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 in a transparent, cross-functional collaboration that brings nondesigners into our design process. Last, and perhaps most important, is the mindset shift we gain from adopting a model based on experimentation. 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.

Besides Lean Startup, 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. Agile refocuses software development on shorter cycles, delivering value regularly, and continuous learning. It seeks to get ideas (oftentimes as working software) to customers quickly, sense how these ideas are received, and to adjust frequently to new learning along the way.

Lean UX uses these foundations to break the stalemate between the speed of Agile and the need for design in the product-development lifecycle. If you’ve struggled to figure out how UX design can work in agile environments, Lean UX is the answer.

Lean UX breaks down the barriers that have kept software designers isolated from real business needs on the one hand and actual implementation on the other. Lean UX not only brings designers to the table, it brings our partners in business and technology to the whiteboard to work with us on the best solutions in an ongoing way.

Jeff once had a large pharmaceutical client who hired the agency he worked for at the time to redesign their ecommerce platform with the goal of increasing revenues by 15 percent. Jeff was the lead interaction designer on the team. In the vacuum of their office, Jeff and his team spent months researching the current system, supply chain, competitors, target audience, and contextual use scenarios. They researched personas and assembled strategic models. Jeff designed a new information architecture for the product catalog and crafted a brand-new shopping and checkout experience.

The project took months. And when the work was complete, the team packaged it all up into a PowerPoint slide deck. This was a formidable deck—and it had to be, considering the $600,000 price tag! The team went over to the client’s office and spent an entire eight-hour day going over each and every pixel and word in that deck. When it was over, the client clapped. (They really did.) Jeff and team were relieved. The client loved the work. And Jeff’s team never looked at that deck again.

Six months after that meeting, nothing had changed on the client’s site. The client never looked at that deck again, either.

The moral of this story: Building a pixel-perfect specification might be a route to rake in six-figure consulting fees, but it’s not a way to make a meaningful difference to a real product that is crucial to real users. It’s also not the reason that any designer got into the product design business. We got in to build valuable products and services, not to write specs.

Some teams we work with today create entirely new products or services. They are not working within an existing product framework or structure. In “green field” projects like these, we are simultaneously trying to discover how this new product or service will be used, how it will behave, and how we are going to build it. It’s an environment of continual change, and there isn’t a lot of time or patience for planning or up-front design.

Other teams work with established products that were created with traditional design and development methods. Their challenge is different. They need to build upon existing platforms while increasing revenue and brand value. These teams usually have more resources at their disposal than a ground-floor startup, but they still have to use their resources efficiently—figuring out the best way to spend those resources to build products and services their customers actually want.

As we’ve been practicing Lean UX, we’ve learned to overcome the feeling that we are showing work in an “unfinished” or “ugly” state. We now know that our first attempt will inevitably require revision. So 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. Accepting the iterative nature of design (and software as a medium) requires the support of a high-functioning, collaborative team. 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.

There are many elements that affect the success of digital systems. Design is certainly an important component, but product management, engineering, marketing, legal compliance, and copywriting (to name a few) all have an impact on the system. No one discipline has all the answers. This is the nature of our digital medium. Collaboration creates better work. Revision and iteration make for better products. Within the pages of this book, we’ve distilled the insights and tactics that have allowed us to adopt this point of view and to create real success for product and business teams—and real satisfaction for customers.

Who Is Lean UX for?

This book is, first, for interaction designers who know they can contribute more and be more effective with their teams. But, it’s also for product managers who need better ways to define their products with their teams and to validate them with their customers. It’s also for developers who understand that a collaborative, Agile team environment leads to better code and more meaningful work. And, finally, it’s for managers—managers of UX teams, project teams, business lines, departments, and companies—who understand the difference a great UX can make.

What’s in It for You?

The book is set up in three sections.

Part I provides an overview and introduction to Lean UX and its founding principles. We lay out the reasons the evolution of the UX design process is so critical and describe Lean UX. We also discuss the underlying principles that you’ll need to understand to make Lean UX successful.

Part II focuses on process. Each chapter takes a step in the Lean UX cycle and details clearly how to execute each one and why each is important. We also share examples of how we and others have done these things in the past.

Part III tackles the integration of Lean UX practices into your organization. We discuss the role of Lean UX within a typical Agile development environment. We also discuss the organizational shifts that need to take place at the corporate level, the team level, and at the individual contributor level for these ideas to truly take hold.

Our hope is that this book will deliver a wake-up call to UX designers, their colleagues, and product teams in all organizations still waiting for “Phase Two.” Although the book is filled with tactics and techniques to help develop your processes, we’d like you to remember that Lean UX is, at its core, a mindset.

Jeff and Josh