Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7. Box 3: Users

Figure 7-1. Box 3 of the Lean UX Canvas: Users

Designers have long been advocates for the end user. Lean UX doesn’t change that. As we make assumptions about our business and the outcomes we’d like to achieve, we still need to keep the user front and center in our thinking. Box 3 of the canvas begins a deeper conversation into our target audience.

Most of us learned to think about a persona as a tool to represent what we learned in our research. And it was often the case that we created personas as the output of lengthy, expensive research studies. There are a few problems with personas that are created this way.

First, we tend to regard them as untouchable because of all of the work that went into creating them. In addition, it’s often the case that these personas were created by a research team or third-party vendor. This creates a risky knowledge gap between the people who conducted the research and those who are using the personas.

In Lean UX, we change the order of operations in the persona process. We also change persona creation from a one-time activity to an ongoing process—one that takes place whenever we learn something new about our users.

When creating personas in this approach, we start with assumptions and then do research to validate our assumption. Instead of spending months in the field interviewing people, we spend a few hours creating ...