Lean UX, 2nd Edition

Preface

The biggest lie in software is Phase Two.

If you’ve spent any time building digital products in the past 20 years—regardless of your role—you’ve felt the sting of this lie. You set aside features and ideas for the next phase of work and then they are gone—never to be heard from again. As designers, we’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, of wireframes and workflows end up in this same bucket.

But were these ideas abandoned because they were flawed? Did the features that shipped actually meet customer and business goals? Or did the team simply run out of time? They never got to Phase Two.

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries lays out his vision for how to ensure the ideas that have the most value get the most resources. The method Ries promotes relies on experimentation, rapid iterations of ideas, and evolutionary processes. The entire concept of Phase Two becomes moot.

The junction of Lean Startup and User Experience (UX) design—and their symbiotically beneficial coexistence—is Lean UX.

What Is Lean UX?

The Lean principles underlying Lean Startup apply to Lean UX in three ways. First, they help us remove waste from our UX design process. We create minimally viable conversations by moving away from heavily documented handoffs. Instead, a Lean UX process creates only the design artifacts we need to move the team’s learning forward. Second, Lean principles drive us to harmonize our “system” of designers, developers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, marketers, and others ...