Building a product : Design thinking, Lean Start Up and Agile
Explore the methods of design thinking, Lean Startup and Agile to build a viable solution
Suppose you’re a chef with a kitchen full of ingredients, but unsure of the dish to prepare. Here, Design Thinking is your recipe book, empathizing with your audience’s tastes, and ideating potential dishes. Lean Startup is your taste test strategy, creating a basic version of a dish (MVP) for feedback, saving time and resources. Agile is your cooking style, preparing the meal course by course, enabling constant adjustments based on feedback. These methodologies together provide an efficient way to navigate project management and problem-solving.
Design Thinking: The Compass
Your team has been tasked with creating a new reading app. But before your team starts writing a single line of code, they must first understand the potential users of this app. In the spirit of Design Thinking, they set out to empathize with users’ needs.
They interview people who love to read and learn about their habits, desires, and frustrations with existing reading apps. They learn that users desire personalized recommendations, a seamless reading experience, and a way to make notes and highlights.
With these user needs in mind, they define the problem statement: “We need to create a reading app that offers personalized recommendations, provides a seamless reading experience, and allows users to easily make notes and highlights.”
Next, they move on to the ideation stage. They brainstorm all sorts of creative ideas that might solve this problem. They could integrate an AI-powered recommendation system, develop a minimalistic and easy-to-navigate design, and include an intuitive highlighting and note-taking feature.
Now, they move on to the prototype stage. They pick the most promising ideas and build a simplified model of the reading app. The prototype doesn’t include all the features of the final product but does allow them to test the main functions.
In the testing stage, they share this prototype with a group of users. As the users interact with the prototype, they provide feedback on their experience: What they liked, what confused them, what features they feel are missing, etc.
Based on the feedback, the team adjusts the prototype, maybe they simplify the note-taking feature or tweak the recommendation system. This feedback loop can go through multiple iterations until the team is confident they’ve got a product that truly serves their users.
In this way, Design Thinking, like a compass, keeps the users’ needs and feedback as the team’s guiding north star throughout the product development process.
Lean Startup: The Fuel Gauge
Let’s say you’re developing a new mobile app for online grocery shopping. The traditional approach might involve spending months or even years designing and developing a feature-rich app with personalized recommendations, loyalty programs, multiple payment options, interactive shopping lists, and more.
But what if, after all that work, you find that users find your app too complicated, or they just prefer shopping in-store?
Lean Startup methodology suggests a different approach: start by building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This MVP would offer the core function of your final product but in a simpler format.
So instead of the full-featured app, you might first develop a basic app that only offers a list of available items and a checkout feature. It’s not as sophisticated as your envisioned final product, but it’s enough to start the online grocery shopping experience.
Once you’ve developed this MVP, you release it to a small group of users and closely monitor their reactions. How often do they use the app? What items are they buying? Is the checkout process smooth? You gather feedback and learn from their experiences.
If your MVP is a hit, great! You can start adding more features based on what your users find most valuable. This might mean refining your list layout, adding a shopping cart feature, or offering delivery options.
But if your MVP isn’t well-received, you haven’t wasted as much time and resources as you would have to develop the full-featured app. You can “pivot” by making significant changes based on user feedback — maybe they want more product information, or they need a better search function. Or you could even discover that your users prefer an entirely different solution, like an in-app chat feature to ask questions about the products.
By using the Lean Startup methodology in UI/UX design, you can ensure that you’re creating a product that users actually want and need while minimizing the risk of wasted resources. It’s a more efficient, user-centric approach to design.
Agile: The Speedometer
Now let’s say you’ve been tasked with creating a new mobile banking application. You’ve already used Design Thinking to understand your users’ needs and Lean Startup to validate your basic app concept with an MVP. Now, you’re ready to build the full-featured app.
In a traditional development process, you might try to build this entire app at once — designing and coding every feature before releasing it. But with Agile, you break this mammoth task down into smaller, manageable pieces, or “sprints.”
Let’s take the first sprint. You decide to focus on the most critical feature of your banking app — a secure login system. Your team works together to design and code this part of the app, and at the end of the sprint (typically two weeks), you have a functional login system. It’s a small part of the whole app, but it’s a working part.
Now, you don’t just move on to the next feature. First, you test this login system. You collect feedback from users and team members. Perhaps users find the password reset process confusing, or the log in button isn’t very noticeable. You take this feedback, make improvements, and then move on to the next sprint.
For the next sprint, you might focus on creating a user-friendly dashboard that displays account balance and recent transactions. Just like before, you design, code, test, gather feedback, and iterate.
Agile’s strength is its iterative nature and focuses on continuous improvement. After each sprint, you have a usable, testable product. And because you’re continuously collecting and implementing feedback, your product is always evolving, always adapting to user needs and changes in the market.
This is how Agile, like a trusty speedometer, keeps your project moving at a consistent pace while ensuring you’re delivering real value to your users.
Choosing the Right Tool
So, when do you use each tool?
Design Thinking is great when you’re at the start of your journey and you’re trying to understand your users and their needs. Lean Startup is beneficial when you’re ready to test your ideas but want to avoid wasting resources. Agile is perfect when you’re building your final product and want to deliver consistent value while staying flexible.
But remember, these aren’t rigid boxes. They overlap and can be combined.
Imagine you’re using Design Thinking to understand what features your car should have. You then build an MVP of the car using the Lean Startup methodology to validate your assumptions. And finally, as you’re building the complete car, you use Agile to deliver value consistently and stay adaptable.
Conclusion
Your journey toward creating an innovative and user-centric product or service isn’t a straight path. It’s an adventure, filled with unknowns and changes. Having the right methodologies at your disposal — Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile — can make navigating this terrain not only manageable but enjoyable. They are your compass, your fuel gauge, and your speedometer. Choose wisely, and remember, it’s the journey that matters, not just the destination.
Weave is a Design Agency focused on building magical experiences through purpose-driven design. Our aim is to create products that people truly love. To know more visit weavedesign.us
