LEAN UX
By: Sandesh Rijal
Tags: Ux Writing, Ux Strategy, UX, UX Design, UX Research

It is a methodology for changing user behavior and influencing business outcomes. One of the thing about lean UX is it makes to think you about outcomes. An outcome for your business might be to increase revenue, it might be to increase the number of subscribers, it might be to increase the number of paid users and so on on your product. How you get that is an unknown. What lean UX is about ?? It’s about filling in that gap of how you get them. You don’t start up thinking about solutions, you don’t start of thinking about features. What you do is you start up thinking about outcome you want to influence.

Let’s take a example. One outcome you might want to influence for your business would be increasing the number of subscribers. What you do is you then say ok and go with increasing the number of subscribers, the outcome we want to create is increasing the number of subscribers. How do we get them ? May be that’s more flexible pricing plans, may be it’s one month’s free trial, may be it’s making the product easy to use and so on so that more people will continue to use your product and they recommend that to their friends and may be because they recommend to their friends more people will come and use it. There is always different way you can address the problems, there is always different ways you can think about the problems. But the core thing about Lean UX is what is does is it’s gets you to think about the problem, it gets you to think about a outcome you want to achieve.

How the Lean UX process works

Before you get started with Lean UX, keep in mind what Gothelf says: Lean UX is a mentality.

A mindset must be accepted by everyone in your organization in order for it to be effective.

“This reframe necessitates an attitude of humility throughout the business. It necessitates that teams and managers apply their knowledge, talents, and creativity in the same way that scientists do: they suggest their best answer and then test to see whether they’re correct.”

For Lean UX to be effective, all members of your organization must be on board and understand it.

The system can be broken down into four processes:

Outcomes, assumptions, hypotheses Design Creating the MVP Research and Learning

Outcomes, assumptions, and hypotheses

Whereas typical software development approaches concentrate on features and deliverables, Lean UX emphasizes the product’s outcomes and how they help (or do not benefit) the user.

To achieve positive results, Lean UX turns the focus away from what designers believe is necessary of a product and onto their assumptions.

Assumptions are just your beliefs or expectations about your users based on what you know.

Business outcomes. This is what it looks like when it’s all said and done. What evidence do you have that your product was a success?

Users. The people for whom you’re designing a product. What are their names? What does their persona entail?

User outcomes. This is what your customers are looking for in a product like yours. What are their aches and pains?

Features. How will you improve your product in the future to ensure that your users get the results they want?

Design

This is the point at which you start designing your product. This could also be the moment to put your hypotheses to the test.

Adapted from Lean UX:

“For instance, if you’re working on a new project, you could evaluate demand by developing a landing page that counts how many people sign up for your service.”

It’s also not enough to lock your designers in a room progressively filling with water and force them to build a product before drowning (too specific?). Always keep in mind that you must collaborate when designing.

For example, cross-departmental teams must collaborate to draw and construct wireframes, and everyone must feel comfortable providing input on everything. Designers should think of themselves as meeting and conversation facilitators.

As your designs advance, you can format your meetings and talks in a variety of ways. Check out chapter four of Lean UX for additional information.

This effort is incorporated into the minimal viable product.

MVP (Minimum viable product)

What is the simplest way for us to learn more about our hypothesis? That is the question that your minimum viable product seeks to answer (MVP).

An MVP is the most basic expression of your product, as we’ve already discussed. The goal is to get a basic product out there and test how your target market reacts to it.

MVP is defined as “a version of a new product that allows a team to acquire the largest amount of validated learnings about customers with the least amount of effort” in Eric Riess’ book The Lean Startup.

Research and learning

Validation is the focus of this stage of the process.

Are you heading in the right direction? Is your product meeting the needs of your customers? What should be changed?

Research and learning requires two things to be effective in Lean UX:

Continuous. Every sprint should include “small, informal, qualitative research” methodologies (from Lean UX).

Collaborative. To “build shared understanding,” teams must operate cross-functionally rather than in silos (from Lean UX).

The idea is for your company to obtain information quickly but thoroughly. This is only possible if you conduct frequent and collaborative research.