Lean UX, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Lean UX: More Important Now Than Ever Before

It’s not iteration if you do it only once.

—Jeff Patton

Design Is Always Evolving

When designers first brought their craft to software in the ’80s and ’90s, they approached the work in the same way they approached the earlier materials they worked with. In industrial design, print design, fashion design, or any field involving physical outputs, the manufacturing step is a critical constraint. When designing for physical materials, designers need to figure out what they’re making before they begin production, because production is expensive. It’s expensive to set up a factory floor to produce hard goods or garments. It’s expensive to set up a printing press for a print run.

Working in software, designers faced new challenges. They had to figure out the grammar of this new medium, and as they did, they saw new specialties like interaction design and information architecture emerge. But the process by which designers practiced remained largely unchanged. They still designed products in great detail in advance, because they still had to deal with a “manufacturing” process: the work had to be duplicated onto floppy disks and CDs, which were then distributed to market in exactly the same way that physical goods were distributed. The cost of getting it wrong remained high.

Today, we face a new reality. Software production has become continuous. The Internet has changed the way we distribute software. The proliferation of mobile ...