Lean UX

Chapter 4. Collaborative Design

As you navigate through the rest of your life, 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

Lean UX is a collaborative process. It brings designers and nondesigners together in co-creation. It yields ideas that are bigger and better than those of the individual contributors. But it’s not design-by-committee. Instead, Lean UX increases a team’s ownership over the work by providing an opportunity for all opinions to be heard much earlier in the process. In this chapter, we explore the many benefits that come from this close, cross-functional collaboration. Specifically, we look at:

• Why everybody gets to design

• How low-fidelity artifacts increase collaboration

• Building a shared understanding across your team

We’ll also dig into a series of techniques that enable this more productive way of working, including:

• Design studio—a collaborative sketching exercise for the entire team

• Style guides and pattern libraries—living repositories of all the customer-facing elements of your product

• Collaboration techniques for geographically distributed teams

In the previous chapter, we discussed product feature hypotheses. The first part of a product feature hypothesis statement describes what we will build to solve our customers’ pain point. These features can be designed in many ways. Navigating through ...