by Jeff Gothelf
Praise for Lean UX
“The quality of the user experience has become the most important differentiator for a company’s product. In Lean UX, Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf highlight the methods and strategies for ensuring that great experiences are built with as little waste as possible in a collaborative, cross-functional effort. It is a must read not just for designers, but for everyone on the team from executive leadership to intern.”
Tom Boates—Founder/CEO of Brilliant
“If you’re struggling to ship winning user experiences with agile development methods, get this book! Jeff and Josh share proven methods for creative ideation, planning, and problem-solving without heavy deliverable baggage. The new edition brings some crucial updates, including help with designing and tracking experiments, and refinements to many of the critical tools of lean UX.”
Christian Crumlish—VP Product, 7cups.com; Coauthor of Designing Social Interfaces, Second Edition
“In the time since Lean UX was first published, the practices it outlines have become widespread. The revised and expanded Lean UX 2nd Edition will show you how to apply Lean UX thinking to both green fields and sustaining innovation projects, create the right company culture for success and inspire you with new case studies of Lean UX in practice.”
Lane Goldstone—Cofounder Brooklyn Copper Cookware
“In a very short time span, Lean UX went from an obscure idea to a transformative way of building and delivering products that meet the customer’s needs. It’s now a critical approach to design and needs to be top-of-mind for every designer, developer, and product manager.”
Jared Spool—Cofounder, Center Centre UX Design School
“Approachable, actionable advice from two people that have been “getting out of the building” and evolving Lean UX globally for over a decade. In sharing that experience, this book moves beyond theory and brings insights from real work done, providing context-rich narratives to digest and fuel UX teams working in tandem with the agile software development process.”
Courtney Hemphill—Partner at Carbon Five
“Customer Development and Lean Startup changed the way businesses are built, because even the smartest teams can’t predict market and user behavior. This book brings both methodologies to UX so you can build cheaper, faster, and—most importantly—better experiences.”
Alex Osterwalder—Author and Entrepreneur;
Cofounder, Business Model Foundry GmbH
“There is a revolution afoot. It is the move away from big design up front and isolated, specialized teams throwing documents over the wall to each other. Applying the principles of Lean startups, Jeff and Josh lay out the principles of Lean UX, which can literally transform the way you bring experiences to life. I have firsthand experience applying their wisdom and am excited about taking Agile to the next level. Get this book. But most importantly, put this book into practice.”
Bill Scott—Sr. Director, User Interface Engineering,
PayPal, Inc.
“While there is no question that great product teams must put user experience design front-and-center, many teams have struggled to reconcile the techniques and objectives of user experience design with the rhythm and pace of modern Agile development teams. Lean UX is the collection of techniques and mindset that I advocate to modern product teams that know they need the benefits of both.”
Marty Cagan—Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group;
Former SVP Product and Design, eBay
“Jeff and Josh’s passion for getting UX (and really all of product development) right comes across powerfully in this detailed yet eminently readable book. The case studies, examples, and research serve to highlight the power of building a Lean UX process, and there’s a great deal of actionable advice taken from these. I’m ordering a copy for everyone on our design, UX, and product teams at Moz.”
Rand Fishkin—CEO and Cofounder, Moz
“A fantastic combination of case studies and practical advice that your team can use today. Whether you’re at a startup or a Fortune 500 company, this book will change the way you build products.”
Laura Klein—Author of UX for Lean Startups
“Lean UX provides a prescriptive framework for how to build better products, moving design away from pixel perfection for the sake of it, toward iterative learning, smarter effort, and outcome-based results. Product managers, business owners, and startup employees—along with designers—can benefit greatly from Lean UX.”
Ben Yoskovitz—Founding Partner, Highline BETA
Lean UX
Second Edition
Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
Lean UX
by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
Copyright © 2016 Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
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March 2013: First Edition
September 2016: Second Edition
Revision History for the Second Edition
2016-09-09: First Release
2016-11-18: Second Release
See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781491953600 for release details.
The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Lean UX, the cover image, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
While the publisher and the authors have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the authors disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work contains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights.
978-1-491-95360-0
[LSCC]
Dedication
For Carrie, Grace, and Sophie
...and Vicky, Naomi, Amanda, and Joey.
Foreword
In reading Lean UX, you’re about to embark on a tour of a new way of working. For those of us steeped in traditional management techniques, it may seem a little disorienting. I sometimes like to imagine what it would be like to have a bird’s-eye view of the typical modern corporation. From on high, you could examine each silo of functional excellence one at a time. See them in your mind’s eye: Marketing, Operations, Manufacturing, IT, Engineering, Design, and on and on in a tidy row of crisp, well-run silos.
Let’s imagine you reached down to grab one of these silos and popped its top off to see inside. What would you see? This being a modern company, you’d see each silo designed for maximum efficiency. To achieve this efficiency, you’d likely find a highly iterative, customer-centric approach to problem solving. In Manufacturing, you’d encounter traditional lean thi
nking. In Engineering or IT, perhaps some variation on agile development. In Marketing, customer development. In Operations, DevOps. And of course in Design, the latest in design thinking, interaction design, and user research techniques.
Zooming back out to our high perch, we might be forgiven for thinking “This company uses a variety of rigorous, hypothesis-driven, customer-centric, and iterative methodologies. Surely, it must be an extremely agile company, capable of reacting quickly to changes in market conditions and continuously innovating!” But those of us who work in modern companies know how far this is from the truth.
How is it possible that our departmental silos are operating with agility, but our companies are hopelessly rigid and slow? From our far-off vantage point, we have missed something essential. Although our departments may value agility, the interconnections between them are still mired in an antiquated industrial past.
Consider just one example, which I hope will sound familiar. A company decides it must innovate to survive. It commissions a design team (either in-house or external) to investigate the future of its industry and recommend innovative new products that could secure its future. A period of great excitement commences. Customers are interviewed, observed, analyzed. Experiments, surveys, focus groups, prototypes, and smoke tests follow one after the other. Concepts are rapidly conceived, tested, rejected, and refined.
And what happens at the end of this process? The designers proudly present—and the business enthusiastically celebrates—a massive specification document with their findings and recommendations. The iteration, experimentation, and discovery ceases. Now Engineering is called upon to execute this plan. And although the engineering process may be agile, the specification document is rigidly fixed. What happens if the engineers discover that the specification was unworkable or even slightly flawed? What if the concepts worked great in the lab but have no commercial appeal? What if market conditions have changed since the original “learning” took place?
I once spoke to a company who had commissioned—at terrible expense—a multiyear study of their industry. The result was an impressive “view of the future” display custom-built into their corporate headquarters. Inside this room, you could see an extrapolation of what the next 10 years would look like in their industry, complete with working demos of futuristic product concepts. You can guess what happened over the succeeding 10 years: absolutely nothing. The company rotated hundreds or thousands of executives, managers, and workers through this glimpse of the future. And in fact, 10 years later, the room no longer looks futuristic. Against all odds, their forecasts turned out to be largely accurate. And yet, the company had failed to commercialize even one of the recommendations in the attendant specification document. So I asked the company what they planned to do next; they told me they were going back to the original designers and asking them to forecast the next 10 years! The company blamed their engineers and managers for their failure to commercialize, not the designers.
When I tell this story to nondesigners, they are horrified and want to convince me that it is the fancy design firm who is to blame. When I tell it to senior executives—in both large companies and startups alike—they cringe. They are constantly deluged with complaints from every single function that they are fast and cutting edge but it is the other departments that slow the company down. When the whole company fails to find new sources of growth, there is plenty of blame to go around.
But the fault is not with the designers, or the engineers, or even the executives. The problem is the systems we use to build companies. We are still building linear organizations in a world that demands constant change. We are still building silos in a world that demands thorough collaboration. And we are still investing in analysis, arguing over specifications, and efficiently producing deliverables in a world that demands continuous experimentation in order to achieve continuous innovation.
It has been just about four years since I first began writing and speaking about a new concept called Lean Startup, and barely a year since I published The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Achieve Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Business). In that time, I have seen the ideas grow and spread—from industry to industry, sector to sector, and function to function. Every time we have encountered new terrain, we have relied on farsighted leaders to help translate the core principles and develop new processes to implement them.
Lean UX is an important step in that evolution. For the first time, we have a comprehensive look at how Lean Startup principles apply in a design context. Along the way, it introduces important new tools and techniques to achieve superior collaboration, faster delivery, and—most importantly—dramatically better products.
Lean Startup is a big tent. It builds on established ideas from many disciplines, from lean manufacturing to design thinking. It gives us a common vocabulary and set of concepts that can be used to accelerate results across the whole company. We can stop wasting time arguing about who is to blame and which department should rule the day.
It is my hope that all of us will remember to heed Jeff Gothelf’s call to “get out of the deliverables business” and return our focus where it belongs, enlisting the whole corporation in its most urgent task: delighting customers.
It is time to break down the silos, unite the clans, and get to work.
Eric Ries
January 30, 2013
San Francisco, CA
Authors’ Note
There are many folks who have continued to be patient, supportive, and inspirational as we set out to write the second edition of this book. We wanted to take a moment to thank them.
The core of our learning and support came from our colleagues at Neo and our experiences launching, building, growing, and sunsetting a truly pioneering consulting company. These folks include Giff Constable, Ben Burton, Jono Mallanyk, Anil Podduturi, Jonathan Irwin, Tim Lombardo, Corey Innis, David Bland, Nicole Rufuku, Ian McFarland, Rabble, Paul Wilson, Mike Doel, Gina Winkler, Ken Barker, Julia Mantel, Balin Brandt, and many more. We tried to use our own ideas to build a business that tested, expanded, invalidated, and fortified many of the tactics, techniques, and points of view we’ve shared with you in this book. We’re grateful to our colleagues and clients and humbled by all we’ve learned from them.
As always, we would like to thank the many folks who have contributed material to the book. As was true the first time we wrote this book, we had more case studies and contributions than we could use, so some of the wonderful material our colleagues shared didn’t fit into the manuscript. This reflects more on our writing process than the quality of the contribution. With that said, thanks to Lane Goldstone, Emily Holmes, Mikael Lindh, Helene Brinkgaard, Henriette Hosbond, James Kelway, Ann Yauger, Archie Miller, Beth Sutherland, Tony Collins, Derya Eilertsen, Bill Scott, Cody Evol, Shilpa Dhar, Jeff Harrell, Dave Cronin, Dan Harrelson, Alethea Hannemann, Kristen Teti, and Matthew Hayto.
Note: From Jeff
I’d like to continue to thank my writing and business partner Josh Seiden. Despite writing three books together, building a business, working on projects, teaching together, and hanging out socially, we continue to seek out opportunities to collaborate. I learn continuously from our partnership. I also enjoy making fun of Josh’s age (hint: he’s really old).
Finally, no project comes without sacrifice. This edition of the book is no different. I continue to be amazed and grateful at the love, patience, and support I’ve had from my family over the years since the first edition came out. My wife, Carrie, has dealt with far too many hours of me locked in my office tapping at the keyboard, in hotel rooms in foreign cities, or on the airplanes taking me to those destinations. That sacrifice is not lost on me. To my daughters, Grace and Sophie, I hope I can provide some inspiration about achieving seemingly impossible tasks and having the courage to give things a shot, even if you don’t think you know what you’re doing. I love you all. Thank you.
Note: From Josh
&n
bsp; In this book, Jeff and I describe a working style that is deeply collaborative. That’s my preferred style of working—I always feel that I learn more and am more effective when I’m collaborating. Whatever I’ve been able to contribute to this book is a result of the amazing collaborations I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy in my career. You all know who you are. I’m very grateful to all of you.
There is one working collaboration that I do need to call out though: it’s been a real pleasure to continue to collaborate with Jeff. Jeff supplies many of the things in this partnership that I can’t, including optimism about deadlines, audacity in setting goals, and tirelessness in evangelizing. He’s a smart, hard-working, and egoless partner. He is not, however, funny. If that’s needed, I usually have to provide it.
Thanks finally, to Vicky, Naomi, and Amanda. I love you.
From Jeff and Josh
This second version of the book is our attempt to update the material to the current state of Lean UX practice and thinking. We’ve had four years to experiment, iterate, and optimize the ideas and techniques originally detailed in this book and we felt it was time to share that insight with you.
Lean methods are learning methods, and we expect to be learning and discovering even more as we continue our journey as practitioners and teachers of Lean UX. As you embark or continue your travel down this path, we’d love to hear about your journey—your successes, challenges, and failures—so that we can keep learning through our collaboration with you.