Lean UX

Preface

The biggest lie in software is Phase II.

If you’ve spent any time building digital products in the last 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 a designer, I’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, of wireframes and workflows end up in this same bucket.

But did these ideas disappear because they were flawed? Did the features that shipped actually meet customer and business goals, so Phase II ideas were never needed? Or did the team simply run out of time? The team never got to Phase II.

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

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

What Is Lean UX and How Is It Different?

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 move away from heavily documented handoffs to a process that creates only the design artifacts we need to move the team’s learning forward. Second, they drive us to harmonize our “system” of designers, developers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, marketers, and others ...