Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14. Collaborative Design

Be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.

Amy Poehler

What is a “user experience”? It’s the sum total of all of the interactions a user has with your product and service. It’s created by all of the decisions that you and your team make about your product or service: the way you price it, the way you package and sell it, the way you onboard users, the way you support it and maintain it and upgrade it, and so on and so on. In other words, it’s created by a team, not an individual designer. For this reason, Lean UX begins with the idea that user experience design should be a collaborative process.

Lean UX brings designers and nondesigners together in cocreation. It yields ideas that are bigger and better than their individual contributors. To be clear, though, we’re not advocating “design by committee,” a phrase that implies a process filled with bad compromises and uninformed decision making. Instead, Lean UX processes are orchestrated and facilitated by designers and executed by discipline specialists working from a common playbook. Lean UX increases your team’s ownership over the work by providing an opportunity for individual points of view to be shared early and continuously through the process. Ultimately, it’s about using the diverse expertise of your team to create designs ...