UX for Lean Startups

Chapter 6. Just Enough Design

In this chapter:

• Learn several important tips for designing the right stuff faster.

• Get tools that give you real insight into whether or not you should build a feature.

• Understand how to tell necessary features from nice-to-have features.

Sorry, still not going to teach you how to be a brilliant designer. Instead, I’m going to teach you something just as important: when not to design. If the previous chapter was about the fundamentals you need to know in order to design something, this chapter is about ways to figure out when not to jump into the design process at all.

Remember, it is important to know how to design things, but it’s just as important to know when not to design anything. Avoiding extra work isn’t lazy. It’s smart. It means you’ll have more time to do great design work on the things that matter.

You see, the beauty of the Lean methodology is that it forces you to get rid of many of your old, ingrained habits that slowed you down and made you design things that never got built or build things that never got used.

Lean UX is often about doing just enough design. Please note that the word “enough” is pretty important here. Just enough design doesn’t mean crappy design or hard-to-use design. Just enough design means doing what you need to do to learn what you want to learn.

Design the Necessary, Not the Neat

Designers design. It’s right there in the job title. The problem is that we can overdesign. We can spend a lot of time focusing on the details ...