by Jeff Gothelf
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Preface
The biggest lie in software is Phase Two.
If you’ve spent any time building digital products in the past 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 designers, we’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, of wireframes and workflows end up in this same bucket.
But were these ideas abandoned because they were flawed? Did the features that shipped actually meet customer and business goals? Or did the team simply run out of time? They never got to Phase Two.
In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries lays out his vision for how to ensure the ideas that have the most value get the most resources. The method Ries promotes relies on experimentation, rapid iterations of ideas, and evolutionary processes. The entire concept of Phase Two becomes moot.
The junction of Lean Startup and User Experience (UX) design—and their symbiotically beneficial coexistence—is Lean UX.
What Is Lean UX?
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 create minimally viable conversations by moving away from heavily documented handoffs. Instead, a Lean UX process creates only the design artifacts we need to move the team’s learning forward. Second, Lean principles drive us to harmonize our “system” of designers, developers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, marketers, and others in a transparent, cross-functional collaboration that brings nondesigners into our design process. Last, and perhaps most important, is the mindset shift we gain from adopting a model based on experimentation. Instead of relying on a hero designer to divine the best solution from a single point of view, we use rapid experimentation and measurement to learn quickly how well (or not) our ideas meet our goals. In all of this, the designer’s role begins to evolve toward design facilitation—and with that we take on a new set of responsibilities.
Besides Lean Startup, Lean UX has two other foundations: Design Thinking and Agile development philosophies. Design Thinking helps us widen the scope of our work beyond interfaces and artifacts. Design Thinking looks at systems, and helps us apply design tools to broader problems. It relies on collaboration, iteration, making, and empathy as core to problem-solving. Agile refocuses software development on shorter cycles, delivering value regularly, and continuous learning. It seeks to get ideas (oftentimes as working software) to customers quickly, sense how these ideas are received, and to adjust frequently to new learning along the way.
Lean UX uses these foundations to break the stalemate between the speed of Agile and the need for design in the product-development lifecycle. If you’ve struggled to figure out how UX design can work in agile environments, Lean UX is the answer.
Lean UX breaks down the barriers that have kept software designers isolated from real business needs on the one hand and actual implementation on the other. Lean UX not only brings designers to the table, it brings our partners in business and technology to the whiteboard to work with us on the best solutions in an ongoing way.
Jeff once had a large pharmaceutical client who hired the agency he worked for at the time to redesign their ecommerce platform with the goal of increasing revenues by 15 percent. Jeff was the lead interaction designer on the team. In the vacuum of their office, Jeff and his team spent months researching the current system, supply chain, competitors, target audience, and contextual use scenarios. They researched personas and assembled strategic models. Jeff designed a new information architecture for the product catalog and crafted a brand-new shopping and checkout experience.
The project took months. And when the work was complete, the team packaged it all up into a PowerPoint slide deck. This was a formidable deck—and it had to be, considering the $600,000 price tag! The team went over to the client’s office and spent an entire eight-hour day going over each and every pixel and word in that deck. When it was over, the client clapped. (They really did.) Jeff and team were relieved. The client loved the work. And Jeff’s team never looked at that deck again.
Six months after that meeting, nothing had changed on the client’s site. The client never looked at that deck again, either.
The moral of this story: Building a pixel-perfect specification might be a route to rake in six-figure consulting fees, but it’s not a way to make a meaningful difference to a real product that is crucial to real users. It’s also not the reason that any designer got into the product design business. We got in to build valuable products and services, not to write specs.
Some teams we work with today create entirely new products or services. They are not working within an existing product framework or structure. In “green field” projects like these, we are simultaneously trying to discover how this new product or service will be used, how it will behave, and how we are going to build it. It’s an environment of continual change, and there isn’t a lot of time or patience for planning or up-front design.
Other teams work with established products that were created with traditional design and development methods. Their challenge is different. They need to build upon existing platforms while increasing revenue and brand value. These teams usually have more resources at their disposal than a ground-floor startup, but they still have to use their resources efficiently—figuring out the best way to spend those resources to build products and services their customers actually want.
As we’ve been practicing Lean UX, we’ve learned to overcome the feeling that we are showing work in an “unfinished” or “ugly” state. We now know that our first attempt will inevitably require revision. So the sooner we get our ideas out, the sooner we can figure out what those revisions should be. Waiting too long to get that feedback is wasteful. We invest too much in the initial design and are less flexible to changes because of the effort we’ve already put in. Accepting the iterative nature of design (and software as a medium) requires the support of a high-functioning, collaborative team. You need to know—as a team—that you’re not going to get it right the first time and that you’re all working together to iterate your way forward.
There are many elements that affect the success of digital systems. Design is certainly an important component, but product management, engineering, marketing, legal compliance, and copywriting (to name a few) all have an impact on the system. No one discipline has all the answers. This is the nature of our digital medium. Collaboration creates better work. Revision and iteration make for better products. Within the pages of this book, we’ve distilled the insights and tactics that have allowed us to adopt this point of view and to create real success for product and business teams—and real satisfaction for customers.
Who Is Lean UX for?
This book is, first, for interaction designers who know they can contribute more and be more effective with their teams. But, it’s also for product managers who need better ways to define their products with their teams and to validate them with their customers. It’s also for developers who understand that a collaborative, Agile team environment leads to better code and more meaningful work. And, finally, it’s for managers—managers of UX teams, project teams, business lines, departments, and companies—who understand the difference a great UX can make.
What’s in It for You?
The book is set up in three sections.
Part I provides an overview and introduction to Lean UX and its founding principles. We lay out the reasons the evolution of the UX design process is so critical and describe Lean UX. We also discuss the underlying principles that you’ll need to understand to make Lean UX successful.
Part II focuses on process. Each chapter takes a step in the Lean UX cycle and details clearly how to execute each one and why each is important. We also share examples of how we and o
thers have done these things in the past.
Part III tackles the integration of Lean UX practices into your organization. We discuss the role of Lean UX within a typical Agile development environment. We also discuss the organizational shifts that need to take place at the corporate level, the team level, and at the individual contributor level for these ideas to truly take hold.
Our hope is that this book will deliver a wake-up call to UX designers, their colleagues, and product teams in all organizations still waiting for “Phase Two.” Although the book is filled with tactics and techniques to help develop your processes, we’d like you to remember that Lean UX is, at its core, a mindset.
Jeff and Josh
Part I. Introduction and Principles
About Part I
In this first part, we provide an introduction to Lean UX and its founding principles. We discuss why the evolution of the product design and development process is so critical, and we describe what Lean UX is. We also discuss the underlying principles you’ll need to understand to make Lean UX work in your organization.
Chapter 1 provides a brief history of product design and development and why it’s time for that process to evolve.
In Chapter 2, we present a detailed look at the key principles that drive the Lean UX process. These principles offer a framework for a leaner product design and discovery process and also provide basic management guidelines for these teams. They are critical to the success of Lean UX and, if incorporated into your organization, will have a profound impact on your culture and on the productivity and success of your teams.
Chapter 1. Lean UX: More Important Now Than Ever Before
It’s not iteration if you do it only once.
—Jeff Patton
Design Is Always Evolving
When designers first brought their craft to software in the ’80s and ’90s, they approached the work in the same way they approached the earlier materials they worked with. In industrial design, print design, fashion design, or any field involving physical outputs, the manufacturing step is a critical constraint. When designing for physical materials, designers need to figure out what they’re making before they begin production, because production is expensive. It’s expensive to set up a factory floor to produce hard goods or garments. It’s expensive to set up a printing press for a print run.
Working in software, designers faced new challenges. They had to figure out the grammar of this new medium, and as they did, they saw new specialties like interaction design and information architecture emerge. But the process by which designers practiced remained largely unchanged. They still designed products in great detail in advance, because they still had to deal with a “manufacturing” process: the work had to be duplicated onto floppy disks and CDs, which were then distributed to market in exactly the same way that physical goods were distributed. The cost of getting it wrong remained high.
Today, we face a new reality. Software production has become continuous. The Internet has changed the way we distribute software. The proliferation of mobile devices, wearables, and the Internet of Things has changed the way we consume it. We are no longer limited by a physical manufacturing process, and are able to get our digital products and services into customers’ hands at a pace unheard of just five years ago.
This changes everything.
Teams are now facing intense pressure from competitors who are using techniques like Agile software development, continuous integration, and continuous deployment to radically reduce their cycle times. Take Amazon as an example. The ecommerce giant pushes new code live to their customers every 11.6 seconds.1 And they are using these short cycles as a competitive advantage—releasing early and often, gaining market feedback, and iterating based on what they learn to create a continuous conversation with customers. In essence, they are discovering their product at the same time they are delivering it. This has many benefits but perhaps the two most important ones are:
The ability to learn, continuously and quickly, how well their products are meeting customer needs
Raising customer expectations in terms of product quality and company response times to their concerns and feedback
What’s more, this new way of working is not based on expensive technologies. The platforms and services that make this possible are available for free or nearly free to just about every startup team. This exposes incumbent businesses to a threat they haven’t known before. Specifically, the barriers to entry—in almost every domain—have never been lower. Without the need to “manufacture” a physical product, anyone with access to the Web can design, code, and deploy services to anyone else. Faced with these new threats, traditional “get it all figured out first” approaches are simply not workable. So what should product teams do?
It’s time for a change.
Lean UX is the evolution of product design and team collaboration. It takes the best parts of the designer’s toolkit, combines that with Agile software development and Lean Startup thinking, and makes all of this available to the entire product team. It allows teams to exploit this new reality to maximize learning, continuously discover the best path forward, and amplify the voice of the customer.
Lean UX is deeply collaborative and cross-functional, because designers, product managers, and software engineers no longer have the luxury of working in isolation from each other. The days of the waterfall process are over. Work is continuous. We can’t afford to wait on the work of others, nor can we keep others waiting on our work. Instead, we need daily, continuous engagement with all of our colleagues if we are going to be successful. This continuous engagement allows us to strip away heavy deliverables (and the time required to create them) in favor of techniques that build shared understanding with our teammates. Shared understanding allows our teams to make decisions faster and empowers us to engage in more strategic conversations. Yes, we still have the tactical responsibility of tweaking aesthetic elements, page load times, form factor and screen size compatibility, workflows, and calls to action, but we have more time to focus on more valuable activities, like gathering insight that can affect strategic choices for our product.
Lean UX also lets us change the way we talk about design. Instead of talking about features and documents, we can talk about what works—objectively. In this new reality, we have more access to market feedback than ever before. This allows us to reframe design conversations in terms of objective business goals. We can measure what works, learn, and adjust.
Lean UX is three things. It begins as a process change for designers and product teams. But it’s much more than that. It’s a culture change that lets us approach our work with humility; we acknowledge that our initial solutions will probably be wrong and use many sources of insight to continuously improve our thinking. It’s also a way of organizing and managing software design and development teams to be more inclusive, collaborative, and transparent. We’ll dig deeply into each of these aspects of Lean UX throughout the book.
Perhaps the best way to sum up this introduction, though, is this: Lean UX is the way we work now.
1 YouTube, “Velocity 2011: Jon Jenkins, ‘Velocity Culture’”, Jun 20, 2011.
Chapter 2. Principles
Go that way. Really fast. If something gets in your way, turn!
—Better Off Dead (1985)
At the heart of Lean UX, you’ll find a core set of principles that govern design process, team culture, and team organization. Treat these principles as a framework. Start with them to get your teams pointed in the right direction. And keep them in mind as you begin to implement the Lean UX processes we describe later in this book. It’s really important to mention that Lean UX is not a set of rules. Instead, it’s an approach that you adopt. Given the variability between industries in terms of culture, regulations, and customers, this means that you will inevitably need to adjust the processes to make them work in your organization. These principles will provide guidance to help you make those adjustments.
Ultim
ately, if you’re able to put these principles to work you’ll find that you will change your team’s culture. Some will have more impact than others, and some will be more difficult to push through. Regardless, each principle detailed here will help you to build a product design organization that is more collaborative, more cross-functional, and a better fit for today’s agile reality.
The Foundations of Lean UX
Lean UX stands on a number of important foundations: it’s a combination of a few different schools of thought. Understanding where it comes from will help you to apply the method and find resources when you get stuck.
The first foundation of Lean UX is user experience design. Lean UX is, at its heart, a way of practicing user experience design. Drawing on roots in the fields of human factors and ergonomics as well as the human-centered design ideas that emerged in the 1950s with the work of industrial designers like Henry Dreyfuss, today we call these methods and mindsets user experience design (or just UX), a term credited to Don Norman.1 UX embraces a number of design fields, including interaction design, information architecture, graphic design, and many others. But the heart of UX practice is that it begins by identifying human needs—the needs of the users of the system.
In the past decade, we’ve seen the rise in popularity of Design Thinking. Design Thinking emerged in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s and was popularized by the design firm IDEO in the early 2000s. It is a way of applying human-centered design methods to a wide range of problems. Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, described Design Thinking as, “innovation powered by...direct observation of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported.”2