lot on fitting UX in an Agile development and it’s interesting to see that so many designers have totally different views on what Agile UX and Lean UX are.

The concept behind Lean UX is that a business needs to ship a product as soon as possible, to produce a minimum viable product and push it out to the market as rapidly as possible.

Is that not true when it comes to Agile UX? Agile UX is not about working on a product forever and release it after years of perfecting the UX. If you think that Agile UX means releasing a fully realized concept then you are clearly not understanding the principles behind Agile development.

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say.

“Agile software development is a group of software development methods in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.”

So that means continuous development, feature driven development and lean development are Agile methods.

If we look at Lean development and where it should be used, we see that Lean is most popular with startups that want to penetrate the market, or test their idea and see if it would make a viable business.

So basically Lean Development is an Agile method that is used by start-ups in order to deliver a minimum viable product as soon as possible in order to test the market and then iterate on it until it meets the customers’ needs.

If we adapt the UX design process to the Agile methodology we get Agile UX and if we adapt the UX design process to a specific Agile method and we combine it with software prototyping teachings we get Lean UX.

I totally agree that these two terms are different. But if you plan on applying one process or the other to your business, you need to understand that Lean UX is an Agile UX process.

To make it simple, you should apply Lean UX to startups. Everything else should fall under a larger umbrella, Agile UX.

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