The Skinny on Lean UX

By Brian

NOVEMBER 21, 2013 0 COMMENTS

Waterfall. Agile. User Experience. Lean. In a field of buzzwords, the one you’ve probably heard most lately is Lean UX. But Lean UX is more than just the latest fad. An emerging methodology for designing digital products, Lean UX shortens the feedback loop between design and development by removing anything that’s unnecessary to provide value for the customer.

While it’s gaining traction now, Lean isn’t a new concept. Toyota first introduced it as the Toyota Production System (TPS) back in the 1990s as a process improvement. Since then, the Lean concept has been applied to Six Sigma in manufacturing; IT products and services; and business startup culture (with the publication of Eric Ries’s bestselling The Lean Startup). When applied to UX, Lean focuses on quickly delivering the experience of the design, putting less emphasis on process-oriented deliverables (which are often the source of unnecessary waste). Instead, Lean UX shifts the focus of the design and development process toward 3 key principles: expanded ownership, externalized communications, and emphasizing outcomes.

Expanded Ownership

In both Waterfall and Agile methods, a product manager is assigned as the owner of the product or feature. This person is the “single wringable neck” (thus often labeled a “chicken”), solely responsible for the success or failure of a project. Lean UX, on the other hand, expands the ownership of success and failure to all members of the team.

In the Lean setup, product managers are still responsible, but only for determining what will ultimately serve the business. Beyond the product manager, developers are now responsible for understanding and communicating what’s technically possible. They are expected to provide a feasibility check on the design process, giving feedback and input at every step. Designers, in turn, are responsible for understanding the customers’ motivations and behaviors – and designing solutions that appropriately map to those aspects. Each team member now owns the facet of the project that matches her role. Teams that share accountability and ownership in this way tend to invent better solutions faster, with less friction.

Externalized Communication

Another component of Lean UX involves broadening the culture of communication within an organization. Rather than a design team generating ideas and making decisions in a vacuum, or developers building functionality in a silo apart from the design team, Lean makes the team’s work external and public, by putting it on a wall for everyone to see. Whether physical or virtual, the “wall” creates a transparency that allows more frequent and organic feedback.

This simple activity tends to trigger a cultural shift. While most product teams aren’t exactly black boxes, it’s rare for a team to make all the product details available, not just internally, but to the whole organization at all times. This, however, is exactly what Lean UX advocates. Setting up the “wall” isn’t hard – Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX, recommends setting aside an actual wall in your office for posting the team’s progress, but it’s just as easy to use a software tool like Pivotal Tracker for remote teams. Whatever you choose, this communication will allow everyone to stay on the same page, at any time.

Emphasizing Outcomes

The last key tenet of Lean UX is its focus on outcomes rather than deliverables. Historically, in a typical project, designers are asked to create and deliver mockups (usually Photoshop files), and developers are asked to deliver code. In a Lean UX project, however, the emphasis is on outcomes – the answers to the question, “What are the tangible results of the work we did?” Each cycle is tested to determine what is and is not working, so that the final design and functionality are guaranteed to work well for users. The overall result is a better, more focused product that people can easily use.

Lean UX is gaining traction because it embraces the reality that designing useful, usable products is partly a numbers game. There is a need for developers and designers to try many different solutions and evaluate them with users, to see what works and what doesn’t – committing to “our best guess” without testing alternatives is simply not as effective. The more design iterations you can do (and test!), the faster you can figure out what truly works. Lean also acknowledges that no one person (or role) has all the design answers – all ideas are hypotheses that need to be respected, but also validated as quickly as possible. These core premises, and the methodology emerging to support them, hold great promise not just for the creation of successful products, but also for a vast improvement of the collaborative culture within creative teams.

via Above the Fold http://blog.abovethefolddesign.com/2013/11/21/the-skinny-on-lean-ux/