Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

MAKING IT LEAN
Fitting the parts of UX that you think will be most beneficial into your skill set and
working process is exactly what’s being done with the increasingly popular practice of
Lean UX. The method was created because development teams working on faster and
faster production cycles have found it difficult to incorporate UX research and design time
into the process. This has been especially true for teams switching to the Agile method of
rapid-cycle, iterative development.
Born out of frustration with the older, sequential Waterfall approach (which moves
slowly, step by step from requirements gathering, to design, to programming, and then
testing and debugging), Agile breaks the work up into small units executed by crossfunctional
and self-managed teams, with designers and front- and back-end programmers
all working together. The way the Agile method is practiced varies from company to
company, but at its heart is the dividing up of design and development work into small
increments called sprints, and the rapid coding and testing of those increments as work
proceeds. This makes fitting UX research and design methods into the process difficult.
Lean UX is a great solution, developed out of both the Agile method and the Lean Startup
approach to product development.
The Lean Startup approach is also one of rapid development and testing in iterative
cycles. Created by entrepreneur Eric Ries, author of the book The Lean Startup, the
method combines the principles of rapid development cycles and testing from Agile with
lessons from the Lean Manufacturing process developed at Toyota, which is focused on
stripping out all wasted time and resources in manufacturing. Key foci of the Lean method
are lowering the amount of inventory of parts that must be on hand for the assembly
process and maintaining quality control throughout the process, catching any problems as
early as possible.
The Lean Startup method focuses on the rapid creation of a minimum viable product
(MVP), which might be thought of as a prototype, depending on which definition of
prototype you mean. An MVP isn’t meant to be a rough approximation of a product; it’s
meant to be a fully functioning product that can be distributed or offered to customers and
from which a startup can gather real-world user feedback for testing the market and
further developing the product. Ries calls this process “validated learning.” You can see
the relevance of UX. Core to the Lean Startup philosophy is that it’s best to get actual user
feedback about a product as early as you can.
So what exactly is Lean UX? The focus, according to UX designer Jeff Gothelf, who
wrote the book Lean UX, is on doing away with many of the more time-consuming
deliverables of UX design, like personas and wireframes, in order to get to the creation of
a working prototype—or MVP—as fast as possible, to test that with customers, and then
to iterate improvements. The process as Gothelf describes it involves quickly and roughly
developing the concept for the product, generally by sketching, whether on paper or
whiteboard, then moving right on to creating a prototype. After the prototype is internally
approved, it is sent to the client or customers for testing and validated learning, and the
product is then improved accordingly.
Some in the UX field would argue that this isn’t “real” UX because it leaves so much