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First, they help us remove waste from our UX design process. We create minimally viable conversations by moving away from heavily documented handoffs.
Second, Lean principles drive us to harmonize our “system” of designers, developers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, marketers, and others in a transparent, cross-functional collaboration that brings nondesigners into our design process.
Instead of relying on a hero designer to divine the best solution from a single point of view, we use rapid experimentation and measurement to learn quickly how well (or not) our ideas meet our goals. In all of this, the designer’s role begins to evolve toward design facilitation — and with that we take on a new set of responsibilities.
Lean UX has two other foundations: Design Thinking and Agile development philosophies. Design Thinking helps us widen the scope of our work beyond interfaces and artifacts. Design Thinking looks at systems, and helps us apply design tools to broader problems. It relies on collaboration, iteration, making, and empathy as core to problem-solving.
the sooner we get our ideas out, the sooner we can figure out what those revisions should be. Waiting too long to get that feedback is wasteful. We invest too much in the initial design and are less flexible to changes because of the effort we’ve already put in.
You need to know — as a team — that you’re not going to get it right the first time and that you’re all working together to iterate your way forward.
The ecommerce giant pushes new code live to their customers every 11.6 seconds.
Lean UX is deeply collaborative and cross-functional, because designers, product managers, and software engineers no longer have the luxury of working in isolation from each other.
each principle detailed here will help you to build a product design organization that is more collaborative, more cross-functional, and a better fit for today’s agile reality.
the heart of UX practice is that it begins by identifying human needs — the needs of the users of the system.
Design Thinking is important for Lean UX because it takes the explicit position that every aspect of a business (or any other system) can be approached with design methods.
The next foundation of Lean UX is Agile software development.
The assumption in Lean UX is that the initial product designs will be wrong, so the team’s goal should be to find out what they got wrong as soon as possible. As soon as the team discovers what’s working and what’s not, they adjust their proposals and test again.
The final foundation of Lean UX is Eric Ries’s Lean Startup method. Lean Startup uses a feedback loop called “build-measure-learn” to minimize project risk and get teams building and learning quickly. Teams build Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and ship them quickly to begin the process of learning as early as possible.
“Lean Startup processes reduce waste by increasing the frequency of contact with real customers, therefore testing and avoiding incorrect market assumptions as early as possible.”
The smallest thing you can build to test each hypothesis is your MVP. The MVP doesn’t need to be made of code: it can be an approximation of the end experience — it might not even be a product! You collect what you learn from your MVP and develop your ideas. Then you do it again.
Inspired by Lean Startup and Agile development, it’s the practice of bringing the true nature of a product to light faster, in a collaborative, cross-functional way. We work to build a shared understanding of the customer, their needs, our proposed solutions, and our definition of success. We prioritize learning over delivery to build evidence for our decisions.
Principles to Guide Team Organization
Principle: cross-functional teams
Principle: small, dedicated, colocated
The benefit of small teams comes down to three words: communication, focus, and camaraderie. Smaller teams are easier to keep current on project status, changes, and new learning. Dedicating your team to one project keeps team members focused on the same priorities all the time and eliminates dependencies on other teams. Having the team all in one place allows relationships to grow between colleagues.
Principle: self-sufficient and empowered
Teams without external dependencies are free to optimize their process for maximum efficiency.
Teams must be able to interact with customers directly in order to get the feedback they need to create effective solutions.
Principle: problem-focused teams
A problem-focused team is one that has been given a business problem to solve, as opposed to a set of features to implement. In other words, this is a team that has been organized around an outcome.
Assigning teams problems to solve shows trust in those teams. It allows them to come up with their own solutions and drives a deeper sense of pride and owne...
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Principles to Guide Culture
Principle: moving from doubt to certainty
Lean UX begins with the idea that everything is an assumption until we prove otherwise.
This means that we begin with doubt and proceed to validate what we know, as systematically and rigorously as we possibly can. In the process, our learning lets us become more certain about our positions.
Principle: outcomes, not output
Features and services are outputs. The goals they are meant to achieve are outcomes.
When we attempt to predict which features will achieve specific outcomes, we are mostly engaging in speculation. Although it’s easier to manage the launch of specific feature sets, we often can’t predict if a feature will be effective until it’s in the market.
Principle: removing waste
One of the core tenets in Lean manufacturing is the removal of anything that doesn’t lead to the ultimate goal. In Lean UX, the ultimate goal is improved outcomes; hence, anything that doesn’t contribute to that is considered waste and should be removed from the team’s process.
Principle: shared understanding
Shared understanding is the collective knowledge that builds up over time as the team works together. It’s a rich understanding of the space, the product, and the customers.
In addition, it reduces the team’s dependencies on second-hand reports and detailed documents to continue its work.
Principle: no rock stars, gurus, or ninjas
Rock stars don’t share — neither their ideas nor the spotlight. Team cohesion breaks down when you add individuals with large egos who are determined to stand out and be stars. When collaboration breaks down, you lose the environment you need to create the shared understanding required to move forward effectively.
Principle: permission to fail
Permission to fail means that the team has a safe environment in which to experiment. That applies to both the technical environment (they can push out ideas in a safe way), and the cultural environment (they won’t be penalized for trying ideas that don’t succeed).
Principles to Guide Process
Principle: work in small batches to mitigate risk
Another fundamental from Lean manufacturing is the practice of dividing work into small units, or batches. Lean manufacturing uses this notion to keep inventory low and quality high.
By working in smaller batches, we can design and validate our decisions as we go, which reduces the risk of wasted work.
Principle: continuous discovery
Continuous discovery is the ongoing process of engaging the customer during the design and development process. This is done through regularly scheduled activities,
Regular customer conversations provide frequent opportunities for validating new product ideas. By bringing the entire team into the research cycle, it develops empathy for users and the problems they face. You create shared understanding. Finally, as the team learns together, you reduce the need for future debrief conversations and documentation.
