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A Simple Introduction to Lean UX

Lean UX is an incredibly useful technique when working on projects where the Agile development method is used. Traditional UX techniques often don’t work when development is conducted in rapid bursts – there’s not enough time to deliver UX in the same way. Fundamentally Lean UX and other forms of UX all have the same goal in mind; delivering a great user experience it’s just that the way you work on a project is slightly different. So let’s take a look at how that might work.

Lean UX – What is It?

Lean UX is focused on the experience under design and is less focused on deliverables than traditional UX. It requires a greater level of collaboration with the entire team. The core objective is to focus on obtaining feedback as early as possible so that it can be used to make quick decisions. The nature of Agile development is to work in rapid, iterative cycles and Lean UX mimics these cycles to ensure that data generated can be used in each iteration .

Author/Copyright holder: Vimeo. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain

The Need for Assumptions in Lean UX

In traditional UX the project is built upon requirements capture and deliverables. The objective is to ensure that deliverables are as detailed as possible and respond adequately to the requirements that are laid down at the start of the project.

Lean UX is slightly different. You aren’t focused on detailed deliverables. You are looking to produce changes that improve the product in the here and now – essentially to mould the outcome for the better.

This works in practice by ditching “requirements” and using a “ problem statement ” which should lead to a set of assumptions that can be used to create hypotheses.

What is an assumption? An assumption is basically a statement of something that we think is true. They are designed to generate common understanding around an idea that enables everyone to get started. It is fully understood that assumptions may not be correct and may be changed during the project as a better understanding develops within the team.

Assumptions are normally generated on a workshop basis. You get the team together and state the problem and then allow the team to brainstorm their ideas for solving the problem. In the process you generate answers to certain questions that form your assumptions.

Typical questions might include:

Who are our users?

What is the product used for?

When is it used?

What situations is it used in?

What will be the most important functionality ?

What’s the biggest risk to product delivery?

There may be more than one answer to each question. That leaves us with a greater number of assumptions than it might be practical to handle. If this is the case, the team can prioritize their assumptions quickly following their generation. In general you would prioritize your assumptions by the risk they represent (what are the consequences of this being badly wrong? The more severe the consequence the higher the priority) and the level of understanding of the issue at hand (the less you know, the higher the priority).

Author/Copyright holder: visualpun.ch. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Creating a Hypothesis in Lean UX

The hypotheses created in Lean UX are designed to test our assumptions. There’s a simple format that you can use to create your own hypotheses, quickly and easily.

An example:

We believe that enabling people to save their progress at any time is essential for smartphone users. This will achieve a higher level of sign up completions. We will have demonstrated this when we can measure an improvement of the current completion rate of 20%.

We state the belief and why it is important and who it is important to. Then we follow that with what we expect to achieve. Finally, we determine what evidence we would need to collect to prove that our belief was true.

If we find that there’s no way to prove our hypothesis – we may be heading in the wrong direction because our outcomes are not clearly defined.

One of the big advantages of working like this is it removes much of the “I don’t think that’s a good idea” and political infighting from the UX design process. Every idea is going to be tested and the evidence criteria clearly determined. No evidence? Then it’s time to drop the idea and try something else.

If everyone can understand a hypothesis and the expectations from it, they tend to be happy to wait to see if it’s true rather than passionately debating their own subjective viewpoint.

The Minimum Viable Product and Lean UX

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a core concept in Lean UX. The idea is to build the most basic version of the concept as possible, test it and if there are no valuable results to abandon it. The MVPs which show promise can then be incorporated into further design and development rounds without too much hassle.

This is a great way of maximizing your resources and one of the reasons that it works so well with Agile development – it allows for a lot of experimentation with no “sacred cows”.

Author/Copyright holder: Jussi Pasanen. With acknowledgements to Aarron Walter, Ben Tollady, Ben Rowe, Lexi Thorn and Senthil Kugalur. Copyright terms and license: All rights reserved

User Research and Testing in Lean UX

User research and testing, by the very nature of Lean UX, are based on the same principles as used in traditional UX environments. However, the approach tends to be “quick and dirty” – results need to be delivered before the next Agile Sprint starts; so there’s much less focus on heavy-duty, meticulously document outputs and more focus on raw data.

Responsibilities for research also tend to be spread more widely across the whole team so that there’s no “bottleneck” created by having a single UX design resource trying to get the whole job done in tight timescales by themselves. This often gets development resources to do “hands on” UX work and increases the level of understanding and support for UX work within the development team too.

This is a very high-level overview of Lean UX and, of course, there’s a lot more to it than you can cover in a short(ish) article. However, these basic concepts should enable you to start heading in the right direction when it comes to implementing Lean UX in your Agile environment.

References & Where to Learn More

Header Image: Author/Copyright holder: Rosenfeld Media. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

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A beginner’s guide to Lean UX (+ 5 lessons from Jeff Gothelf)

Tony ho tran,   •   sep 6, 2019.

W hen it comes to creating experiences that blow your users away, a good management system is key.

It’s not enough to design a product and hope your users are happy with it. You need a process that allows you to create that product, and then make changes if need be.

This requires collaboration between teams and departments, as well as frequent interactions with your users.

That might seem like a lot to handle. After all, how can you keep up with the constant flux of your users’ needs and expectations while involving multiple teams and stakeholders?

Enter Lean UX.

Lean UX is a design management system built to help create well-designed products through frequent collaboration between teams, constant iteration, and frequent contact with your users.

Like many design systems, Lean UX contains a lot of moving parts. But once your team gets going with it, you’ll find that it’s an intuitive, fruitful way to get fast insights on what your users want.

That’s why we want to walk you through what exactly Lean UX is, its benefits for designers, and how you can start applying the process to your own company.

What is Lean UX?

Jeff Gothelf, organizational designer and UX design team leader, introduced Lean UX to the world when he published Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams in 2013. 

He helped develop the system after seeing frustrations with his team at TheLadders . They even created a diagram breaking down the exact pain points they were having with their management system.

He took what he learned with his team and developed Lean UX. He’s since spent the past few years teaching the system to all who will listen. 

( Streamline your teamwork by brainstorming with InVision Craft .)

The book laid the groundwork for different ways that companies handle their UX process, and introduced a system that emphasizes the following:

• Removing waste. The system seeks to cut through common, time-consuming tactics like frequent documentation by creating minimal viable products that drive learning quickly.
• Constant collaboration. Lean UX brings together teams from “designers, developers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, marketers, and others” through frequent contact and communication (From Lean UX ).
• More experimentation. Designers leverage rapid experimentation with their designs to uncover more grounded information and lessons on their products. 

( Watch our webinar with Jeff Gothelf where he breaks down the lessons he learned from five years of teaching and implementing Lean UX. )  

At the heart of Lean UX is the idea of radical transparency . Each team needs to communicate to one another their findings often in order to address any roadblocks and do the work needed to deliver a product quickly.

From Lean UX :

“By having these conversations early and often, the team is aware of everyone’s ideas and can get started on their work earlier. If they know that the proposed solution requires a certain backend infrastructure, for example, the team’s engineers can get started on that work while the design is refined and finalized. Parallel paths for software development and design are the fastest route to reach an actual experience.”

Once you break down the walls of communication between members of your team, then you’re primed for Lean UX. 

As such, Lean UX is much less of a system than it is a mindset that each member of your company must adopt if you want to see success.

How the Lean UX process works

Before you jump into the Lean UX process, you need to remember what Gothelf says: Lean UX is a mindset. 

In order for a mindset to become effective it needs to be adopted by everyone in your company. 

“This reframing requires an organization-wide position of humility. It requires teams and managers to use their knowledge and skills and creativity as scientists might: they propose their best solution and then they test to see if they’re right.”

All members of your organization need to be on board and understand Lean UX for it to be effective.

With that, let’s take a look at the process itself.

Source: Chapter 5, Lean UX: Minimum Viable Products and Prototypes

The system can be broken down into four processes:

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

Let’s take an overview of each and see how they work.

Note: This is a BRIEF overview. There’s a lot to be said about each section. To gain a fuller understanding of the Lean UX and the full process, pick up a copy of Lean UX and read it for yourself. 

Outcomes, assumptions, and hypotheses

Where most software creation processes focus on features and deliverables, Lean UX shines a light on the outcomes of the product and how they benefit (or don’t benefit) the user.

To create good outcomes, Lean UX shifts away from what designers think is required of a product to their assumptions. 

Assumptions are simply your belief or expectation based on what you know about your users. 

Yes, these are filled with risk and can be outright wrong. But they’re important to create a launching point for your team. 

There are four types of assumptions:

• Business outcomes. This is what done looks like. How do you know your product was successful?
• Users. The people you’re creating your product for. Who are they? What’s their persona look like?
• User outcomes. This is what your users want from your product. What are their pain points? How can your product solve them?
• Features. How you will improve your product going forward in order to give your users the desired outcome. 

From your assumptions, you’re going to then move onto creating a hypothesis. This involves turning your assumptions into hypotheses statements. 

Example: We believe our users are middle-aged homemakers who need help with their housework. We will know we’re right if we see an increase in app usage and hear that it has helped them save time on housework. 

( Lay out your hypotheses using InVision Freehand .)

The hypotheses is a great way to establish what you believe you know about your users and what they need. This is the groundwork for your work going forward.

This is where you begin to actually design your product. This might also be the time where you can test your hypotheses.

“For example, if you’re in the early stage of a project, you might test demand by creating a landing page that will measure how many customers sign up for your service.”

And it’s not enough to shut your team of designers in a room slowly filling with water and force them to design a product before they drown (too specific?). Remember: You must design collaboratively.

For example, the teams from across departments must sketch and create wireframes together, and everyone must feel comfortable giving their feedback on everything. Designers should see themselves as facilitators to these conversations and meetings. 

There are a variety of different ways you can structure your meetings and conversations as your designs progress. For more, check out chapter four of Lean UX. 

All of this work becomes part of the minimum viable product.

MVP (Minimum viable product)

What’s the least amount of work we can do to learn more about our hypothesis? That’s the question behind your minimum viable product (MVP). 

We’ve written about this before , but an MVP is the most basic expression of your product. The idea is to get a simple product out to see how your target audience reacts to it. 

In The Lean Startup by Eric Riess, MVP is defined as “a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings about customers with the least effort.”

And your MVP can come in a variety of different shapes. Here are a few:

• Wireframes. Low-fidelity versions of your product. For more, here’s our article on how to create a wireframe . 
• Mockups. Higher-fidelity, full-scale versions of your product complete with designs, colors, and icons. 
• Prototypes. Very basic version of your product with minimal functionality and design. For more, check out our guide on rapid prototyping . 

You need to build your MVP based on your assumptions and hypotheses. Your target audience’s reaction and feedback to your MVP will give you the most insights into whether you’re on the right track. 

If you’d like to learn about how to create a MVP, read our article all about it here .

Once you have your MVP, it’s time to take a deep dive into how your users are reacting. 

Research and learning

This part of the process is all about validation. 

Are you on the right track? Is your product giving your users what they need? What needs to be changed?

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

• Continuous. Bake “small, informal, qualitative research” techniques into every sprint (from Lean UX ). 
• Collaborative. Teams must work cross-functionally instead of in individual silos to “build shared understanding” (from Lean UX ). 

The goal is for your organization to gain insights in a quick but comprehensive way. This can only happen if you research frequently and collaboratively. 

( Work better together using InVision Cloud .)

Your users will be a part of this process as well, whether through conversations, interviews, surveys, or whatever else. The conversations you get will validate your hypotheses. Once you know what you need to change and improve, it’s time to start back up at the top and do everything again! 

Rinse and repeat until you have a product that satisfies your users’ needs. 

Should you use Lean UX?

While there are plenty of great benefits to Lean UX, there are five that might sway you to trying it out for yourself:

Increased collaboration

Improved outcomes, streamlined feedback process, reduced time-to-market, strengthened user research.

Lean UX teams are traditionally cross-functional. 

This means that they involve people from across a variety of different disciplines to work together when creating a product.

“Diverse teams create better solutions, because each problem is seen from many different points of view,” writes Gothelf. “Creating diverse teams limits the need for gated, handoff-based processes. Instead, teams can share information informally, which creates collaboration earlier in the process and drives greater team efficiency.”

Rather than focus on output (the end product), Lean UX relies on the product’s outcome (how the product impacts the user).

“Although it’s easy to manage the launch of specific feature sets, we often can’t predict a feature will be effective until it comes to market,” Gothelf writes. “By managing outcomes (and the progress made toward them), we gain insight into the efficacy of the features we are building.”

This gives designers the freedom to produce minimum viable products quickly based on their assumptions and see how it performs. If it doesn’t perform well, they can respond and make tweaks as necessary. 

Gothelf continues, “If a feature is not performing well, we can make an objective decision as to whether it should be kept, changed or replaced.”

This ties in with the next benefit of Lean UX:

Lean UX is built upon the concept that it’s more beneficial for designers to do rather than talk about doing.

“There is more value in creating the first version of an idea than spending half a day debating its merits in a conference room,” writes Gothelf.

When you create a product, the most important feedback you can get isn’t from a manager or a member of your team. The most crucial feedback and critiques come from your users (i.e. the people who will actually be using your product). 

If you spend your time deliberating and falling into the dreaded “paralysis by analysis,” you create waste—which you do not want with Lean UX.

That brings us to …

The system of Lean UX trims the fat that most design processes experience by removing aspects that don’t contribute to creating a product for the users.

Whatever doesn’t contribute to that goal is waste—and is cut out mercilessly.

According to Lean UX methodology, at the heart of each of your decisions should be the question, “Does this really help us create a good product for the users?” If the answer is no, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. 

This applies to meetings, documentation, and even the stakeholders. Your users should come first with each of your design decisions—that brings us to…

Like any good design process, Lean UX puts the user first. However, Lean UX puts an emphasis on including the user as early and often as possible.

How? With GOOB.

No, that’s not something that a kid would call you on the schoolyard (though, it’s probably that too). GOOB stands for “getting out of the building.” 

It’s the idea that teams shouldn’t just be cooped up in the offices arguing about minutiae about a design. Instead, they should actually go out into the world and get feedback from their users—and they should do it sooner rather than later.

“Test your ideas with a strong dose of reality while they’re still young,” writes Gothelf. “Better to find out that your ideas are missing the mark before you’ve spent time and resources building a product that no one wants.”

Before you do anything, be sure to head to your local bookstore to pick up a copy of Lean UX. 

Like we said earlier, this is a very brief overview of the process. To gain a fuller understanding of Lean UX and how exactly you can apply it to your team, be sure to pick up a copy for yourself. Better yet, make sure everyone on your team has a copy too. 

Best of luck—and be sure to let us know about your experiences with Lean UX!

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by Tony Ho Tran

Tony is a content marketing consultant and freelance writer. His work has been seen in Business Insider, MSNBC, Hootsuite, and GrowthLab.

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Lean UX is a collaborative, iterative way of designing and building products – but why is it so important?

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In 2013, Jeff Gothelf published a book called Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams . In doing so, he introduced a revolutionary approach to the way products are designed and built. 

Since then, lean UX has become quite the buzzword, favoured by startups and agile practitioners. But what does it all mean? 

If you’re looking for a no-nonsense, jargon-free guide to lean UX, look no further. We’ll explain:

• What lean UX is
• The difference between lean UX and traditional UX
• The principles of lean UX
• The lean UX process
• What’s so great about lean UX

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1. What is lean UX?

Lean UX is a collaborative, iterative way of designing and building products. 

It goes hand-in-hand with the agile methodology, which originated in the software industry. The agile methodology breaks a project up into short, rapid cycles in order to get things done quickly, with continuous testing and improvements along the way. Lean UX follows a similar approach, working in a constant loop of thinking, making, and testing. 

The purpose of lean UX is to harness the power of collaboration, to reduce waste (in terms of time, effort and resources), and to experiment and build rapidly in order to get feedback early on. With this feedback, the product can be improved incrementally. 

That’s lean UX in a nutshell. We’ll dive deeper into how lean UX works as we explore the process and principles underlying this increasingly popular approach. 

2. What’s the difference between lean UX and traditional UX?

When following the typical UX design process , designers spend a lot of time understanding their users through user research, figuring out the problem space and defining product requirements before they get to actually designing anything. The focus is on scoping out the project fully and comprehensively enough so that when the product is designed and developed, it has a good shot at meeting the user’s needs and adequately solving their pain-points. 

With lean UX, you’re not looking to get it right (or even close) straight out of the gate. Rather than laying extensive groundwork before you can create something, lean UX has you building a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly and early on. This enables early and continuous feedback so the product can be improved iteratively — with each iteration (or version) bringing you closer to the end goal. This isn’t to say that lean UX does away with user research and testing; they’re just done with a more “quick and dirty” approach. 

It’s often said that lean UX is more collaborative than the traditional UX process. Because lean UX works in short cycles, there’s a constant back and forth between the designers, developers, product managers and other key stakeholders, as opposed to working in silos. Although “classic” UX is still highly collaborative, the sharing and testing of ideas and solutions is not as continuous as it is with lean UX. 

Ultimately, traditional UX favours a more thorough, deliverable and documentation-heavy approach prior to actually designing and building anything, while lean UX puts the emphasis on building early on, getting feedback, making quick decisions and improving along the way.

3. The golden rules and principles of lean UX

Lean UX is based on certain rules and principles. Let’s take a look at some of the most important ones now.

Lean UX requires cross-functional collaboration 

Rather than working in silos (i.e. in isolation), different departments and disciplines work together throughout. With everyone involved at each stage, lean UX helps to ensure a shared understanding of the product, the end users, the problem space and general processes. 

Lean UX prioritises problem-solving and solution-finding

Not dissimilar to traditional UX, lean UX places problem-solving front and centre. The emphasis is not on designing or building features for the sake of an output. Rather, it’s about making sure you’re solving the right problem and empowering everyone to come up with solutions. 

Lean UX seeks to reduce waste

Lean UX encourages you to skip any parts of the process that are time and resource-heavy (like excessive documentation) and to focus instead on creating an MVP (minimum viable product), which you can quickly learn from. The goal is to accelerate progress and, as the name suggests, make the process leaner and more streamlined. 

Lean UX says build early and quickly

As we’ve mentioned, lean UX has you creating an MVP as early as possible. The goal isn’t to create a near-perfect or even great product right away, but rather to build something you can continuously and iteratively improve. 

…and gives you permission to fail

Designing and building in this way encourages experimentation and failure. With lean UX, it’s absolutely fine to get it wrong. You’ll learn soon enough because of the continuous feedback loops – and because you’re building quickly –  you’ll be able to put it right. And, because you haven’t invested too much time and resources in getting it perfect, the fallout of getting it wrong is minimal. 

4. The lean UX process

The lean UX process centres on three key phases: Think , Make  and Check . It’s a cyclical process that keeps repeating, with the product improving each time the cycle begins anew. 

Lean UX phase 1: Think

The process starts with your assumptions about –  and understanding of –  the problem space in question. Assumptions are usually gathered in a workshop or through a group brainstorming session and they basically sum up what you collectively assume or think you know. 

You can gather assumptions about who your users are, what the product you’re designing is used for and when, what the most important functions and features will be and so on. 

Based on your assumptions, you’ll then create a hypothesis (or multiple hypotheses). For example, you might come up with the following hypothesis:

We believe that online shoppers need to be able to place an order without creating a customer account. Providing this option will increase the number of completed orders / reduce the number of “abandoned cart” incidences. We can prove this if we are able to measure an increase in the order completion rate (which currently stands at 15%).

When writing hypotheses, it’s important that you’re able to set a clear and measurable goal for how each hypothesis can be tested. Otherwise, there’s no way to determine if it’s valid or invalid and therefore worthy of pursuing or not.  

Lean UX phase 2: Make

As we know, lean UX is about building early and that’s the focus of the “Make” phase. You’ll now create a minimum viable product (MVP), which is essentially the most basic version you will need in order to test your hypothesis and gather initial learnings and feedback.

The form your MVP takes will depend on your hypothesis and what you want to test. Taking the example of our online shopping hypothesis, the MVP could be an interactive prototype of the proposed new checkout process, featuring the additional option to place an order without having to create an account. 

Otherwise, an MVP might be a very basic wireframe or a website landing page. Anything that can be created quickly and used to test out your hypothesis. 

Lean UX phase 3: Check

With your MVP in place, you have something tangible to test and evaluate. In the “Check” phase, you gather feedback on your MVP in order to invalidate or validate your original hypothesis. You can do this through A/B testing, site analytics and a variety of user and usability testing methods. 

Based on your learnings, you’ll loop back to phase 1 (“Think”) and proceed accordingly. Maybe you need to scrap the initial hypothesis and explore a different problem or perhaps it’s necessary to generate new ideas and angles for the same hypothesis. Either way, you’ll build on the previous cycle and continue to steer the product towards success. 

5. What’s so great about lean UX?

You’ve read this far, so you probably already have a good idea of why lean UX is so popular. 

Compared to traditional UX, lean UX is hailed as a huge time and money saver — and, perhaps most importantly, it keeps designers focused on solving the right user problem at the right time.

With the traditional approach to UX, you might spend months designing a particular feature or solution, investing considerable time and resources along the way, only to find that by the time your designs are developed and tested, requirements have changed. The idea you came up with four months ago is no longer relevant or fitting, sending you right back to the drawing board. 

Now imagine how that changes if you take a lean approach. You would build and test your initial idea early on, making sure you’re solving the right problem before you invest any more time and resources. By working in short cycles with continuous testing and feedback, you’re able to adapt to changing requirements in real-time. 

Lean UX is especially popular with startups and teams who don’t have infinite resources at their disposal. So, if you’re a UX designer with aspirations of working in a startup or a company which follows the agile methodology, it’s important to understand what lean UX is and how it works. 

Hopefully this guide has got you off to a good start! If you’d like to dive deeper into lean UX, we can recommend Jeff Gothelf’s book on the topic . 

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What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget? —Eric Ries

Lean UX design extends the traditional UX role beyond merely executing design elements and anticipating how users might interact with a system. Instead, it encourages a far more comprehensive view of why a Feature exists, the functionality required to implement it, and the benefits it delivers. By getting immediate feedback to understand if the system will meet the real business objectives, Lean UX provides a closed-loop system for defining and measuring value.

Generally, UX represents a user’s perceptions of a system—ease of use, utility, and the effectiveness of the user interface (UI). UX design focuses on building systems that demonstrate a deep understanding of end users. It takes into account what users need and wants while making allowances for the user’s context and limitations.

A common problem, when using Agile methods, is how best to incorporate UX design into a rapid Iteration cycle that results in a full-stack implementation of the new functionality. When teams attempt to resolve complex and seemingly subjective user interactions, while simultaneously trying to develop incremental deliverables, they can often churn through many designs, which can become a source of frustration with Agile.

Fortunately, the  Lean UX  movement addresses this by using Agile development with Lean Startup  implementation approaches. The mindset, principles, and practices of SAFe reflect this thinking. This process often begins with the Lean Startup Cycle described in the  Epic  article and continues with the development of Features and Capabilities  using a Lean UX process described here.

As a result, Agile teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) can leverage a common strategy to generate rapid development, fast feedback, and a holistic user experience that delights users.

The Lean UX Process

In Lean UX , Gothelf and Seiden [2] describe a model that we have adapted to our context, as Figure 1 illustrates. It follows SAFe’s Continuous Delivery Pipeline and focuses more on team-level activities.

Benefit Hypothesis

The Lean UX approach starts with a benefit hypothesis: Agile teams and UX designers accept the reality that the ‘right answer’ is unknowable up-front. Instead, teams apply Agile methods to avoid Big Design Up-front (BDUF), focusing on creating a hypothesis about the feature’s expected business result, and then they implement and test that hypothesis incrementally.

The SAFe Feature and Benefits matrix (FAB) can be used to capture this hypothesis as it moves through the Continuous Exploration cycle of the Program Kanban :

• Feature  – A short phrase giving a name and context
• Benefit hypothesis  – The proposed measurable benefit to the end user or business

Outcomes are measured in Release on Demand and best done using leading indicators (see Innovation Accounting in [1]) to evaluate how well the new feature meets its benefits hypothesis. For example, “We believe the administrator can add a new user in half the time it took before.”

Collaborative Design

Traditionally, UX design has been an area of specialization. People who have an eye for design, a feel for user interaction, and specialty training were often entirely in charge of the design process. The goal was ‘pixel perfect’ early designs, done in advance of the implementation. Usually, this work was done in silos, apart from the very people who knew the most about the system and its context. Success was measured by how well the implemented user interface complied with the initial UX design. In Lean UX, this changes dramatically:

“Lean UX literally has no time for heroes. The entire concept of design as a hypothesis immediately dethrones notions of heroism; as a designer, you must expect that many of your ideas will fail in testing. Heroes don’t admit failure. But Lean UX designers embrace it as part of the process.” [2]

Continuous Exploration takes the hypothesis and facilitates a continuous and collaborative process that solicits input from a diverse group of stakeholders – Architects , Customers , Business Owners , Product Owners , and Agile Teams .  This further refines the problem and creates artifacts that clearly express the emerging understanding including personas, empathy maps, and customer experience maps.

Principle #9 – Decentralize decision-making provides additional guidance for the Lean UX process: Agile teams are empowered to do collaborative UX design and implementation, and that significantly improves business outcomes and time-to-market. Moreover, another important goal is to deliver a consistent user experience across various system elements or channels (e.g., mobile, web, kiosk) or even different products from the same company. Making this consistency a reality requires some centralized control (following Principle #9) over certain reusable design assets. A design system [2] is a set of standards that contains whatever UI elements the teams find useful, including:

• Editorial rules, style guides, voice and tone guidelines, naming conventions, standard terms, and abbreviations
• Branding and corporate identity kits, color palettes, usage guidelines for copyrights, logos, trademarks, and other attributions
• UI asset libraries, which include icons and other images, templates, standard layouts, and grids
• UI widgets, which include the design of buttons and other similar elements

These assets are an integral part of the Architectural Runway, which supports decentralized control while recognizing that some design elements need to be centralized. After all, these decisions are infrequent , long-lasting and provide significant economies of scale , as described in Principle #9, Decentralize decision-making.

With a hypothesis and design in place, teams can proceed to implement the functionality in a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF). The MMF should be the minimum functionality that the teams can build to learn whether the benefit hypothesis is valid or not. By doing this, the ARTs apply SAFe Principle #4 – Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles , to implement and evaluate the feature. Teams may choose to preserve options with Set-Based Design , as they define the initial MMF.

In some cases, early designs could initially be extremely lightweight and not even functional (ex., paper prototypes, low fidelity mockups, simulations, API stubs). In other cases, a vertical thread (full stack) of just a portion of an MMF may be necessary to test the architecture and get fast feedback at a System Demo . However, in some instances, functionality may need to proceed all the way through to deployment and release, where application instrumentation and telemetry [4] provide feedback data from production users.

MMFs are evaluated as part of deploying and releasing (where necessary). There are a variety of ways to determine if the feature delivers the right outcomes. These include:

• Observation – Wherever possible, directly observe the actual usage of the system, it’s an opportunity to understand the user’s context and behaviors.
• User surveys – When direct observation isn’t possible, a simple end-user questionnaire can obtain fast feedback.
• Usage analytics – Lean-Agile teams build analytics right into their applications, which helps validate initial use and provides the application telemetry needed to support a Continuous Delivery model. Application telemetry offers constant operational and user feedback from the deployed system.
• A/B testing – Is a form of statistical hypothesis comparing two samples, which acknowledges that user preferences are unknowable in advance. Recognizing this is truly liberating, eliminating endless arguments between designers and developers—who likely won’t use the system. Teams follow Principle #3 – Assume variability; preserve options to keep design options open as long as possible. And wherever it’s practical and economically feasible, they should implement multiple alternatives for critical user activities. Then they can test those other options with mockups, prototypes, or even full stack implementations. In this latter case, differing versions may be deployed to multiple subsets of users, perhaps sequenced over time and measured via analytics.

In short, measurable results deliver the knowledge teams need to refactor, adjust, redesign—or even pivot to abandon a feature, based solely on objective data and user feedback. Measurement creates a closed-loop Lean UX process that iterates toward a successful outcome, driven by actual evidence of whether a feature fulfills the hypothesis, or not.

Implementing Lean UX in SAFe

Lean UX is different than the traditional, centralized approach to user experience design. The primary difference is how the hypothesis-driven aspects are evaluated by implementing the code, instrumenting where applicable, and gaining the actual user feedback in a staging or production environment. Implementing new designs is primarily the responsibility of the Agile Teams, working in conjunction with Lean UX experts.

Of course, this shift, like so many others with Lean-Agile development, can cause significant changes to the way teams and functions are organized, enabling a continuous flow of value. For more on coordinating and implementing Lean UX —and more specifically how to integrate Lean UX in the PI cycle—read the advanced topic article Lean UX and the Program Increment Lifecycle .

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Lean UX Design: Full Guide

Lean UX design bridges the gap between theoretical design principles and practical application, paving the way for products that truly resonate with users.

By marrying elements of lean manufacturing and agile development, this approach emphasizes rapid iteration, user feedback, and a deep focus on the actual experience of the end user.

Lean UX seeks to remove waste from the design process, allowing teams to focus more on building and testing rather than extensive documentation.

It transforms how startups and established companies alike innovate, bringing products to market faster and more efficiently.

Keep reading to learn how to apply the principles of Lean UX to streamline your design process, enhance collaboration, and create more user-centered products.

Introduction to Lean UX

Lean UX, standing at the intersection of lean methodologies and user experience design, revamps traditional UX principles for more agile, feedback-driven environments.

Originating from lean manufacturing principles, Lean UX borrows the focus on value creation and waste elimination, adapting these concepts to the dynamic realm of lean software development and startup company culture.

This methodology emphasizes rapid iteration, close collaboration among team members, and a deep focus on the user to streamline the design process.

As Lean UX has evolved, it has incorporated elements from design thinking, agile development, and lean startup methodologies, making it an increasingly vital approach for companies aiming to enhance user experience while staying adaptable and efficient in their product development endeavors.

What is Lean UX?

Lean UX embodies a mindset shift from traditional, heavyweight design frameworks towards one that is more fluid and user-centered. It prioritizes the rapid validation of design hypotheses through continuous feedback loops with users, thereby aligning closely with the agile methodology’s iterative nature. By centering on the concept of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and integrating user feedback early and often, Lean UX seeks to refine products in real-time, reducing inefficiencies and focussing on delivering real value to users.

The Evolution of Lean UX

Lean UX has grown beyond its initial inspiration from lean manufacturing, incorporating a rich blend of methodologies. This blend includes agile’s flexible, iterative approach and the user-centric nature of design thinking. Coupled with insights from the lean startup movement, which emphasizes quick, learn-as-you-go development, Lean UX has matured into a powerful, adaptable framework. It equips teams to nimbly respond to user needs and market changes, ensuring that the design process remains both efficient and deeply attuned to creating meaningful user experiences.

Principles of Lean UX

Delving into the heart of Lean UX, one must understand its core principles that distinguish it from traditional user experience design paradigms.

These principles hinge on an iterative, collaborative approach that seeks to align closely with the real needs of the user.

Essential to this discourse is contrasting Lean UX with more conventional UX methods.

Doing so illuminates the streamlined, feedback-driven nature of Lean UX, which accelerates product development while embedding a deeper understanding of the user through continuous learning and adaptation.

This section explores these fundamental tenets, shaping the way businesses and designers alike envision and execute user experience efforts.

Core Principles for Success

At the heart of Lean UX lies a strong reliance on a set of core principles designed to maximize success: lean methodology, constant user feedback, and an iterative development process. These foundational elements work together to ensure that every step in the design and development process is aligned with user needs and feedback, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and enabling teams to pivot quickly in response to new insights. By placing the user at the center of the development journey, organizations can streamline their processes, reduce wasted effort, and significantly enhance the overall user experience.

Comparing Lean UX and Traditional UX

In contrast to traditional UX, which often operates within more rigid, sequential project phases, Lean UX champions a much more fluid and flexible approach. This method disrupts the conventional workflow, trading lengthy upfront design and documentation for rapid paper prototyping and user testing. As a result, Lean UX enables teams to adapt swiftly to user feedback and evolving project requirements, significantly reducing time-to-market and enhancing the end product’s alignment with user expectations.

The Lean UX Process: Think, Make, Check

The Lean UX process, distilled into three essential stages—Think, Make, Check—guides teams through a cyclical journey of hypothesis formation, rapid paper prototyping, and target audience validation.

Commencing with the ‘Think’ phase, teams engage in active brainstorming to form solid, user-driven hypotheses, thereby setting a clear direction for product development.

Transitioning into the ‘Make’ phase, the emphasis shifts towards translating these hypotheses into tangible, interactive prototypes, utilizing a range of rapid prototyping techniques to bring concepts to life quickly.

The process culminates in the ‘Check’ phase, where these prototypes serve as tools to validate assumptions with real users, ensuring the product’s features are both desirable and offer a value proposition.

This structured yet flexible approach enables teams to iterate swiftly, aligning closely with user needs while fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

Phase 1: Think – Building the Right Hypotheses

In the ‘Think’ phase, the essence of Lean UX is distilled into the creation of informed hypotheses that guide the future design process: starting with an understanding gleaned from user research, market analysis, qualitative research and the broader goals of the organization, teams embark on formulating educated assumptions. These hypotheses are essentially predictions about what changes or new features might most effectively improve the user experience or meet specific user needs. With a robust hypothesis in place, the team is equipped with a clear direction for the prototyping and testing phases that follow.

Phase 2: Make – Rapid Prototyping Techniques

Once a solid foundation of user-driven hypotheses is laid down in the ‘Think’ phase, Lean UX teams advance to the ‘Make’ stage, where rapid prototyping takes center stage. This critical phase transforms abstract ideas into concrete, interactive prototypes, allowing for swift exploration of design solutions. Utilizing tools and techniques ranging from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity digital mockups, the objective is to quickly produce a working model that reflects the proposed solution, making it ready for real-world user testing and feedback.

Phase 3: Check – Validating Assumptions with Users

In the ‘Check’ phase, Lean UX requires teams to directly engage with users to validate or refute the hypotheses generated earlier. This involves usability testing and gathering qualitative and quantitative data from real interactions, getting insights into user motivation, which then informs the next cycle of iteration. It’s a critical step where user feedback becomes the fulcrum, guiding further refinement of the product to better meet user expectations and needs.

Implementing Lean UX in Agile Environments

Transitioning Lean UX into Agile environments introduces a powerful synergy, enhancing adaptability and focusing on delivering user value through streamlined processes.

This integration necessitates a shift in team dynamics and workflow, embracing Lean UX workshops and collaborative design sessions as central mechanisms for cross-discipline engagement and rapid iteration.

It’s a pathway that bridges the gap between user-centric design philosophies and the iterative, fast-paced nature of Agile development, setting the stage for topics like the integration of Lean UX with agile methodologies, and the vital role of Lean UX workshops in fostering a truly collaborative design process.

Integrating Lean UX with Agile Methodologies

Integrating Lean UX with Agile methodologies creates a symbiotic relationship that enhances the product development process: Agile’s sprint cycles provide the perfect rhythm for Lean UX’s rapid iterations, allowing for a seamless flow of user feedback and design adjustments. This merging rises above traditional barriers, fostering a dynamic environment where cross-functional teams are empowered to collaboratively refine and evolve a product, ensuring that user experience remains at the forefront of the software development process.

Lean UX Workshops and Collaborative Design

Lean UX workshops galvanize the collaborative design effort, serving as a crucible where team members from different disciplines converge to share insights, iterate on prototypes, and collectively refine their approach to product development. Through these workshops, the concept of collaboration transcends mere interaction, transforming into a dynamic, hands-on process where diverse perspectives are leveraged to craft solutions that resonate deeply with user needs.

Case Studies: Success Stories with Lean UX

The journey of Lean UX unfolds vividly in the tales of organizations that embraced its principles, demonstrating the versatility and impact of this approach to improve user experience and enhance the customer service.

From Doodle’s impressive transformation that showcases the power of Lean UX in refining and elevating a product, to the broader application within both sprawling enterprises and nimble teams, these case studies are a testament to the methodology’s ability to foster innovation, enhance user satisfaction, and streamline product development cycles.

Through examining these success stories, we gain insight into the practical application of Lean UX principles and witness firsthand the significant benefits that come from adopting a user-centric, iterative design and development mindset.

Doodle’s Transformation Through Lean UX

Doodle, a popular scheduling platform, embraced Lean UX to dramatically overhaul its user interface and enhance overall customer experience: The SaaS (software as a service) company recognized that its users struggled with an outdated interface, which deterred seamless interaction design. By employing Lean UX principles, Doodle rapidly iterated on its design, relying heavily on user feedback to refine and streamline the experience. This focus on rapid prototyping and testing allowed Doodle to introduce a vastly improved platform that not only met but exceeded user expectations.

Lean UX in Large Enterprises and Small Teams

In adapting Lean UX methods, both large enterprises and small teams find common ground in their pursuit of efficiency and responsiveness. Large organizations dismantle ingrained siloes, fostering a culture of collaboration across departments, while small teams capitalize on their agility to iterate designs swiftly. This approach not only democratizes user experience design but also embeds it as a central strategy for innovation, regardless of company size.

Tools and Techniques for Lean UX Practitioners

Moving deeper into the Lean UX methodology, the focus shifts towards the practical aspects that enable practitioners to put theory into action effectively.

Essential to this practical application are the tools and techniques that facilitate rapid prototyping and the gathering of critical user feedback, as well as the metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that provide quantifiable measures of success.

Selecting the right tools can dramatically streamline the prototyping process, while a clear understanding of relevant metrics can guide teams toward iterative improvements that significantly enhance user experience.

Useful Tools for Prototyping and Feedback

For Lean UX practitioners, selecting agile and responsive tools such as UXPin or Adobe XD proves crucial for prototyping, offering a seamless transition from low to high fidelity models. These platforms enable real-time collaboration and efficient modifications, ensuring that feedback is rapidly integrated into design iterations. Additionally, leveraging Google Analytics during the ‘Check’ phase aids in capturing quantitative feedback, allowing teams to analyze user behavior and validate hypotheses with data-driven insights.

Metrics and KPIs for Measuring Success

In Lean UX, practitioners measure success by closely monitoring Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that directly correlate with user satisfaction and product efficiency. By employing specific metrics such as bounce rate, user retention rate, and task completion time, along with qualitative feedback gathered through user testing, teams can effectively gauge the impact of their design iterations. This quantifiable evidence supports informed decision-making, ensuring that each modification moves the product closer to achieving its ultimate goal — a seamless, engaging user experience.

Challenges and Solutions in Lean UX

While Lean UX presents a dynamic methodology designed to enhance user experience and streamline product development, it is not without its challenges.

Navigating the waters of this innovative approach, practitioners often encounter common pitfalls and resistance within their organizations.

Addressing these issues head-on, this section delves into strategic solutions aimed at overcoming obstacles to Lean UX adoption, fostering a culture that embraces rapid iteration, user-centered design, and cross-functional collaboration.

Here, we will explore actionable insights for sidestepping foreseeable challenges and enhancing the adoption of Lean UX practices efficiently.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

A common pitfall in Lean UX is the siloing of information, where critical user insights fail to be communicated across the team, leading to misaligned design efforts. Teams can circumvent this by nurturing an environment of open communication and integrating regular cross-functional meetings where insights, feedback, and progress can be shared in real time. This encourages a unified vision and ensures that all members, regardless of their role, are aligned with user needs and the iterative direction of the project.

Overcoming Resistance to Lean UX Practices

Overcoming resistance to Lean UX practices begins with educating stakeholders on its value, demonstrating how rapid iterations and user feedback lead directly to improved products and user satisfaction. By highlighting successful case studies and generating small, quick wins within the organization, teams can vividly showcase the tangible benefits of adopting Lean UX. This approach not only clarifies the methodology’s direct impact on project outcomes but also builds confidence across the team, fostering a more receptive and collaborative environment for Lean UX to thrive.

In navigating the intricate terrain of user experience, Lean UX has emerged as a beacon for efficient and user-centric design approaches.

As we edge closer to wrapping up this comprehensive exploration, it’s essential to cast our gaze forward, contemplating the future landscape of this methodology.

Delving into the foreseeable trends and predictions for Lean UX equips practitioners with a lens to anticipate changes and sculpt strategies that evolve in tandem with technology and user expectations.

Meanwhile, distilling the essence of our journey through Lean UX, the final reflections and key takeaways aim to crystallize the knowledge amassed, ensuring that readers emerge with a fortified understanding and actionable insights for applying Lean UX principles to their projects.

Trends and Predictions for Lean UX

As Lean UX positions itself more prominently within the design and development ecosystem, its future is likely to be shaped by deeper integration with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. These advancements promise to automate and refine the collection and analysis of user feedback, enabling more personalized and proactive design adjustments. Furthermore, the rise of remote collaboration tools catalyzes a more distributed, agile approach to Lean UX practices, accommodating global teams and fostering a richer, more diverse user experience dialogue:

• Deeper integration of AI in automating feedback analysis.
• Enhanced personalization of design through machine learning.
• Adoption of advanced remote collaboration tools for global team engagement.

Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways

Embracing Lean UX design fosters a culture of rapid innovation and deep empathy for user needs, fundamentally reshaping the way organizations approach product development. By grounding their work in continuous feedback and iterative learning, teams can genuinely align their efforts with the evolving landscape of user expectations, ensuring that their outcomes not only resonate with users but also drive meaningful business value. This guide underscores the transformative potential of Lean UX, equipping practitioners with the insights and methodologies necessary to navigate the complexities of user experience design with agility and precision.

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Frequently asked questions.

Lean UX approach is a methodology that combines elements of lean manufacturing and agile development with the goal of enhancing user experience design . It focuses on rapid iteration , frequent user feedback , and a close collaboration between cross-functional teams to efficiently create products that meet user needs.

Lean UX focuses primarily on improving the user experience design process with a strong emphasis on rapid iteration , measuring, and learning whereas Agile UX integrates user experience design into Agile software development practices, stressing collaboration and flexibility. Both aim to create better products but approach the task with different methodologies and priorities.

Lean UX (a part of Scrum ), with its focus on rapid prototyping, user feedback , and user interface design , remains highly relevant, particularly in environments that web usability and user-centric products. Its principles of minimizing waste and focusing on actual user needs make it indispensable for a startup company and established companies alike striving for efficiency and impactful user experiences.

Traditional User Experience (UX) design emphasizes a comprehensive understanding and meticulous planning of the user interface and user interaction before the initiation of development , focusing on delivering a fully realized end product . In contrast, Lean UX advocates for a more flexible, iterative approach, emphasizing rapid prototyping, continuous feedback , and adjustments to design based on user research and data , aiming to streamline the design process and more quickly adapt to users’ needs.

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The complete guide to Lean UX

Lean UX is an efficient alternative to traditional UX design. Discover how to incorporate the best Lean UX practices to improve your workflow.

• Development →

People want outstanding digital products — and they want them now. Lean user experience (UX) design is a practical way to minimize wasted time and quickly deliver high-quality designs.

Many UX designers go straight from ideation to implementation, moving through each phase of the design process at breakneck speed to meet deadlines. However, without regular rounds of feedback, designers may discover too late that the requirements have changed or project stakeholders are dissatisfied with the outcome. When this happens, not only does work have to be scrapped, but lost work also costs the designer money and resources.

Lean UX aims to eliminate that lost work. UX designers who use Lean UX check in at multiple touchpoints during the design process to ensure continuous improvement and quick feedback. The process reduces unnecessary deliverables and emphasizes creating the best possible user experience.

Interested in implementing Lean UX in your design process? Let’s explore the ins and outs of Lean UX and compare it to traditional UX design.

What is Lean UX?

Lean UX is a design process that's based on two pre-existing workflow methods: Lean manufacturing and Agile development.

• Lean manufacturing is a method based on increasing productivity while reducing waste during manufacturing. It removes redundant steps in the production process that don't directly benefit the customers.
• Agile development allows for a more adaptive approach to project management in software development by focusing on collaboration. Agile practices aim to provide value to clients quickly and with few difficulties by maintaining regular contact with the client and delivering multiple prototypes throughout the design process to collect feedback. For example, an Agile UX team works in smaller increments rather than delivering the entire project in one go.

Lean UX combines a lean and agile approach with a user-centered design methodology that reduces wasted time and resources. It assumes the first prototype will receive critical feedback and needs modifications, so it focuses on creating a minimum viable product (which we'll discuss later). 

The Lean UX approach uses repeated, rapid cycles of brainstorming and improvement to learn what to correct in each project iteration. The goal is to identify problems in batches and constantly work toward solutions through client feedback. It’s a simple, practical, and effective way to practice UX design that focuses on the resulting user experience over the project’s specific deliverables and parameters.

Lean UX vs UX

Lean UX focuses on refining a product as it develops to ensure the end result is the best possible web application in the here and now, focusing on dynamic goals rather than concrete checkpoints. Traditional UX , on the other hand, emphasizes specific deliverables based on testing completed at the beginning of a project.

Instead of waiting for the final product to reach the client before making the required adjustments, designers using Lean UX ask for feedback during the design process and make tweaks along the way. 

Traditional UX is slower and more detail-oriented, while Lean design focuses on trimming unnecessary elements and increasing efficiency and client satisfaction throughout development. It’s also a more collaborative process in which the entire team and client identify problems and outline assumptions together rather than receiving rigid specifications from the client to meet in the design process. The result is a fast and practical process well-suited to designers looking to work more efficiently. 

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The Lean UX process

The Lean UX approach is an expansive design process, but we’ve narrowed it down to a four-step cycle that’s easy to understand and implement in future projects.

1. Using assumptions and hypotheses to map possible outcomes

Lean UX analyzes which web application features are effective (and which aren’t) through an “assumption and hypothesis” approach. And it all begins with a brainstorming session.

Consider what problems your design will overcome. Do you intend to increase conversions? Improve ease-of-use? Create a more intuitive navigation? After examining existing roadblocks to your desired outcome, you and your team can formulate a problem statement, which is an actionable summary of your web application visitors, their goals, and what you must accomplish to meet those goals.

Once you have a problem statement, create a list of assumptions. As a designer, your assumptions are behaviors and preferences you believe are accurate based on knowledge of the target audience. Questions to consider when building your assumptions include:

• Why might someone seek this product?
• What are visitors looking to gain from this product?
• What is the product’s most important function?
• What currently interferes with product quality?

After coming up with a final list of assumptions, you must formulate a hypothesis (or hypotheses) to test these assumptions. If the hypothesis is correct, you’re moving in the right direction. If not, you know the team must change the approach to get back on track.

Let’s consider a subscription-based cooking blog looking to improve customer retention. The problem statement could be: “The number of active subscriptions from individuals looking to purchase high-quality recipes is decreasing, so we must improve the gap in visitor satisfaction.” An assumption could be: “Active subscriptions are decreasing because subscribers forget their passwords and cannot recover them.” An appropriate hypothesis would be: “By changing the ‘Forgot Password’ support to use a backup email to reset account passwords rather than relying on complicated security questions, user retention will increase by 10%.”

2. Designing the product

After forming a hypothesis, design solutions to test the hypothesis. 

Let’s circle back to that subscription-based cooking blog. To test the user retention hypothesis, a UX design team would implement the necessary changes to support a backup email function for password recovery. Then the team would collect visitor feedback and client retention data to compare real-world results to their estimated 10% improvement.

It’s important to note that Lean UX demands collaborative design. You must incorporate feedback at every stage, so it’s crucial to have all hands on deck at every stage.

Teams from various departments must collaborate to draw wireframes , create prototypes , and test user interfaces to determine the product's efficacy. Every team member should provide their input. Multiple perspectives provide more assumptions, allowing you to test more hypotheses and collect better results.

Cross-functional teams form a shared understanding that contributes to every design decision, leading to improved dialogue, smoother workflows, and better designs.

3. Creating an MVP

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a minimalist product created with only the features absolutely necessary for user testing. It's the most basic representation of a product, stripped down to the bare essentials.

But why would a design team launch such a product? The objective is to release the most simplified version of a product to see how the target audience responds to it. As a Lean UX team, the question  is always, “What's the maximum amount of information you can obtain with the least effort possible?”

You can create MVPs using several methods, including:

• Wireframes: 2D, low-fidelity designs of the product
• Mockups: 3D, high-quality versions of the product. Mockups are more realistic than wireframes and have colors, icons, and typography
• Prototypes: Simplified versions of the final product, although functionality is limited and not full-scale

MVPs are essential to test hypotheses. And, by putting in less work than creating a finished product, you have more time and resources to create multiple products for various tests. Focus on the product areas you need to improve and leave superfluous elements for later.

4. Improving through feedback

The fourth and final step of the process is all about proof of concept. Is your team moving in the right direction? Does the product meet your customer's needs? Is it broadly accessible to those using web readers and other accessibility supports? 

Lean UX relies on continuous and collaborative learning. Each step of the process must involve qualitative and quantitative data to establish what’s working and what isn’t. The objective is to gain insights quickly and take action accordingly. 

When the team is in the design phase, continuously source feedback from the client and other team members. Once the product has launched — even in beta form — involve visitors in this process. Source feedback through forums, interviews, or surveys. Use your improved knowledge and understanding with each design iteration to build on the MVP. Repeat this circular process as many times as necessary until you have a product that meets client and visitor expectations. The interactions you create with visitors will support or disprove your hypotheses and ultimately lead to a more satisfying user experience.

Further your UX journey

Lean UX is just one approach to UX design in an expanding UI/UX industry. To grow as a designer, you must have a basic understanding of various web design practices.

Webflow has an extensive library of articles, courses, and tutorials to teach you all about Lean UX, web design, and more. We condense complex information into easy-to-understand bites that cater to everyone from beginners to experienced design professionals.

Like Lean UX, it’s important to learn and grow continuously. Get started with our UX design resources and take your skillset to the next level.

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The Efficient Approach: How to Design a Lean UX MVP

Think. Make. Check. The Lean UX process works well with the MVP process—Prototype, Measure, Learn. Combining Lean UX and MVP allows designers to create valuable products in less time, with less waste.

By Cameron Chapman

Cameron comes from a design background and is the author of two web design books: Color for Web Design and The Smashing Idea Book.

Some designers and laypeople seem to think that Lean UX and Minimum Viable Products are an outcome. Instead, they are processes that when done well, result in the best possible products while saving UX designers time and resources. The end products serve business needs while also being optimal solutions to the problems customers present.

The Lean UX process (or Lean UX Loop, as it’s often called) is not unlike the scientific method—observation, forming a hypothesis, testing and collecting data, analyzing the results, and then accepting or rejecting the hypothesis. In Lean UX, the steps roughly correlate to Ideas (observation and hypothesis), Build and Code ([testing])(https://www.toptal.com/qa/how-to-write-testable-code-and-why-it-matters), Measure and Data (collecting data), and Learn (analyzing results and accepting or rejecting the hypothesis). Sometimes, the Lean UX process is summed up more succinctly as Think, Make, Check .

Like the scientific method, the Lean UX process is a circular one until reaching the desired outcome. Unlike the scientific method, however, designers can start wherever they choose on the Lean UX Loop (most start new projects with either learning or ideas but work on established products that can more easily begin anywhere).

Minimum viable products fit well into the Lean UX methodology. The general MVP methodology is generally summed up as Build (or Prototype), Measure, Learn (and then repeat based on those learnings). It’s easy to see how those steps correlate to the Lean UX loop (especially the succinct version).

Some designers confuse MVPs with proofs of concept or prototypes (the first step of the MVP process is sometimes referred to as prototyping , which could explain that confusion). But MVPs are complete products that are ready for production, and Lean UX MVPs are no different. A Lean UX MVP should be a fully functional product that people can use.

Stop Thinking About the Final Product

When a UX designer looks at a problem, it can be tempting to jump ahead and think about the final product that would potentially solve the issue. Getting to a final, finished product is generally the goal, so why not start there?

The issue with starting with the finished product and working backward is that it stifles innovation and creativity. There might be a dozen different ways to solve a user’s problem. Designers who begin by thinking about the final result might miss the majority of these potential solutions and come up with one that falls short.

When designers let go of any preconceived notions about what solution will best serve the people using their product, they can come up with more innovative ideas. In his book Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience , Jeff Gothelf states that Lean UX “is about bringing the true nature of a product to light faster.” It’s a collaborative process that focuses on “building a shared understanding of the actual product experience being designed.”

That process requires designers to not only understand the needs of the people they’re trying to serve but also the business needs before they start. When embarking on a Lean UX design project, this understanding forms the basis for all of the other steps in the design process.

Focus on User Needs

When a designer approaches a problem, they often think they have a thorough grasp of what that problem is. For example, if the idea is to create a to-do list app, then the designer may assume that users need a solution that lets them add tasks to a list and nothing more. Their initial Lean UX MVP would focus on creating an app that provides that functionality.

But is that the best solution to the actual problem? People don’t use to-do apps solely to add tasks to a list. They use them because they need to keep their lives organized. They don’t want to forget to do something important. They’re afraid if they don’t keep a list, they’ll overlook things.

A list format may not be the best way for people to keep track of what they need to do. But if a designer goes into the project thinking, “I need to create an app for to-do lists,” they may never come across an idea that would better serve the people they’re designing for. By focusing on what the user needs and forgetting their own assumptions, the designer can find a solution that solves the real problem at hand, rather than just adding yet another to-do list app to the other options out there.

Designers should aim to challenge their assumptions about what they think a user needs. People often don’t even know what they need to solve their problems. So how can designers assume they know best before they’ve done user research and sought to understand what customers are struggling with?

One way to think about customer needs is to focus on their pain point. A pain point is the aspect of the problem that causes the most distress to the customer. When designers focus on that, they can get to the root of the issue faster and find unique solutions. For the to-do list app example, the pain point is likely worrying about forgetting something important or having to waste mental energy keeping track of things.

Once a designer has an idea how to solve a problem, it’s essential they test that solution with real people. They shouldn’t waste too much time trying to create a finished product from the get-go. Collecting feedback from people on the initial idea, before investing a ton of time and resources on a polished product, makes changing the details, scope, or even the entire premise much easier.

The first iteration could be something as simple as a slide deck or semi-functional mockup. Something that lets people get a general idea of the experience offered is a useful precursor to creating an actual Lean UX MVP.

These early pre-MVPs can also be useful for mapping out user journeys. Once some initial feedback is gathered, designers can get a better sense of what people really want in a product. That’s invaluable for mapping out how to get them from point A (their problem) to point B (the ideal solution). Designers may find that there are more steps required along that map than they initially thought, or less.

Designers may even find the original problem they were trying to solve wasn’t the actual problem. In the to-do list app, for example, the designer may find that a solution that helps people feel less stressed about the things they need to do is a more valuable end product than something that keeps their tasks organized. Without actively seeking feedback and creating new iterations that aim to solve the real problem, the designer may never discover that solution.

Think About Necessary Features

When a designer begins a new project, they often start with a list of features the product needs to have. A list of possible features to include isn’t a bad place to start. But it should be compared to what people express they actually want from a product.

Most people, however, won’t know what features they want. They’ll focus on the benefits instead. It’s the designer’s job to figure out what features provide those benefits. And there may be multiple ways to provide each benefit.

Writing down a list of all the possible features that address the benefits people seek is a valuable part of the design process. The list should include more than just the “good” ideas, though. Bad ideas can also serve an important purpose—they can lead to good ideas.

Writing down all the ideas that come to mind is especially helpful when a group is brainstorming. One person will throw out a bad idea, and it sparks a better idea for someone else. Even when brainstorming solo, the “bad” ideas can lead designers to travel down different paths and come up with innovative solutions.

Once a designer has this big list of ideas, they can start to narrow it down to which ones are technically feasible given the project resources and best address the customer’s pain points. From there, building an MVP and testing with potential users can begin.

Building an Initial Lean UX MVP

Thinking and coming up with ideas is the first step to creating a Lean UX MVP. But building real products should quickly follow. Both Lean UX and the MVP process emphasize building actual, usable products.

It’s important to try not to stuff every feature possible into this initial build phase. Instead, think about the minimum number of features that will alleviate the user’s most critical pain point. The first design should focus on what the UX designer thinks will be the features with the highest ROI. Whether that turns out to be true or not will be revealed once people start using the product.

Iteration Is Key

Collecting qualitative feedback and quantitative data from people is useless unless the designer acts on the feedback to create better iterations of the product. Remember, Lean UX MVPs are a process, not a result. And one of the most significant parts of that process is creating new, improved iterations of the product to better address people’s needs.

Each iteration of an MVP should be done based on feedback collected from actual users. That means each iteration should be tested , either in a production environment or by a smaller group of people. It makes sense in many cases to test with a small group first and then, based on how those people respond, test on a larger production scale.

With small groups, designers should collect qualitative feedback. Ask people questions about the product to collect information about what works and what doesn’t, as well as ideas for improvements or alternatives.

In a production environment, designers should focus more on quantitative feedback (things like bounce rates, time on page, and cart abandonment in the case of eCommerce sites). This quantitative feedback can tell designers whether the new iteration is moving in the right direction, i.e., are those numbers improving or getting worse?

When Is a Lean UX MVP Done?

When can a Lean UX MVP be considered “done” can be a tricky question for designers who are new to the process (and sometimes even for seasoned pros). It could come after five iterations or 50. It depends on the complexity of the product, the quality of the user testing and feedback collected, and how many iterations show no noticeable improvements. In many cases, there’s never a point where every person using a product is 100% satisfied with the outcome. It’s up to the product team to decide what level of dissatisfaction is acceptable given their business goals.

Designers and stakeholders should come up with criteria for when a project is “done” (or at least ready for a public release without ongoing testing and new iterations). These criteria could include things like:

• A higher customer conversion rate
• More time spent on the site
• A higher quality or satisfaction score from customers
• Fewer customer complaints
• An increase in customers or users
• More newsletter signups

The exact criteria and goals should be discussed at the beginning of the project and reviewed regularly. As iterations change according to customer feedback and user testing, the goals may need to change along with them.

In truth, a product is rarely ever “done.” Even after a final product release, it’s likely that things will change over the following months or years. Customer and business needs change. Design trends and new technologies emerge. Any of these things may prompt a necessary evolution of the design in the future. Designers and product owners should keep these things in mind and be prepared to launch a new Lean UX MVP cycle as necessary.

Lean UX MVPs have a lot of advantages over other product design methods. When UX designers and product owners want to create a product that best serves customers while also making the design cycle more efficient, it’s often the best choice.

The Lean UX MVP process—from ideas to building a functional prototype to measuring and learning from real people—can be implemented over and over again to create an optimal product. The process itself is simple and straightforward, and works well whether a designer is working solo or with a team.

The resulting product will address people’s pain points while also creating a pleasurable experience. Building products using the Lean UX MVP methodology gives designers a clean roadmap for the entire process. From ideation through iterations based on real customer feedback, this method makes design more efficient and less wasteful.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• Ditch MVPs, Adopt Minimum Viable Prototypes (MVPrs)
• Getting Maximum Impact From a Minimum Valuable Product
• The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods
• How to Conduct Effective UX Research: A Guide
• The Value of User Testing With Prototypes

Understanding the basics

What is mvp in ux.

Minimum viable product (MVP) is a process for creating a production-ready product based on collaboration with users that undergoes continuous iterations and improvements until a “final” product is created. MVP design iterations are based on quantitative data and qualitative customer feedback.

What does minimum viable product mean?

Minimum viable product, despite what the name implies, is a process for creating production-ready products. The MVP design process includes three steps: Prototype, Measure, Learn. The first step is coming up with ideas, the second step is building those ideas, and the third step is getting feedback from real users.

What is the difference between an MVP and prototype?

MVP (minimum viable product) design is a process for creating functional, production-ready products that serve user needs. Prototypes are not fully functional, nor are they ready for production. In some cases, minimum viable prototypes are created which are like a hybrid of the two.

What makes a good MVP?

A good MVP is a functional product that includes enough useful features to serve user needs and address their pain points. A good MVP will also go through multiple iterations based on user feedback to continuously improve the product until it’s an optimal solution for the people using it.

What does Lean UX start?

Lean UX is the basis for creating valuable products in a more efficient, less wasteful way. It combines agile development methodology (primarily iteration) with design thinking. It’s a collaborative, cross-functional process that reveals the true nature of a product faster.

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The full guide to Lean UX

Lean UX is all about changing the focus and gaining perspective in the design - but why is it so popular? What does it mean in practice? Read on to find out!

Lean UX unites product development, design and business in a methodology that promotes continued development, constant iteration and validation. By building, measuring and learning, designers are able to get closer to great user experiences sooner rather than later.

Design wireframes and hi-fi prototypes with Justinmind for Free. Unlimited projects!

Lean UX techniques can be applied to enhance a traditional UX process and give it a boost in both performance and efficiency. And so, let’s take a closer look at a much discussed but misunderstood methodology: Lean UX.

What is Lean UX?

Benefits of being lean: why design teams do it, the lean ux process, the main tenets of the lean ux methodology, lean startups vs large lean companies, 5 lean design hacks to improve product success, learning lean ux: books and tutorials.

Lean UX is an approach to designing and crafting user experiences. At its heart, Lean UX is about letting the validation of hypotheses guide the work of the design team. This implies that designers never make decisions based on their gut or their preferences – there are only hypotheses here.

A hypothesis might read like this: “I believe that people like persona A have a need for (or a problem doing) XYZ”. This may sound a bit silly at first, but it’s important to frame our theories in the right way so that we encourage a truly lean approach to design. Simply stating what you think isn’t enough. You need something concrete that can be tested and validated, proving the theory right.

So why is validating your hypotheses important in Lean?

Think about this: you’re in a meeting with your other colleagues and you’ve all decided that the one idea that is a definite winner. You and everybody else on your team go to work on this Big Winning Idea. You spend a ton of money, invest a lot of hours, the code goes from rough to ready and eventually, you have a product to release.

What do you do?

You release it. You put your Big Winning Idea out into the world and slowly await the tech write-ups, five-star reviews and the revenue flowing in. But soon, you realize that the Big Winning Idea isn’t so big and it’s definitely not winning.

Hypotheses and validation help us know if we’re making products people want and need. The framework of lean UX is about gradual progress, as opposed to putting all your eggs in one basket. There’s no jumping head-first. It’s all about dipping your toes in the water and making sure you don’t get temperature shock. That’s what makes the method Lean. It provides space to pivot and change as the project unfolds.

You might think that not speaking to your users (or potential users) is a disastrous thing but many companies still fall into the trap of making products people don’t need. The first few stages of the project where the team validates the core features is meant to keep that from happening. Laura Klein writes in her book Lean UX for Startups:

“Instead of thinking of a product as a series of features to be built, Lean UX looks at a product as a set of hypotheses to be validated. In other words, we don’t assume that we know what the user wants.”

Designers have many methodologies to choose from when creating products. It’s true that there’s more ways to approach the creative process of any UX product, from design thinking to Agile. With that said, let’s take a moment to understand why so many design teams out there choose Lean over and over again.

It’s cost-effective

You save money by adopting a Lean methodology. Instead of wasting 3 months precious time into a project that is headed nowhere, the lean method keeps teams focused on what matters. Decisions are validated over and over again, creating a solid base on which a product can be built. It’s true that this in of itself brings many benefits – but it also creates a financially stable project.

Laura Klein, the author of Build Better Products, mentions the company Webvan in her book. They spent $400 million on an automated warehouse system only to discover that people weren’t ready to do their grocery shopping online yet. Think of all the time and money wasted.

There are many projects out there that fail because drastic changes were needed in the last moments, adding a huge strain on the finance of the product. In the world of UX, everybody knows that late changes can break a product design project. It’s all about spending money on decisions that were validated, so change happens quickly and early – while it’s still cheap.

It saves you time

In addition to trimming your budget, Lean UX is also a huge time saver. The lean method is collaborative in nature and doesn’t focus on heavy documentation. This means no more lengthy documents or endless back and forths with developers. Despite the fact that the lean method isn’t exactly linear, it keeps the design team from wasting time.

“Functional software is more important than comprehensive documentation” Jeff Gothelf - Lean UX

Lean UX focuses on quick and rapid solutions instead of months and months of development on a fully designed feature. There’s no investing great deals of time into a huge feature and testing it once it’s completely finished.

Lean is also iterative. Research and design move quickly and don’t require months to be delivered to engineering. Product owners, designers and developers are all involved in the Lean UX process. Everyone has ownership of what they produce, making everything go much quicker than a traditional design development process.

Ultimately, everyone works together and progress is made a little at a time. Think of it like a project that moves in small but sure baby steps.

It’s user-centered

There is a lot of overlap with User-Centered Design (UCD) and Lean UX. UCD is iterative like Lean and are both processes which focus on the user and their needs at each phase of the design process.

That is because both methods give a lot of importance to letting validation show us the way. Both approaches encourage designers to distance themselves from the product, with testing acting as a guiding light.

Much like UCD, the lean way is about creating something that truly fits users like a glove. It’s not just about delivering a sound business project but also creating something that shapes itself to the lives of real people. By validating everything with users, lean design teams can see their hypotheses in action, lowering the chances of poor design making it to the final stages of the project.

It’s data-driven

You can have assumptions in Lean UX but those assumptions will be put to the test. Instead of making guesses about potential new features or designs, Lean UX relies on data to inform any decisions. This helps prevent making that lowers the quality of the product.

“Here is the worst possible way for you to try to figure out if your idea solves somebody’s problem: ask them. The vast majority of entrepreneurs seem to think that explaining their concept in detail to a few people and then asking whether it’s a good idea constitutes validation. It does not.” – Laura Klein, UX for Lean Startups

Perhaps even more importantly, constant testing and validating shine a light on aspects of the product that don’t perform well. Even if something was designed in a way that doesn’t work for users, testing will reveal what went wrong and when.

Hear it from the author: Q&A with Jeff Gothelf

We here at Justinmind were lucky enough to have an interview with one of the men behind the method. In the book, Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience, he and Josh Seiden combine lean ideas with design and strategy. It all works to build processes that are more collaborative, iterative and open. Fast forward a few years, and the entire industry of UX loves the lean approach.

It’s a wonderful way to hear from him exactly how he sees Lean UX, what its impact is and how others can benefit from it. Read the entire thing and discover how Lean UX makes better products .

Lean UX is driven by 3 main concepts: think, make and check. While it may be easier to see these as 3 steps that take place in a straight line, nothing could be further from the truth. Lean UX is a cycle that keeps going around, with the product improving and advancing every time the cycle is completed and started again.

Think refers to creating assumptions about any given problem and what you think you know about that particular area. These assumptions are important because eventually, they provide new knowledge which will be turned into hypotheses that can be tested. Other aspects of the think stage involve:

• Mental models
• Storyboards

Make involves designing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is the bare minimum you need to engage your audience and start an iteration-feedback loop. An MVP might be a landing page to a product that doesn’t exist yet to gauge customer interest. It might be a low-fidelity wireframe of the main features and bare bones.

This stage is highly iterative (that is to say, you make the minimum and continue to build upon it). Here are other ways you can create your own MVP:

• Value propositions
• Landing pages

“Lean UX is where prototyping shines. As with the initial sketches, focusing the prototype on critical components of the experience is essential.” Jeff Gothelf - Smashing Magazine

Check is the last stage in the Lean UX loop. This is where you test your MVP with your audience and validate or invalidate it, taking your newfound knowledge back to the think stage to start over again.

It’s important to consider that you won’t be testing a finished MVP or an entire interactive prototype. Testing starts out humbly, using the part of the product that was created in the previous step. Be it a navigation system or the information architecture, testing happens frequently and tends to focus on every little thing that was decided on previously.

This is a part of why you always need to have a professional prototyping tool at hand. Here you can expect to carry out:

• A/B testing
• Site analytics
• Usability testing
• Feedback system
• Customer meetings

Assumptions

We touched on assumptions earlier but as assumptions play a fundamental role in Lean UX, they deserve to be understood a little better.

The reason that assumptions play a big role in Lean UX is the shift from the traditional requirements/deliverables method. Instead of relying on requirements, the focus is turned towards creating a problem statement.

A problem statement can take this form:

We have observed that [product/service/organization] isn’t meeting [these goals/needs], which is causing [this adverse effect]. How might we improve so that our product/service/team/organization is more successful based on [these measurable criteria]?

This helps you to know when you’ve solved the problem. It’s likely you might have multiple problem statements. It is the team’s job to decide which problem statements are most pertinent to business, prioritizing user goals and pursuing the best route.

From your problem statement, you can start to make assumptions. When creating assumptions, it’s best to have your problem statement in front of you. Now, you need to think about user needs and solutions.

Use statements like these to help guide you as you create assumptions:

• My customer needs to…
• I believe I will acquire the majority of my users through…
• The biggest risk is…
• What features are important?
• What problem does the product solve?

After you write a problem statement, identify and select your main assumptions, the next stage is developing hypotheses. To test an assumption, you simply transform it into a hypothesis. This is useful for identifying any gaps in your thinking.

A hypothesis statement template looks like this:

We believe this [business outcome] will be achieved if [these users] successfully [attain this user outcome] with this [feature].

And this is what it might look like when you’ve created your hypothesis:

We believe that conversions will increase by 25% (business outcome) if new customers (your target audience) successfully identify a larger call to action button (feature).

Once you’ve created a hypothesis statement, it’s time to put it to the test. As you can see from the hypothesis statement, you start with what you expect to happen – in this case, an increase in conversion. From there, you move onto who will help you achieve this (new customers) and how (big, shiny call to action button).

The beauty of creating a hypothesis is that if you ever hear someone say the dreaded “I don’t think this idea will work”, the testing data will show everyone the truth. By putting all hypotheses to the literal test, all disagreements and conflict is avoided. Personal opinions take the back seat, while test results do the driving.

Minimum Viable Product

An MVP is what prevents you from going out and designing a fully fledged social network that nobody asked for. Instead, you design the bare minimum and expand on that, little by little.

By building an MVP, you’re creating a small product that functions. You don’t need flashing lights just yet. Your MVP can be so stripped back that a landing page alone can be sufficient. You just need to have something to satisfy early customers and gain interest. Something that captures the central essence of the entire product – something concrete and tangible.

“As you consider building your own MVP let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.” Eric Ries - The Lean Startup

Part of the beauty of MVPs is that they can take many forms. Depending on the nature of the product, a simple wireframe might do the trick. You want something that symbolizes the soul of the product, so you can validate that core and make sure the product can thrive. It’s about creating a solid base that all else can rest on.

Testing is the backbone of Lean UX. Testing is what gives you answers. It will help you understand why your users interact with your product in the way that they do. It’ll guide your design decisions and offer clarity. Testing doesn’t necessarily have to involve a lot of people either.

Part of the beauty in user testing is that methods and tools are diverse. Depending on what exactly is being tested, the right approach might change. Whatever needs to be validated, though, can be done in a way that suits the time and budget of the project.

Unmoderated testing tends to be lean because it is cheap to carry out, quick to find recruits and can be easily scaled. You can use a variety of artefacts from low-fidelity prototypes, clickable wireframes and just about everything else. You want a wireframe tool that allows for you to build on the MVP, so you can work your way up to a realistic prototype as the project progresses.

Unmoderated testing just means that a user can complete a testing session without needing a UX researcher in the room. This can be done on a service like Userzoom and users can do it from the comfort of their own home.

Why big companies find adopting Lean UX principles difficult

So, all it takes is thinking about problems from a design perspective and a little Lean Startup magic? Why aren’t all companies using this approach? Taking the lean approach isn’t always easy for big companies. Let’s go over why that is.

1) Fear. Fear of failure, specifically. Lean UX embraces failure as a way to learn and improve. One of the main principles of Lean UX is the permission to fail, as well as the idea that failing early and quickly is best.

When we know that there are no repercussions from failure, we’re more prone to take risks and these risks could lead to innovation or even disruption.

Business Administration professor Edward D. Hess agrees. He says that failure is a necessary part of the innovation process because “from failure comes learning, iteration, adaptation, and the building of new conceptual and physical models through an iterative learning process. Almost all innovations are the result of prior learning from failures.”

2) The reason that many large companies shun innovation is that they’re comfortable. Too entrenched in old business models. Large companies tend to have been in business for a while, which could make it difficult to implement such a drastic change in the way things are done.

This is both because there is already a certain way to do things which people are used to, as well as because it can be difficult to change the workflow of several large teams. Be it as it may, it’s no secret that getting large amounts of people to change their ways can be challenging. This is even more true when you’re trying to change the very way they think about design.

3) Old school management tactics can prevent companies from adopting the Lean UX principles. When thinking of a big company, try to see it as a huge institution. It has its own set of rules, which have been in place for a long time.

Of course, there are ambitious managers who want to push their organizations and try to innovate. However, it’s common to see that traditional management practices push them underground, forcing them to hide that side of who they are in order to maintain the current way things are approached.

Consider a manager who does embrace the lean method. It’s easy to imagine that many middle managers won’t appreciate the change in workflow, putting them in an unfamiliar situation. When trying to implement Lean UX, it can be tough to make an institution adopt a new path.

How big companies can learn to stop worrying and love Lean UX principles

These roadblocks can stifle innovation at companies and make managers feel as though they’re simply functionaries instead of genuine innovators. Not all is lost, however. There’s many creative ways in which companies can hop on the Lean train.

Create small cross-functional pilot teams

Gather some like-minded colleagues and try and tackle some problems together. Keep the team small (but still, if possible, cross-functional). The problem doesn’t have to be large either, just complex enough to maintain motivation and to help everyone understand what can be achieved in a short amount of time.

“You want these folks to get to know each other, to build trust, a shared language and rapport, and through that simple spending of time together they start to look at different ways of working and respect each other’s opinions more. They start to think of themselves as a unit that wins or loses together” Jeff Gothelf explains.

Then show the results to your managers. It’s important to highlight how you solved the problem quickly and prove the power of silo-busting. These small victories over time can result in a bigger, dramatic shift in thinking and greater acceptance of Lean principles in the enterprise.

Open communication for everyone (including your customers)

Breaking out of the silo mentality won’t happen overnight. It’s a good thing to make sure the communication channels between you and your manager are always open. That means explaining what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, the challenges you’re experiencing and how much it all costs. It helps here to drive home the benefit to the company to really bolster your arguments.

Communication conventions may have to adapt to this new way of thinking. Thankfully, tools like Slack make this transition easier. The entire team will need the right equipment to maintain good communication as you introduce Lean into the enterprise.

Open communication should spill over to your customers too. Not just between you and the rest of your team.

Jeff explains that “the best thing you can do is to start engaging with customers as regularly and consistently as possible, and bring as many people as you can to the conversation.” Jeff believes that by opening the communication with our customers as soon as possible, we’ll mitigate any resistance to Lean UX in the enterprise.

In brief, to overcome the hurdles at your organization here’s what you can do to introduce Lean UX principles:

• Find like-minded colleagues to escape silo prison
• Speak to your customer early and often
• Go stealthy to drive innovation
• Ask for forgiveness instead of permission
• Nurture clear channels of communication with your managers
• Highlight the benefits to the organization

Create your own Meetup group

Meetups are valuable for a variety of reasons. They give you direct access to people who are already interested in your product. You know that, because they’ll have signed up to attend. It’ll be confirmed when they actually arrive and you see them in person.

Already you can begin to get some early validation for your ideas. But aside from being a useful tool to get validation, you can create a community of early adopters who can evangelize on your behalf.

If you have a dedicated Meetup with a group of loyal people, you can use them to spread the word for your product. Plus, you can talk directly with them about what you’re thinking. It’s a great way to Get Out of the Building.

Another use is testing out your MVP. Creating an MVP is vital if you want to understand where your product fits in the market and, crucially, if people want it. You might discover through your Meetup group that what you’re working on actually isn’t what people want. This gives you the chance to:

Discard your idea and pivot in another direction

Tweak your idea into something that your customers actually want. Pivoting might sound scary, especially if you’re wedded to a particular idea. But if you’re not getting validation, the lean way gives you plenty of margin to change direction. There’s nothing wrong with cutting your losses and moving on to other hypotheses.

Design personas

Advocating for the user is the mantra of many UX designers. Thankfully, Lean advocates for them too. User personas are an opportunity to create empathy. Empathy makes better products because you’re putting yourself in the shoes of your user. That means understanding their pain points and what makes them tick.

Personas are excellent for their utility; they are a tool which can mitigate the need for expensive research studies and the best ones only need one page. Better to spend a few hours crafting decent personas than spend thousands of dollars you don’t have interviewing people.

You could take a few people from your Meetup and transform them into personas. When you have more information as a result of ongoing research, you can adapt your personas by seeing which guesses were right and which were wrong, then adapt accordingly.

It’s true that each design team will create user personas in their own way. Some of them are in-depth and look into motivations, problems and goals. Others focus on the simple things, like the face and profession of the user. Either way, it’s important to have user personas at the disposal of your team so they can refer back to it when need be. You can find some very practical user persona templates to speed things up.

Take advantage of heuristics

Heuristics are rules of thumb. They’re not set in stone but can be used as a set of useful guidelines when navigating uncharted territory. If you’re making a product for the first time, heuristics can give you pointers on what to do and what not to do.

Standards, like the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design , help anchor us to reality. The principles have been tried and tested countless times so we can guarantee that they’re a safer bet than that unfounded hypothesis you just whipped out of thin air.

Don’t tie yourself too tightly to these heuristics. Even though those particular heuristics by Jakob Nielsen have been going strong since the mid-nineties, it’s worth remembering that they’re still broad guidelines and not specific usability guidelines. Rather, they set a certain bar when it comes to usability and it’s up to the team to live up to them or not.

You will need to find out the specifics of any given problem through user research on your own. But at least by using heuristics, you’re on good footing. They’re a starting point. Using them will save you time and money because you don’t have to investigate whether or not error prevention is a good thing.

Use an MVP design canvas

Designing an MVP is easier said than done. But they’re valuable for speeding up learning, decreasing waste and encouraging iterations. All too often, though, when we’re in a Lean cycle, we’re prone to losing focus or forgetting the bigger picture.

You have many options available to make your own MVP, from Justinmind to Unbounce. Where the MVP Canvas Template enters into the process is at the very beginning. It can be used to give your MVP creation focus and clarity.

The MVP Canvas is a tool to help you clarify your product strategy and key assumptions. Amy Jo Kim, the startup coach, created the MVP Canvas. She found that the one-page canvas helped to articulate the strategy across the whole team.

The canvas has 7 sections:

• Early customers
• Unmet needs
• Value proposition
• Your solution
• Unfair advantage
• Early Metrics
• Key assumptions

Here you write down your initial thoughts. You can use the canvas as your assumptions get tested and evolve. It’s a great tool to stay strategically aligned with your team.

Tell people what you’re doing

Yes, building and creating a successful product is hard work. Very hard work. Who has time for other people when you’re trying to change the world one user experience at a time?

Why not let people know how hard it is? Using social media platforms like Twitter gives you access to an audience who you can share your thoughts, anxieties, fears and desires with. You can build meaningful relationships with other like-minded people as well as form potential business connections.

Then there’s blogging. You can use blogging not only for your SEO efforts but to explain your process behind why you took certain actions or what test worked or didn’t work.

This type of content humanizes you and people will be able to empathize with that. When they can empathize with you and your struggles, they’ll be able to relate and, maybe one day, turn into customers of your product.

Start putting your product updates on a website like Product Hunt to get more visibility. It shows the community what exactly you’re up to and they can follow you to stay in the know.

Getting out of the building is important when practicing Lean. Speaking to real people in the real world is valuable. But so is creating that sort of community online by finding out where your customers hang out and talking to them. Slack groups, Twitter chats and online communities are all ripe for these sort of connections.

1. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

What is there to say about the book that started it all? Brought to us by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, this is the book that allowed for Lean UX to grow in popularity and use. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams has been read by countless people by now, earning a place amongst the top UX design books in general.

It covers everything, from the theory of how lean works to more concrete details on what makes a minimum viable product. It’s a classic for any UX designer to have at hand!

2. UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design

UX for lean startups is brought to us by legendary Laura Klein, whose design books are beloved all around the globe. We love this book here at Justinmind. It’s essence is all about working to find the right way to test design decisions, as well as to using data to draw conclusions.

The book aims to cover not just the theory of user testing, but aspects that are much more detailed and concrete. Both newbies and veteran designers will, without a doubt, learn a thing or two from this book. It’s just about learning how to user test things. It’s about learning to test better.

3. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

Lean Analytics : Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster is another wonderfully practical book for anyone interested in UX design. This book by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz covers everything related to analytics in UX design.

We love that this book goes beyond the classic question of “how do I test a design idea?” and ventures much further. The book threads carefully between the world of UX and the world of business, working to show how analytics can align the two and create a truly powerful product. It’s great stuff, especially for business analysts venturing into design or vice-versa.

4. Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business

This is a wonderful way to get more familiar with a key aspect of Lean UX design. With the lean approach, deliverables all take a back seat so that the time and effort of the designers is prioritized in the product. However, for those of us coming from a more classic way of designing, it can be hard to let go of deliverables.

That’s why Getting out of the deliverables business works so well. The talk, given by none other than Jeff Gothelf himself, focuses on trimming the extra fat from these documents and focusing on actually creating things. Wonderful!

5. Learn Lean UX with Jeff Gothelf

Learn Lean UX is basically an overview of the entire lean process and lean principles. Also given by Jeff with Mural, this presentation covers everything in the lean approach. We get it – sometimes, you’d rather hear than read it. That’s why we included this 1 hour long presentation that could work to introduce people to the lean way of doing things.

The wrap up on Lean UX design

Lean UX is a paradigm shift. It focuses on creating efficiency and removing any waste unlike other common design methodologies. By reducing the reliance on deliverables and focusing on small wins over time, products can get to market faster with the knowledge that your customer really wants what you have to sell them.

Any design-driven product team can benefit from the Lean method to boost their workflow. Even in large companies, there’s power to be found in the Lean way of doing things!

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What is Lean UX?

Streamlining user experience for an increasingly agile world.

As the trend of software development bends inevitably toward continuous improvement, continuous learning, and agility, so too must design practice bend and change to be most effective for the digital world. The process models UX inherited from its precursors—graphic design, industrial design, and architecture—are front-loaded and heavy, meant for outputs that are physical products and objects. But these process models collapse when it is no longer possible to figure out everything in advance, as is the case with creating complex software applications. Lean UX is a call to work iteratively, to streamline design and eliminate waste, to collaborate on cross-functional teams and, most importantly, to maintain a customer-centric perspective in our decision-making.

“We saw this emergence of Agile as the sensible process to deal with this malleable, infinitely changeable material, [that is software], where you don’t have to measure twice, cut once. You can measure once, cut once, measure once, cut once, measure once, cut once, forever,” says Josh Seiden, designer, strategist, and co-author of Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams . “When [Agile] became the spinning engine at the center of software production, all the other pieces of software production [and their] process models started to conflict. People started asking, ‘What is the process model that we can use that will work with these Agile methods, that won’t give up the value that we bring as designers, and, in fact, will take advantage of these new process models?’ … I think Lean UX is an umbrella term for all of these approaches that work well in an Agile context.” Lean UX optimizes design for an Agile world, by applying digital design tools and techniques, as they’re needed.

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The origins of Lean UX

Lean UX can trace its origins back to lean manufacturing, a system that aims to eliminate waste in production—those activities that do not add to value for the end-customer—with the greatest efficiency. In The Machine That Changed the World , published in 1990, authors James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos first described the lean manufacturing approach, derived from the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota’s lean manufacturing approach has helped produce substantial growth for the company, which has become one of the largest automakers in the world.

In 2008, Eric Ries in his groundbreaking book, The Lean Startup , applied lean management practices to business and product development, encouraging entrepreneurs to follow an iterative build-measure-learn feedback loop to test business hypotheses by soliciting customer feedback on a minimum viable product (MVP). This process enabled startups to quickly validate their ideas in the market.

Lean UX takes key ingredients from its predecessors—including a strong emphasis on eliminating byproducts of processes that do not drive customer value—and applies them to user experience design.

Lean UX is driven by a set of core principles, each focused on maximizing value and minimizing waste in software design. The Lean UX cycle can be expressed as think-make-check, not dissimilar from the Lean Startup method’s build-measure-learn feedback loop.

We start our Lean UX cycle by articulating our assumptions about a problem—what we know or think we know about that space. We might have assumptions about our potential users and their goals, or what software features might facilitate them in reaching those goals. Next, we turn these assumptions about the problem into a hypothesis that we can test and validate via feedback from our users. At this stage, we also articulate what a successful outcome might look like, the state toward which we are aiming and for which we are managing.

Next, we design collaboratively. Our goal is to make a minimum viable product (MVP)—which might be a prototype or even a sketch—to help us test the assumptions articulated in our hypothesis with real users. Lean UX prioritizes co-creation—sketching, white-boarding, and having informal conversations—to move the design forward, rather than aiming for specific deliverables.

Ongoing research gives us the chance to check our hypothesis quickly, to test our MVP with customers and validate or invalidate it, as the case may be. Ideally, we’ll talk with customers at regularly scheduled intervals, perhaps once a week and receive feedback. Lean UX research is collaborative and distributed across the entire team, so that everyone can have exposure to it and develop a shared understanding.

With this core think-make-check cycle in mind, let’s look at some of the key principles of Lean UX.

Lean UX principles

Act as one team.

In order to build a shared understanding around customers and what they need most, designers, engineers, and product managers need to work together on one team. “It’s really about [creating] this cross-functional collaboration around what we’re building, who we’re building it for, [and] what success looks like, which is a really difficult conversation in most companies,” says Jeff Gothelf, an organizational designer and co-author of Lean UX . “Because in most companies, success is: ‘We shipped the feature. It’s out the door. We’re successful.’ [But] that’s the beginning. In my eyes, that’s the beginning of the conversation with the market.”

“Shared understanding comes from a tight collaboration between those disciplines,” Gothelf explains. “That’s really where the efficiency and the productivity gains come with Lean UX.” For example, by interviewing users together, team members gain first-hand knowledge of feedback, and can understand the reasons why particular results happened as they did. With this shared knowledge, team members can quickly focus on figuring out what to do about a problem.

With collaboration at such a premium, it stands to reason that remote teams might have difficulty practicing Lean UX. “The philosophy remains the same. It’s just [that] the company has to optimize for remote culture,” says Gothelf. “They have to provide their teams with the tools that allow them to do this kind of collaborative work. Then, most importantly, they have to be awake at the same time. If the time zones don’t overlap in any kind of productive capacity, then no, it can’t work. That’s the biggest challenge.”

Of course, the digital technology exists for enabling real-time collaborative work on dispersed teams. We can easily engage remote colleagues in activities like sketching, white boarding, video conferencing, and screen sharing. A few examples of these applications include the ubiquitous Slack or HipChat for team conversations; Basecamp or Asana for project management; and GoToMeeting , Blue Jeans , or Zoom for video meetings, not to mention Skype and Google Hangouts . There are also collaboration tools like Mural and Realtime Board for instant collaboration with virtual sticky notes and white boards.

Solve the right problem

Lean UX practice requires that teams get customer feedback quickly. The more we can talk to customers together, the better off we’ll be. “We have to learn our way forward, in small, continuous batches with continuous feedback,” says Seiden. “We do that … [by] building our process around continuous learning.”

Lean UX organizes teams around learning, using small steps, small units of work, and continuous customer or user engagement. “I think a lot of the places where you see Agile fall down is that people think that Agile is about just doing small increments of work. Actually, Agile is about small, continuous feedback loops,” says Seiden. With continuous feedback and learning from customers, it is more likely that we’ll hone in on and solve the right problem.

For example, having a user or early adopter group that is involved with the design of the product from concept to completion can pay dividends. For technical applications and business-to-business software this can be especially important. Your team can choose one day per week on which new designs or prototypes are reviewed or tested with the group. User feedback informs the next week of work. Sometimes weekly reviews can be too much, depending on the rhythm of the design team—bi-weekly reviews can be effective as well. Pick an interval that works best for your group.

Working in small increments allows us to test out potential solutions while mitigating risk. If the solution we’re devising is not working, we find we need to try out something else, or even reframe the problem. Ongoing input from users will help ensure the team truly understands the problem, and its various aspects, and has diagnosed it correctly.

Design collaboratively

For Lean UX, design is a function, not a person . “In our little agency that we had for four years, we really saw this … mingling of the waters between product design and engineering. It was difficult for us to say, in fact, ‘He’s our designer,’ [which] was a very limiting statement, or, ‘She’s our engineer,’ says Gothelf. “I see a blurring of the lines. I see a much more collaborative future.”

Lean UX relies on well-managed, continuous design collaboration. For example, at Involution Studios, a Boston area software design firm where I work that specializes in health care, projects are set up so clients and the design team can work closely together, both in virtual and physical environments, as much as possible. Projects typically start with multi-day workshops at the studio, where, through design exercises, shared meals, etc., the team can begin to coalesce into one unit. The studio—a historic grand ballroom, with period architecture originally constructed at the turn of the 20th century—has open workstations on the balcony that can accommodate client designers, developers, or product managers to help the project team integrate into one working group.

Additionally, the majority of the walls in the ballroom, as well as meeting spaces and the kitchen, are painted with IdeaPaint, a writable and erasable surface coating that encourages ad hoc collaborative design and white-boarding. And, when the project team is not together physically, they communicate and share knowledge using a variety of digital tools from Basecamp to DropBox, Google Drive to Slack.

Plans change, so plan accordingly

Lean UX demands that designers evolve their understanding as they discover new information. Working in software almost always means working in situations with high levels of uncertainty. “It’s very difficult to predict whether the solution you’re putting in front of people is going to work, and whether it’s going to have the desired effect,” says Seiden. “That’s kind of the starting point, right? … How do we get them to behave within these systems? We don’t know, and so that means that instead of a model where we do careful planning, we need to optimize for taking small steps and learning as we go, and being open to change.”

Being open to change is easier said than done, however. It can even be difficult for designers and developers whose work mandate is to create such change. For instance, there are moments when the information coming back from user testing or reviews reveals that the initial assumptions for our design hypotheses were incorrect—debunked by observing users actually interacting with software or product. What we are challenged to do, in these instances, is to change course when our assumptions prove false, which rarely instills a good feeling, at least at first. Flexibility in this manner—not wanting to be right, but rather being willing to be wrong and follow the path that the evidence demonstrates—can be a critical trait for a designer or developer.

Deliverables? Not so much.

Deemphasizing designing for deliverables is another key principle for Lean UX.

Other design processes may favor upfront work, whether it’s research, information architecture, interaction design, UI mockups, or prototyping, with each step generating a discrete set of deliverables. But this approach doesn’t work well in an Agile environment. Lean UX is about adjusting your design process to become more Agile compatible.

“How do you take all those [design] tools and apply the most relevant ones at the most appropriate time at the appropriate level of effort?” says Gothelf. “You’re eliminating the waste in your design process, and you’re moving away from being in the deliverables business.” This doesn’t mean that a Lean UX process is devoid of deliverables. “It means only create the artifacts that you need to communicate the conversation one step forward,” Gothelf explains.

“I think probably the most important [tenet of Lean UX] … is [the] minimum viable conversation ,” says Gothelf. “What I mean by that is, as a designer, what’s the most important thing you need to communicate next? Whom do you need to communicate it to? Then, what’s the least amount of work that you need to do to make that communication take place? I think if there was a Lean UX commandment, that’s really it.”

For example, if you’re a designer working closely with the developer on your team, you might choose to talk through the interactions required for an interface, or sketch your idea quickly on a piece of paper or whiteboard to communicate. This is the minimum viable conversation required to move forward one step.

In a world driven by virtual communication, there’s sometimes too little credit given to the volumes of information we can receive from human body language and the shared context and knowledge of working in the same room or same office.

“Now, if I need to explain [something] to an executive, who doesn’t really care about pixels and whatever, maybe I’ve got to build a prototype and walk them through that,” says Gothelf. “Maybe we have to fully design something to show that and get that point across. Maybe I have to come to that presentation with a little bit of evidence, some kind of research that I’ve done as well. I need to do that amount of work to make that case convincing.”

This principle of favoring conversations over deliverables for the sake of themselves, is a great example of design adapting to an Agile world. But, while Lean UX is an evolutionary step toward continuous process, it nevertheless shares characteristics with other established design methodologies that may not be immediately apparent.

Lean UX and design thinking

Another methodology that shares with Lean UX an evidence-based approach to product design is design thinking . The two have a number of elements in common. In fact, Lean UX draws upon design thinking in many crucial areas: observing the customer, understanding and building empathy, brainstorming collaboratively to find different solutions, and measuring the impact of those solutions to determine the best one.

But there are points of difference between them as well. Lean UX sees formal process and method as scope that can and should be altered as needed. When it comes to adhering to specific steps or ways of doing things, Lean UX takes a pragmatic and utilitarian approach, especially when it comes to soliciting customer and user feedback. For instance, expensive formal usability tests are unlikely to have a place in a Lean UX process, while guerilla usability tests with a few users, are more likely. For a formal usability test, requirements might include a lab with various observational technologies, recruiting and scheduling a substantial group of users, and devising a testing protocol. Depending on the number of users you test, costs could reach tens of thousands of dollars. In contrast, guerilla usability can be conducted anywhere that you encounter users who are appropriate for your product. If you have a product with a general user base, you may be able to test your designs in a communal space like a coffee shop. “The formality is really where the play is for me. Yes, all of the design thinking components fit. Use what you need to help move forward in the right direction. But the core philosophies are highly aligned,” says Gothelf.

Lean UX in action: CarMax

How does a company leverage technology to make the used car buying experience more successful? This was the question that CarMax, the largest used car retailer in the U.S., asked as it started to put Lean UX principles to work, taking an iterative, experimental approach to product design and development.

CarMax wanted to redesign its shopping experience—which contains both digital and physical world elements—by re-examining it from the car buyers’ perspective. The company desired a more modern, customer-centric design for its mobile and desktop experiences. Online, CarMax needed to first inform customers about its inventory, allow them to browse it, and then schedule a test drive. The buying experience then had to move offline, where the customer visited one of CarMax’s physical stores to check out and potentially purchase the car. Within this experience, there was room for improvement. The CarMax design team hypothesized that if customers had a more thorough understanding of the financing available to them, they would have a better car buying experience. To validate this thinking, the team first spoke with customers and created a journey map to better understand the buying experience. Next, they iterated through various designs for the loan application via a series of prototypes, changing the experience as they learned more about what was important to the customer. Additionally, the design team worked closely with sales consultants at the CarMax stores to make sure that the right information about the customer was included in the offline sales process. Ultimately, the CarMax design team was able to create an integrated online / offline experience that helped customers find the cars they were qualified to purchase.

CarMax is also building Lean UX into the way that they work, which, as a consequence, is evolving their corporate culture. It has reshaped the way the company hires, the way they build teams (projects, for instance, can involve stakeholders across many different departments), the way they incentivize those teams, the way that those teams engage with leadership, the types of activities these teams do, and even their physical space. For instance, the company’s product organization offices—a digital and technology innovation center in downtown Richmond, Virginia—is a converted music venue, created specifically to improve collaboration. Located in the historic Lady Byrd Hat building, the space can hold up to 120 employees, including application architects, UX designers, and software developers.

“The interesting part, I think, of the story,” says Gothelf, “is that occasionally these [Lean UX] efforts reveal some feedback that’s not necessarily what the company wants to hear. ‘We’re heavily invested in this particular initiative.’ Guess what? This is the wrong initiative. … That’s the toughest part in all of this. It’s all fun and games when the feedback and the learnings that you’re getting confirm your hypothesis. [But] when they invalidate your thinking …  the hard part of this is changing course. It’s one thing to change course on a design or on a project team. It’s another to strategically shift courses in an organization, which is what this is ultimately having an impact on. That’s proven to be fascinating.”

You can learn more about the CarMax Lean UX case study in Gothelf and Seiden’s book, Lean UX .

What’s next, Lean UX?

As Lean UX continues to be adopted in the marketplace, where will it take companies in the future?

“My hope and my expectation is that this way of working simply becomes the way we work,” says Gothelf, “when we move into a post-Agile world, a post-Lean UX world. Something new will come along, but … the values of collaboration, of evidence-based decision-making, of humility, of customer centricity, I expect those values to [be maintained]. That’s what I see moving forward, a breakdown in silos.”

“Software is here to stay,” says Seiden. “It’s a fact of life now, and continuous methods are the way to work in software. … We’re really moving from these kinds of assembly line process models to continuous process models. I’m seeing young designers that I’m talking to who [are saying], ‘Yeah, this is how you work. I don’t get it. Why are you talking about this Lean UX stuff? This is just design.’”

Creating a product in a digital environment is altogether different from the ways in which we created products before. Lean UX, then, is a design process evolution toward a digitally dominant future, where rapid change, continuous learning, and adaptation are key. Surprisingly, it takes time for this kind of process evolution to occur even in the most tech saavy of industries, like software. But we’re definitely on our way. 

Ready to take a deeper dive into Lean UX? Check out these resources.

Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams , by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously , by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design , by Laura Klein

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback , by Dan Olsen

Lean UX Is Taking Over. Here’s Why.

What is Lean UX and how can you use it in your own product development?

Well-functioning, reliable and easy-to-use products are more likely to become commercially successful. Through their design process, product designers aim to create great UX and Lean UX is quickly becoming the favorite technique for many teams.

What Is Lean UX?

In the traditional product design process teams build products based on requirements that are defined up front. The team familiarizes itself with the requirements, ideates a solution, builds a prototype of this solution, and validates it with its users. Design deliverables play a major role in the traditional design process since we use prototypes in product development. The problem with this approach is evident: initial requirements can be fallible and the team risks investing energy creating something that won't bring any value to the user. 

Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup , perfectly summarizes the risk of following a traditional product design approach: “What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?”

Jeff Gothelf introduced the concept of Lean UX in his 2013 book Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams . Instead of specific requirements, a team  practicing Lean UX starts with a problem statement--a description of a problem that users face in real life that should be addressed with a digital product. The team explores the problem space and formulates assumptions. 

An assumption is a statement of something a team thinks is true (based on existing knowledge about the market and target users).

There Are 2 Types of Assumptions

• User assumption is an assumption of what users expect from your product.
• Business assumption is an assumption of what will make your product commercially successful.

Here’s an example: a team wants to create a food delivery app. One of the first key user assumptions will likely be minimizing the time-to-order (since the user wants to receive her meal as fast as possible). The business assumption, in this case, is therefore evident—by reducing the time-to-order, you will increase user satisfaction and overall conversion. 

After you state explicit assumptions, it's time to move on to creating a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an evidenced-based statement that can be validated . For instance, the team formulates a hypothesis that UI should allow ordering food in less than five minutes and validates this hypothesis by building a prototype and testing it with users. During testing, it's vital to measure the conversion rate. If, after the validation, the team sees that it's heading in the wrong direction, they can quickly adjust the course. 

More From Nick Babich 3 Great Ideation Techniques for Your Team

Designing With Users in Mind

Lean UX is a process that embraces agile design methods and encourages a more comprehensive view of the problem space. For example, when team members decide whether or not they want to introduce a new feature in a product, they ask questions like:

Why do we need to release this particular feature? 

What value does it bring to users? 

How is the person supposed to use this feature in their daily life?

This approach provides a team with a better understanding of user pain points and how exactly a feature is supposed to solve them.

What to Consider When Employing Lean UX

Deep understanding of end users.

User research is the core of Lean UX. It's impossible to release a good product without learning the true needs and wants of end-users. Product teams practicing Lean UX take into account not only what users need and want, but they also consider the user's context (the environment in which the product will be used with its limitations). 

Collaborative Design

Design is a team sport. It’s hard (or nearly impossible) to create a good design while working in a silo. Radical transparency is one of the key differences between Lean UX and other design approaches. All teams participating in a  product’s design communicate with each other on a regular basis and address all roadblocks together. 

Lean UX also practices cross-functional activities. For example, designers on product teams create mockups and prototypes while taking an active part in user research and testing. As a result, the team tackles each problem from many different angles, which significantly improves the design process’s outcome. 

Iterative Design

The nature of agile development is to work in rapid build-validate-learn cycles. Lean UX is not about creating an ideal, well-polished prototype right from the first attempt, it's about building the most basic version of the concept as soon as possible and validating it with users.

3 Goals of Iterative Design

• Reduce waste. The team aims to produce the basic design artifacts such as fake doors (i.e. creating a landing page of a non-existent product to measure interest in it) or low fidelity prototypes that allow the team to validate the hypothesis as fast as possible.
• Validate solutions on real business objectives. The team defines key business metrics (such as conversion rate) up front and tests a solution to ensure that it satisfies the expectations.
• Constant experimentation. Constantly experimenting helps the team uncover more information about the problem space to develop a better understanding of users’ pain points and find better solutions. 

The team achieves all three goals by creating minimum viable product (MVP). Eric Riess defines MVP as “a version of a product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings about customers with the least effort.” Here is how it works in practice:

The team researches a problem space and learns user needs and wants. The team defines problem A.  

The team assumes that problem A can be solved by creating a solution B (hypothesis).

The team creates an MVP of solution B in order to validate the hypothesis.

The team validates the MVP with users and continues the learning process.

Once the team knows what needs to be improved, it can best decide where to invest effort.

Read More From Our UX and Design Experts Should You Be Focusing on Product Design or Service Design?

Feedback Loop 

Every idea, no matter how good it sounds, should be tested. That's why it's critical to create concepts and validate them as early as possible. As a product designer, you should expect many of your ideas to fail in testing. But that's okay. The key is to obtain feedback early in the design process because it will be easier to adjust the product design direction. As a result, the product design process will be much less expensive. 

Lean UX is both a mindset and a technique that embraces both Agile and Lean methodologies. For Lean UX to become effective, the entire organization needs to adopt the practice. Only then can we create products with exceptional user experience as quickly as possible.

Recent Expert Contributors Articles

What Is Lean UX? A Complete Beginner’s Guide

The increasingly competitive nature of the digital product development space means there’s more pressure on designers than ever before — not just to deliver better products than everyone else, but also to deliver them faster than everyone else. That pressure has ushered in a new age of agile working, which allows design teams to gather user feedback early and iterate quickly. Enter, Lean UX: a collaborative design approach based on agile working, that focuses on problem-solving and minimizing wasted time.

Based on the lean-agile methods of making the design process incremental, Lean UX is a design strategy focused around minimizing wasted time and effort during the design process. While that might sound simple enough, Lean UX has recently taken the design world by storm, with many proclaiming that it’s the epitome of design method evolution.

If you’re none the wiser about Lean UX, and the term itself makes you conjure up images of UX that is somehow skinnier than normal UX, we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll get to grips with the newest UX method on the block — providing you with an overview of the thinking behind it, how it differs from conventional UX, and give you some insight into why the design world is ‘going lean’.

• What is Lean UX?
• The core principles of Lean UX
• How does Lean UX differ from normal UX?
• What are the benefits of using Lean UX?

1. What is Lean UX?

Everyone’s heard the cautionary tale of the architect who didn’t make enough floorplans. Content with having the homeowners on board during the initial planning phase, the architect plows on with confidence — unaware that the homeowners have since changed tastes and grown their family. The architect has to then tear down the home and start again from scratch because the end result didn’t work with the homeowners, costing millions of dollars and wasting months of everyone’s time in the process. What the architect should’ve done to avoid such a mess was to create basic floorplans at each stage, ensuring they had the homeowners’ full approval before a single penny was spent.

The same goes when it comes to the design cycle. All too often, designers will go full-steam ahead with the product, and then either the requirements change or the stakeholders just aren’t happy with the result. This makes all those months of hard work and research obsolete, and the entire team has to go back to square one — costing the company time, money and resources.

This is what Lean UX aims to change.

Based on the popular Agile Design Method wherein the design phases run parallel alongside each other rather than following each other linearly, Lean UX is a collaborative, user-centric approach to design that focuses on minimizing wasted time, money and resources during the design cycle. The Lean UX approach asserts that a product’s initial prototype will always be wrong and need improvement, so it encourages the creation of a minimal viable product — a product with the bare essentials needed to conduct user testing. This approach is all about finding solutions to the problems and then improving those solutions based on user feedback.

The process of finding these solutions is known as the assumption and hypothesis method. By looking at the problems, you should be able to come up with a problem statement which will then snowball into a set of assumptions — or, in other words, a statement that you believe to be true.

Creating your assumptions usually involves a team brainstorm, in which everyone comes up with a set of questions based on the problems to inform your assumptions. Once you have your assumptions, you can then come up with a hypothesis to test them. For example, you might hypothesize that adding a certain feature to the product will increase usability by 35%. If you are unable to prove your hypothesis to be true, you know that you’re heading in the wrong direction.

While naturally, Lean UX refers to a digital design process, it’s actually a derivative of Lean manufacturing — a long-standing technique involving minimizing unnecessary steps in the manufacturing process that do not have any direct value for the customer. It was first documented in the ’90s with reference to the Toyota Production System, during which the adoption of Lean manufacturing contributed to Toyota’s growth into one of the largest automotive companies in the world.

There are three fundamental phases of Lean UX:

• Build: create a low-fidelity prototype that outlines the backbones and bare essentials of the product design
• Measure: conduct a round of user testing based on your prototype, and use your hypothesis to test your assumptions
• Learn: analyze and deconstruct the feedback gathered before making the necessary improvements and taking the design to the next stage

…and keep repeating the process!

2. The core principles of Lean UX

Lean UX has 5 core principles:

Act as one team

Solve the right problem, design collaboratively.

• Exercise flexibility

De-emphasize deliverables

Let’s take a look at each of these principles in more detail.

The first key principle of Lean UX is acting as one team. This means going against the tradition of delegating tasks based on skill and keeping design teams separate, instead bringing together designers, product designers, engineers, and developers to work together. Having a diverse team with a multitude of backgrounds and disciplines in the mix means you’ll come up with more diverse and well-rounded solutions to the problems brought up by the user testing. It also helps to foster a shared understanding of the consumer and the issues facing you in the design process. As you can imagine, this is often easier said than done — but it’s well worth the initial getting used to.

The second core principle of Lean UX is solving the right problems over the wrong ones. Lean UX relies heavily on a loop of continuous learning facilitated by continuous feedback. By receiving this feedback, the team will be able to hone in and focus on solving the right problem with a deeper understanding of the issue at hand. By working in small increments, i.e. a weekly feedback session that informs a week of work, you’ll be able to focus on finding a solution without any large risk. If your solution isn’t working and you need to reframe the problem, this way you will have only wasted a week — rather than, say, 3 or 4 months.

The third and perhaps most important principle of Lean UX is collaboration. In the design world, there’s a growing step towards ‘many hats’ job specs and away from limiting yourself with specific and specialized design roles . This increasing demand for designers who can work across disciplines is paving the way towards a collaborative future — a future where Lean UX will thrive. One way to facilitate collaboration between teams is to have a shared whiteboard or painted white wall that allows anyone to add their ideas and thoughts to.

Be flexible

The penultimate core principle of Lean UX is flexibility. In traditional UX, you’re always working with a high level of uncertainty — but the traditional approach is to try and change that. This is a different story in Lean UX, where you should always assume (no matter how well it’s going) that the plan is going to change — and therefore you need to plan accordingly. For example, your second round of user testing might mean that your initial assumptions are proved wrong, and you have to go back to square one. This might go against some people’s instinct, and many may instead be tempted to make some minor changes and continue on as normal. But being flexible is critical to the Lean UX process.

The fifth and final core principle of Lean UX is a de-emphasis on designing for deliverables. Where traditional design favors upfront work, Lean UX focuses on adjusting your design process as you go along in order to become more agile compatible. That’s not to say that Lean UX is devoid of deliverables; rather, it asserts that you should work out what conversation needs to be had in order to move forward to the next step. In short, Lean UX places emphasis on conversations rather than deliverables in the design process.

Based on these 5 principles, you may have noticed that Lean UX actually overlaps with the design thinking process in a number of ways. The collaborative brainstorming approach to finding solutions (and then testing those solutions) is also a key part of the design thinking process, as is the attention to the customer. Also, building empathy is integral to Lean UX and is an essential part of the design thinking process. Lastly, paying close attention to the needs of the customer is a textbook design thinking component. It can even be said that Lean UX draws inspiration from the design process in a multitude of ways!

3. How does Lean UX differ from normal UX?

Where traditional UX places focus on detailed deliverables based on the user testing that was conducted at the start of the project, Lean UX focuses more on improving the product as you go along to ensure that the final outcome is the best that it can be. In Lean UX, you’re constantly asking what changes and improvements can be made in the here and now rather than waiting until you’ve got a finished product and then making necessary tweaks or improvements.

Finally, while traditional UX and Lean UX use largely the same principles when it comes to user testing, Lean UX tends to be a lot less meticulous and, in turn, a lot faster. Where traditional UX would spend months analyzing the feedback in extreme detail, Lean UX tends to cancel out the noise and look purely at the raw data in order to decipher what immediate changes need to be made. To boil it down, many think of Lean UX as being learning-oriented while thinking of traditional UX as being results-oriented.

4. What are the benefits of using Lean UX?

Without the privilege of expendable income for trial and error, Lean UX sits at the height of resourceful designing for startups. By allowing them to maximize output and minimize waste, design teams are able to pass through each design phase a lot quicker. On top of this is Lean UX’s collaborative nature, which builds synergy within the team and allows everyone to not only voice their concerns but to test them out.

There are also huge benefits of getting user feedback as early as possible. Getting an early insight into the usability of your product means better design decisions in the future. It also gives the designers a chance to experiment in the early stages without any huge repercussions — especially when it comes to the assumption and hypothesis method. This way, it’s easier to measure success and failure, and design accordingly. For designers, it’s a way of working smarter.

Overall, more and more designers are catching on to Lean UX as the design approach of the future. Hopefully, these benefits are robust enough to inspire you to ‘keep it lean’ in your own design approaches!

Further Reading

• What is Agile UX?
• How To Become A UX Designer
• What Are Design Sprints?
• What’s The Difference Between A Product Designer And A UX Designer?

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Lean UX: definition, process, and a detailed case study

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has spent the past 30 years making fun of inefficiency in business—including our efforts to reduce inefficiency.

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The truth is, it’s hard to get everyone on the same page in any organization, big or small. That’s why  Doodle , a Software as a Service (SaaS) company with just over 50 employees and 250 million active users, turned to Lean UX to improve its products in an efficient, evidence-based, customer-centric way. In other words,  Lean UX principles help Doodle’s product teams make the changes their customers want in a smart, efficient way, so they can grow faster and boost their bottom line .

I recently sat down with   Jack Berglund, Chief Product Officer at Doodle , to talk about his product development strategy. He was very transparent, so if you’re looking for a real-life example of how to use Lean UX for digital product design, you’ve come to the right place.

Table of contents

Lean ux case study: what is doodle and who is jack berglund, what is lean ux, 3 phases of lean ux: think, make, check, lean ux development process at doodle, lean ux: a simple roadmap to get started.

Doodle is an online tool that helps people schedule meetings more efficiently. It syncs with all the major calendaring systems (Google, Outlook, Apple’s iCal, etc.), and it lets users poll meeting invitees to find a time that works for everyone.

Founded in 2007, Doodle is headquartered in Zurich with offices in Berlin, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Belgrade. Today, more than 250 million people use Doodle each year, and it’s available in more than 25 languages.

As Doodle’s Chief Product Officer, Jack Berglund uses Lean UX to guide agile, cross-functional teams to develop products that customers love.

Does that sound a little too jargon-heavy? Don’t worry, I’ll unpack it all for you… and I promise it won’t sound so much like a Dilbert cartoon by the time we’re done.

Lean User Experience (UX) Design is a user-centered design process that embraces Lean and Agile development methodology to reduce waste and build products centered around the users. Lean user experience design relies on a collaborative approach and rapid experimentation/prototyping, to get user feedback by exposing a minimum viable product (MVP) to users as early as possible.

The Lean UX process grew out of earlier  process management  systems like  Lean Manufacturing , which has been used by major companies (such as Intel, Nike, Toyota, and Ford) to eliminate waste in production. Lean UX took principles that were originally designed for physical products and adapted them for software development.

LEAN UX TAKES ITS ROOTS IN LEAN MANUFACTURING, WHICH IS USED BY MAJOR COMPANIES ACROSS THE WORLD.

What makes software production different? For one thing, you don’t have to follow the old “measure twice, cut once” idea. Instead, your Agile product teams (which are composed of experts from different departments) can come up with ideas, test them out quickly, and revise them based on customer responses and usability.

As Jeff Gothelf puts it in  Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams , “You can measure once, cut once, measure once, cut once, measure once, cut once, forever.”  That’s the luxury that SaaS and e-commerce product design teams have. Since they work in a virtual space, they just don’t have the same physical restrictions to user experience design as Toyota or Nike.

How so? If you’re Toyota, you can’t try out five different steering wheels in one month to see which one  improves the customer experience . But if you’re Doodle, you can add a new checkbox to the 'Make a Poll' product, see if it gets any use, and tweak it accordingly.

Lean UX in action:  Doodle saw a 54% increase in the number of free trial signups by changing the language on their homepage to focus on business use-cases, which was a greater increase than expected.

In the Lean UX model, product teams are usually made up of members from different departments (e.g., engineers, product managers, UX designers). Each team works to improve a specific product by focusing on improving processes that cycle through three phases: Think, Make, and Check.

THE LEAN UX MODEL FOLLOWS A THREE-PHASE CYCLE: THINK, MAKE, AND CHECK.

Teams brainstorm possible areas for improvement based on  customer feedback , customer research, competitor comparisons, and observing their product in use. They develop a problem statement, then decide which areas they want to improve.

Designers and developers build a new feature that will (hopefully) solve a problem and/or improve the product.

Product teams test the new feature, using tools like  UX surveys  and  A/B testing , to figure out whether their hypothesis was correct. If customers respond well to the new feature, it becomes part of the new design. If it doesn’t improve the customer experience, they return to the Think phase and try something new.

The Doodle team uses Lean UX to anticipate their users’ needs. This design-thinking approach allows them to build cutting-edge products their customers will gladly pay for, and keeps them one step ahead of the competition.

They have five product teams, and each team is usually composed of at least one  product manager , one product designer, and a collection of engineers—possibly including data scientists or data engineers, as needed.

A TYPICAL PRODUCT TEAM AT DOODLE INCLUDES A PRODUCT MANAGER, A PRODUCT DESIGNER, A DATA SCIENTIST, AND MULTIPLE ENGINEERS.

The idea is to create a cross-functional team (meaning, teams from different departments) who come together to work on specific product improvements (such as Doodle’s 'MeetMe' product, Polls, etc.). Each team has a slightly different makeup depending on the product they manage.

Lean UX in action:  Doodle tested out a new calendar invite feature that put the agreed-upon meeting time in all attendees’ calendars, and 40% of their customers used the first version of this feature. This demonstrated how strong the demand was for the feature, and gave the team a clear sense of where to go next because there was already plenty of room for improvement on that initial version.

What does the lean UX process begin with? Here’s how Doodle approaches their Think, Make, Check phases:

Step 1: the thinking phase at Doodle

Doodle uses  Airtable  to maintain their 'idea bank,' which is a collection of all ideas submitted for improvement and, at the time we talked, contained 175 ideas.

DOODLE USES AIRTABLE TO COLLECT IDEAS AND PRIORITIZE THEM.

“We use the idea bank to capture all ideas, wherever they come from. Even if we think they're terrible ideas, we still write them down, and that serves two purposes. One, we want the person who made the suggestion to know that it's been captured and it's up for consideration. Two, we do this because what might not be a great idea now, for whatever reason, might become a great idea in the future.”

Of course, ideas don’t come out of thin air! The product teams at Doodle use the following tools to gather  qualitative research  from their customers and capture ideas for product improvement.

3 lean UX tools Doodle uses to find areas for improvement

Google Analytics : “Google Analytics is a good source for us in terms of user behavior within the product,” says Jack. Doodle uses Google Analytics for cohort analysis , which is all about breaking users down into groups (cohorts) and studying the behavior of each group. For example, Doodle can tell whether a user who connected through their Calendar Connect product is retained better than those who have not. They have their own data warehouse to complement this information.

Desk.com: Desk.com , a Salesforce product, allows Customer Success (CS) to tag different types of issues that arise. “For obvious bugs,” Jack says, “it’s a bit easier: if something isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, it’s pretty obvious that you need to fix it. Where it becomes more complicated is when you receive input, either from research or CS, that speaks to something that isn’t so black and white, like a feature we could add down the line. At that point, it goes from an engineering/problem-solving matter to a question of prioritizing and using your judgment,” he says. In the next section, I’ll talk about how Doodle prioritizes projects like these.

Hotjar : Doodle uses Hotjar Feedback to have users rate their level of satisfaction and describe their experience using website feedback . If the customers provide an email address, someone responds. “However,” Jack says, “even the anonymous feedback can be helpful.”

Doodle collects feedback from different types of users, segmenting the data according to each group. In particular, they want to know which product the respondents are using (e.g., MeetMe, Polls), whether they are the ones who created the poll or simply participated in it, and whether they’re using the paid version of the product.

DOODLE USES HOTJAR FEEDBACK TO COLLECT FEEDBACK FROM USERS AT SCALE AND IN CONTEXT.

Product managers and product designers read the replies and look for patterns, but at the moment they don’t have a formal system in place to review this data.

Where Doodle did take a more organized approach to Voice-of-the-Customer feedback was when they redesigned their website in 2017. This was a complete redesign, going from a late-90s style to something much more modern, and they used Hotjar Feedback to figure out what their users liked, disliked, and needed.

Categorizing projects according to goals

Once they submit ideas, Doodle’s project teams categorize each one based on the goals they want to achieve, and those goals are grouped into Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). OKRs, in short, describe big-picture objectives, such as “convert more users after the trial ends.” To learn more about organizing by OKRs, take a look at  this article   by   Jeff Gothelf  (the author of  Lean UX , mentioned above).

DOODLE USES OBJECTIVES AND KEY RESULTS (OKRS) TO MEASURE THEIR PROJECTS.

Doodle uses OKRs to identify their larger goals. Then they break their OKRs down by Objectives and Key Results, which identify the smaller goals that will hopefully help them achieve their Objectives. For example, the “convert more users after the trial period ends” Objective might be achieved by encouraging users to create more polls since Doodle’s research shows that users who create polls are more likely to convert.

Therefore, “get users to create a poll during the trial period” could become a Key Result, and that KR would fall under the “convert more users” Objective.

AN EXAMPLE OF AN OBJECTIVE (CONVERT MORE USERS) AND KEY RESULTS ATTACHED TO IT.

As the team captures more ideas, they tag them according to the appropriate OKR. Then, when they discuss plans for reaching those goals, they can use Airtable to filter the results, only showing those that relate to certain Objectives and Key Results.

Idea generation and problem-solving: a tale of two meetings

In the beginning, the product teams would brainstorm new ideas  and  discuss the progress they’d made on current projects at one meeting, but that got confusing.

These days, they have two separate meetings: one for brainstorming and generating new ideas (monthly), and the other. for discussing their progress on current projects (weekly).

“To get a balance there, we have two different versions of the same meeting. One is weekly, where we go through the stuff we're working on, making sure that it's progressing. And then there’s a separate meeting where we generate ideas and talk about what we want to do next.”

Step 2: the make phase at Doodle

In the make phase, a team of designers and developers builds a new feature to address previously highlighted problems and/or improve the product. But when ideas abound, as is likely to be the case, a crucial step is choosing  what  to build first.

How Doodle prioritizes projects

During the monthly meetings, whoever owns or champions an idea gives a 60-second talk about the idea, the data related to it, and how they might approach it as an improvement project. After the team reviews all new ideas they take a vote, pick the two or three most promising ideas, set deliverables, and really dive into them. The best ideas get added to the list of active projects.

The ICE framework

Doodle uses a system called ICE, designed by Sean Ellis. ICE stands for Impact, Certainty, and Effort, and potential projects are evaluated on these qualities. Here’s what the ideal project would look like in the ICE model:

Impact (on User Experience) : High

Certainty (whether it will work) : High

Effort (what it would take to make the change and test it) : Low

Of course, most projects aren’t so straightforward.  Jack says, “There are ones where you say, ‘Look, the effort is significant. We think the impact is high, but we're not completely sure.’ In that case, before we spend that full effort, we see if there’s something simpler we can work on.”

Jack stressed that they don’t take anything for granted when they assess certainty. If the idea’s champion thinks it’s a great project to work on, that counts for .01 on a certainty scale of 0 to 10. If the stakeholders love the idea and think it’s brilliant, that might bump you up another 0.1, but you’re still a long way from a 1, much less a 10.

THE DOODLE TEAM PRIORITIZES IDEAS USING THE ICE FRAMEWORK.

“What I really like about this approach,” he concludes, “is that it pushes us to do the necessary things to validate our ideas.” Whether it’s asking very specific questions to customers, bringing out specific data, or doing more A/B tests (see below), this framework allows Jack and his teams to save a lot of time down the line and make sure that all the work they are doing counts. That said, the ICE model isn’t a rigid scoring system. It’s a simple tool that gives you a rough idea of what to prioritize.

Curious to see how Hotjar prioritizes projects? Check out  Mastering the art of prioritization: how Hotjar decides what to work on next .

Step 3: the check phase at Doodle

Lean UX doesn’t rely on gut feel to decide whether a change has been successful, and neither does Jack Berglund. The teams at Doodle test their changes to see how users respond and later refine their approach accordingly.

If you have a lot of traffic to your website,  A/B tests (or split tests)  are a great way to validate your hypotheses scientifically and determine if the changes you made are working. Once you’ve got that result, you can go ahead and implement the changes confidently.

“We have a good amount of traffic, so we can do a lot of A/B testing. And if we're smart about the tests we run, we can save ourselves a lot of time by not implementing things that are basically low confidence,” says Jack.

Example #1: An 800% increase in the use of a feature

Sometimes the results can be surprising—like, “an eight-fold increase in feature use” surprising. When users create a poll, which they send to meeting invitees to determine which date works best for everyone, they can add a “Yes, if need be” option. This allows invitees to select their preferred date (the green checkmark) along with any dates that are less-than-ideal but would still work (the yellow checkmark).

Originally, this was an advanced option, meaning that it didn’t pop up in the 'Make a Poll' wizard that the average user sees. The product team assumed most users wouldn’t be interested in that feature, but they questioned their assumptions and tested it out by adding it to the wizard as a checkbox.

The result? They saw an 800% increase in the use of that feature. Who knew?

Example #2: The fake door that got them nowhere

Jack shared this with me as a cautionary tale—the story of a time they set out to study a problem with A/B testing but ended up studying the wrong thing. They didn’t get the information they needed to move to the next steps, but they learned a valuable lesson.

Doodle wanted to see whether having a 'Poll Deadline' button, which allowed poll creators to set a deadline for respondents to reply, would get any traction. They set up a  fake door , which is a button that offers a feature that isn’t actually available, so the UX team can see whether people will use it before spending the time and money to develop it. When users click on a fake door, they receive a message telling them: “Sorry! This feature is not yet available.”

Doodle showed the fake door to a portion of their users, and people clicked, but the team soon realized they had no way of knowing  how  useful the feature would be to their clients. Sure, they got plenty of clicks… but was the button valuable enough to influence buying behavior? Would it increase conversions? They couldn't tell from this A/B test.

To answer that question, Doodle went back to the drawing board. They’re currently planning to run a test that measures how likely this feature is to influence a user’s decision to start a free trial, which is a more complicated and business-focused question than whether or not a user will click.

“The core lesson is that we need to measure behavior change that demonstrates real value to the user.”

By designing smart, strategic A/B tests that answer basic questions about buying behavior, the teams at Doodle can prioritize their tasks and focus on those that offer a greater return.

Starbucks tests

It’s not always practical to do A/B testing, even when you have a ton of traffic, because sometimes you need to move quickly to see if an idea is worth looking into at all. You can always do more structured testing later if an idea shows promise after ‘guerilla testing’ it (an idea that Jeff Gothelf introduces in  Lean UX ).

Guerilla tests are ‘quick and dirty’ user tests that give you a sense of how your ideal users  might  respond. Much like focus groups, which advertising agencies have been using for more than 70 years, guerilla testing gives you quick feedback when you need it.

Since Doodle has 250 million users (that’s the population of Indonesia, by the way), and since many of these users are similar to people the Doodle team members rub shoulders with at their local Starbucks, they like to use Starbucks for guerilla testing new features. They go down to the Starbucks near their office and offer people a voucher for a free cup of coffee to test out new features.

“If you ever want to try to get a Starbucks voucher for a free cup of coffee, just hang out at the Starbucks near the Doodle office in Zurich. You never know!”

Starbucks testing is just one form of anecdotal feedback they use. Doodle also goes to customers, employees (including marketers), and product management stakeholders to get their input.

The guerrilla testing approach of Lean UX works better for SaaS and eCommerce than it does for companies that build physical products because, again, you can make changes quickly and reverse them if they don’t work. And in many ways, that points to the basic difference between Lean Manufacturing and Lean UX.

Lean UX is all about agility, experimentation, testing, and reassessing in a continuous cycle. It has allowed companies like Doodle to scale to 250 million active users—and it’s helped them thrive in a competitive market.

Lean UX in Action:  Doodle had the 'Settings' page automatically appear as the third step in their poll creation wizard, which increased the number of free trial signups by 25%, boosted the use of their 'Ask Attendees for Contact Information' option by 300%, and increased the use of the 'Hidden Polls' feature (which allows the creator to keep poll results hidden) by 400%.

If you were inspired by Jack's story or simply want to give Lean UX a try in your own business, here is a simple 3-step roadmap to get started:

Step 1: think phase

Gather customer feedback using tools like Feedback from Hotjar and reviewing insights from your Customer Success or sales team.

Process this info in an idea bank using a simple spreadsheet or a tool like Airtable.

Step 2: make phase

3.  Set up a meeting to prioritize projects according to their Impact, Certainty, and Effort  (keeping in mind that certainty is determined by facts, not stakeholder opinions).

Step 3: check phase

4.  Use guerilla testing  to get quick feedback where appropriate.

5.  Use A/B testing , if your traffic is large enough, to get scientifically valid results.

FAQs about lean UX

What is agile and lean ux.

Agile and lean UX involves applying the principles of these methodologies to the sphere of UX. Agile and lean both focus on creating quick iterations of products and features, testing them with users, and creating a tight feedback loop between users and product teams as they iterate in the future.

What are the benefits of lean UX?

Applying the lean methodology to UX creates a user-centered approach that forces product teams to rapidly generate and test ideas in the real-world to find what works. This prototyping model speeds up the  UX design  process, minimizes waste, and grounds it in the perspectives and experiences of real users.

What is an example of lean UX?

Online scheduling tool Doodle uses the lean UX approach to generate a backlog of ideas for new features or improvements. It then prioritizes the ideas that are estimated to have the most impact, and then conducts sprints where product & design teams create iterations that are A/B tested with users. During these prototyping tests, the product team observes how users interact with the new features and determines which ones they actually use and find helpful. They then repeat this process indefinitely to continuously improve the product.

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Consumers have more than their fair share of vendors to choose from when shopping online. When attention is split between different brands and devices, ensuring your online presence stands out from the crowd hinges on first impressions. 

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Lean UX 101: what you need to know

Last updated

27 April 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Enter Lean UX.

Lean UX is a collaborative approach to design that values iteration over planning and roadmaps. Instead of focusing on requirements, research, and contemplation, Lean UX seeks to solve problems – it minimizes development time through low-fidelity prototyping .

Let's take a closer look at what Lean UX is all about and why it conquered the world of design without making an effort.  

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• What is Lean UX?

Lean UX essentially alters the structure of the workflow. Rather than a heavy, up-front, time-consuming, and sometimes roadmap-producing planning phase, the team is tasked with solving the data they have in the leanest way possible. Once the barebones first iteration is released, data collected from that iteration is used to produce the next, and so on. 

Conversely, the agile design methodology simply breaks down design requirements into phases that match the agile sprints the team needs to follow. With Lean UX methodology, teams save time, money, and resources while allowing the product design team to produce highly efficient results.

When using the Lean UX design methodology, designers assume that the initial product prototype requires improvement. Accordingly, they create a minimum viable product and dive into the design process to find solutions that turn the initial design into a robust result.

During the development process, designers source feedback, brainstorm, apply changes, evaluate errors, and streamline their approach. By gaining immediate feedback from users and team members, designers spend less time in the initial stages and instead iterate rapidly based on incoming results.

Overall, Lean UX is an incremental design process that focuses on minimizing wasted time and resources. Today, product teams rely on Lean UX to provide faster and more efficient results while supporting the rest of the development processes .

• How the Lean UX process works

The Lean UX process consists of several parts. It's imperative to understand and accept that, unlike traditional UX design, Lean UX is based on assumptions. While this may sound weak at first, these assumptions speed up the process while adding precision to the design.

Phase 1: Think

The first part of Lean UX is thinking and brainstorming . Instead of diving into complex research, designers begin with assumptions. 

At this stage, the design team arranges several brainstorming sessions to help them understand what they know or think they know. The team gathers assumptions about the product's user, its applications, the most important features, top functions, and more.

These assumptions are important because they generate new knowledge. Later, this knowledge turns into a hypothesis (or several of them), which in turn requires testing.

A hypothesis may look like this:

"We think that our weather application users need the option to see the weather in several locations simultaneously. Giving app users this option can increase the number of downloads and provide extra space for paid ads. We can prove this by measuring the increase in the paid ad revenue over two months (currently, monthly revenue is $1,000).

The key to providing a high-quality hypothesis is measurability. You need a straightforward metric that can help you evaluate the results in the future. Otherwise, you can't figure out if the hypothesis is viable.

Phase 2: Make

The key to Lean UX is starting the creation process as early as possible. At this stage, you create a minimum viable product (MVP). This is the minimum you require to begin getting feedback from the audience. Once the feedback starts coming in, you can make adjustments and streamline the product until it becomes highly viable and perfectly suits the users' needs.

An example of an MVP is a new landing page for a product you’re planning to build. This can help you evaluate the customers' interest and start gaining feedback. Returning to the example in Phase 1, an MVP could be a prototype of the new app feature that has the option to add another location to the interface.  

Once you release an MVP, your next iteration should also be just the minimum of the next phase’s additions or adjustments to check its corresponding metric.

The main features of an MVP are speed, simplicity, and the ability to check your hypothesis or metric. Anything you can build quickly to get you to the next stage works.

Phase 3: Check

Once you have an MVP ready, you can proceed to test it. During this phase, you source feedback about the MVP from users to see how well it fits your initial hypothesis. You can do this by evaluating the metrics you defined in Phase 1. You can use a/b testing, PPC analytics, and other methods.

Based on the information you gather, you have to go back to the first phase and make adjustments, for example:

Change the hypothesis completely since it doesn't yield the desired results

Adjust the hypothesis according to the new findings

While it may seem that these phases take place in perfect order, it couldn't be further from the truth. The Lean UX process is a cycle. These phases keep going around and stimulating product improvements continuously. As one phase of the cycle ends, the new one starts and brings more benefits to the design picture.

• Key principles of Lean UX

At first glance, it may seem that Lean UX is an easy way out. In reality, it can be highly efficient due to its user-based approach. 

To make sure Lean UX works for you, you must keep its key principles in mind:

Data-backed. Instead of doing robust research (there’s nothing wrong with research), you leverage direct observations of what users need from typical user tests and in-app data or short surveys that are embedded into the released feature.

Cross-functional teams. Lean UX involves continuous collaboration between team members, most commonly including product managers , data scientists, product designers , and software engineers. This essentially takes the typical team structures based on roles and instead breaks teams down into what feature or product they’re building.

Continuous brainstorming. What Lean UX lacks in initial research, it makes up with in-app data and continuous brainstorming. During each stage, team members come up with ideas to streamline the hypothesis, solution, and experience. A/B testing can often replace user testing .

Problem-solving. Lean UX is a never-ending problem-solving process. New solutions raise new questions. Eventually, the cycle produces dynamic, high-quality products effectively and organically designed by users.

Fast iteration. During the Lean UX design process, you can implement hypotheses to validate or invalidate them. This can be done on a phased approach (alpha, beta, full release) or through A/B testing. They're monitored specifically to meet a metric and only released further if they meet it. This prevents errors from turning into costly mistakes and downtime.

One of the pillars of Lean UX is permission to fail. When you implement this approach, you shouldn't be afraid of failing. The initial hypothesis often turns out to be flawed and requires adjustments.

The structure of Lean UX methodology allows for these failures because it saves a lot of time on other UX elements. You gain an opportunity to fall and pick yourself up repeatedly without losing time, money, or resources.

• Benefits of Lean UX

Lean UX is an efficient methodology that comes with a variety of benefits, including:

Cost-efficiency

When you calculate the expected cost of a product development project, you understand the importance of all cost-cutting opportunities. Using Lean UX is one of them. By implementing Lean UX, you’re reducing waste and financial risks to the project.

If something goes wrong during the project, the agile method fixes it in the process. Eventually, you get a viable product without wasting time and money on failed versions.

Better collaboration

Lean UX depends on high-quality collaboration. Since Lean UX teams are mostly cross-functional, this approach improves collaboration in the workplace. This, in turn, contributes to faster work, higher employee satisfaction, and better productivity.

By implementing Lean UX, you’re investing in teamwork quality, bringing team members closer together and allowing them to create higher-quality solutions. Teams streamline communications and coordination while honing engagement and prioritizing collaborative teamwork.  

Time-saving

Traditional UX design consists of many elements that don't always contribute to the final result. The Lean UX approach eliminates all the waste and allows team members to focus on essential parts of product development. This cuts the design and development time substantially.

Even though the Lean UX approach is cyclical, it manages to be more time-effective than traditional linear methodologies. The think-make-check formula streamlines collaboration and speeds up the design.

Improved outcomes

The principles of Lean UX design allow teams to come up with better product outcomes. The user-centered approach that leverages user feedback improves final product quality and ensures client satisfaction .

When implementing traditional UX methods , designers often don't know whether the consumer will find the new feature or function useful. Once the user gets their hands on the product, designers may learn they need to redo the entire solution.

With Lean UX, continuous feedback and frequent opportunities for adjustments make it easy to achieve user satisfaction.  

User learning

The close collaboration between developers, designers, and users allows you to learn more about customers' needs and preferences.

Besides being highly useful for fast and effective product development, this collaboration generates valuable data that you can use for different needs in the future.

The information you gather while using Lean UX methodology can help you generate ideas and hypotheses for your next project.

• Traditional UX vs Lean UX

While Lean UX is highly effective, many product developers still use the traditional UX approach. The key differences between these two methodologies are:

Traditional UX is result-oriented

Lean UX is process-oriented

With traditional UX, you invest time, money, and resources into creating a viable design. You don’t develop on anything that you haven’t researched thoroughly. Lean UX, however, uses the development process in the research efforts by developing on much smaller phases, essentially using the releases as the testing ground itself.

With Lean UX, you create an MVP and use the continuously-flowing feedback to improve the product and come up with the final result quickly.

While Lean UX may seem a much better option than traditional UX, it's not always the best solution. The design methodology you choose depends on the project. In many cases, making reasonable assumptions and getting continuous feedback from users at the MVP stage is simply impossible. Other times, you may not have a team to support people from every role for every feature of your digital product or service.

Lean UX is popular among startups and small businesses that don't have large development budgets but need to get products out as soon as possible. 

Larger companies with solid financing can invest time and money for each feature to have its own ‘lean UX team’ to go through the cycle. If small businesses have a lot to lose, they may be more likely to invest in more traditional UX studies. It depends on what’s at stake, who’s on the team, and what makes sense to leverage.

• Leveraging Lean UX for new product development

Lean UX is an excellent design methodology that saves companies time, money, and effort. It leverages user feedback and cross-functional teams to come up with a viable product faster.

While it can be an excellent approach to product development, Lean UX isn't applicable to all projects. It works best in tandem with the agile product development methodology. However, in some cases, traditional UX may be a better option.

Lean UX is a methodology of choice for companies structured around it. Companies without the agile methodology in place, where business requirements become a hindrance or access to feedback is limited, may benefit more from traditional UX methods.

What is the lifecycle of Lean UX?

The lifecycle of Lean UX consists of three phases: think, make, and check. First, designers come up with a hypothesis based on the assumption about the user's needs. Then they make a minimum viable product and start testing it. Finally, they make changes based on the feedback received during the testing phase.

What is the goal of Lean UX?

Lean UX’s goal is to create a high-quality product while reducing waste and saving money. This design methodology works well with the agile product development approach.

Is Lean UX a framework?

Lean UX is a user experience design methodology that implements and develops hypotheses straight into the product rather than validating them beforehand with user testing and more traditional UX methods.

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Lean UX: A Hypothesis-Based Design Approach

• Paul Osborne
• Business ,  UI / UX ,  Web Development
• 13 Comments

Lean UX is an unbelievably valuable system when chipping away at tasks where the Agile improvement technique is utilized.

Customary UX strategies frequently don't work when improvement is directed in quick blasts — there's insufficient time to convey UX similarly. Essentially Lean UX and different types of UX all have a similar objective as a primary concern; conveying an extraordinary client experience, it's simply that the manner in which you take a shot at an undertaking is unique. So we should investigate how that may function. Lean UX is centred on the experience understructure and is less centred on expectations than customary UX. It requires a more noteworthy degree of a coordinated effort with the whole group. The center goal is to concentrate on acquiring input as right on time as could be allowed with the goal that it very well may be utilized to settle on brisk choices. The idea of agile improvement is to work in fast, iterative cycles and Lean UX emulates these cycles to guarantee that information created can be utilized in every emphasis.

Top Reasons for using Lean UX

Planners have numerous procedures to browse when making items. However, how about we pause for a minute to comprehend why you should utilize the Lean UX system in your plan procedure.

Cost Saving

You set aside cash by embracing a Lean system. Rather than squandering 3 months of your life taking a shot at an item no one needs, test your theory. Approve each choice before anybody starts working. Laura Klein, the writer of Build Better Products, makes reference to the organization Webvan in her book. They burned through $400 million on a mechanized stockroom framework just to find that individuals weren't prepared to do their shopping for food on the web yet. Think about constantly and cash squandered.

Time Saving!

Notwithstanding cutting your financial limit, Lean UX is likewise a help. Lean is cooperative in nature and foregoes overwhelming documentation. This implies not any more extensive archives or perpetual back and forth with engineers. Lean UX centers around speedy and fast arrangements rather than many long stretches of advancement on a completely structured component. Lean is iterative. Research and configuration move rapidly and don't expect a very long time to be conveyed to a building. Item proprietors, creators and designers are altogether engaged with the Lean UX process. Everybody has responsibility for they produce, making everything go a lot faster than a conventional plan improvement process.

User-Centric

There is a great deal of cover with User-Centered Design (UCD) and Lean UX. UCD is iterative like Lean and are the two procedures which spotlight on the client and their needs at each period of the structure procedure. UCD likewise includes the client in the plan procedure, similarly as Lean UX does.

Data-Driven Capability

You can have suspicions in Lean UX, yet those presumptions will be put under serious scrutiny utilizing research. Rather than making surmises about potential new highlights or structures, Lean UX depends on information to educate any choices. This counteracts aggravating something accidentally.

Need for Assumptions in Lean UX

In ordinary UX, the endeavour depends on essentials catch and desires. The objective is to ensure that desires are as ordered as would be judicious and respond enough to the necessities that are set down close to the start of the endeavour. Lean UX is, to some degree, remarkable. You aren't based on point by point, desires. You are planning to make changes that improve the thing right here and now — essentially to shape the outcome to improve things. Assumption : An assumption that is essentially a declaration of something that we accept is legitimate. They are expected to make ordinary understanding around an idea that engages everyone to start. It is totally grasped that assumptions may not be correct and may be changed during the endeavour as a predominant perception makes inside the gathering. Assumptions are normally created on a workshop premise. You get the gathering together and express the issue and after that empower the gathering to conceptualize their considerations for handling the issue. In the process, you make answers to explicit request that structure your assumptions.

Making a Hypothesis in Lean UX

The theories made in Lean UX are intended to test our presumptions. There's an essential organization that you can use to make your very own speculations, rapidly and effectively. We express the conviction and why it is significant and who it is essential to. At that point, we pursue that with what we hope to accomplish. At long last, we figure out what proof we would need to gather to demonstrate that our conviction was valid. In the event that we find that there's no real way to demonstrate our speculation — we might head off course on the grounds that our results are not obviously characterized. One of the enormous points of interest of working like this is it evacuates a great part of the "I don't feel that is a smart thought" and political infighting from the UX configuration process. Each thought will be tried and the proof criteria unmistakably decided. No proof? At that point, it's an excellent opportunity to drop the thought and take a stab at something different. In the event that everybody can comprehend theory and the desires from it, they will, in general, be glad to hold on to check whether it's actually as opposed to energetically discussing their own emotional perspective.

The Minimum Viable Product and Lean UX

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a central idea in Lean UX. The thought is to fabricate the most fundamental variant of the idea as could reasonably be expected, test it and if there are no important outcomes to relinquish it. The MVPs which show guarantee would then be able to be consolidated into the further structure and improvement rounds without an excessive amount of problem. This is an extraordinary method for amplifying your assets and one reason that it works so well with Agile improvement — it takes into consideration a ton of experimentation with no "untouchable relics".

User Research and Testing in Lean UX

Client research and testing, by the very idea of Lean UX, depend on indistinguishable standards from utilized in conventional UX situations. Be that as it may, the methodology will, in general, be "no fuss" — results should be conveyed before the following Agile Sprint begins; so there's significantly less center around substantial, carefully record yields and more spotlight on crude information. Duties regarding research likewise will, in general, be spread all the more broadly over the entire group so that there's no "bottleneck" made by having a solitary UX structure asset attempting to complete the entire occupation in tight timescales without anyone else's input. This frequently gets improvement assets to do "hands-on" UX work and expands the degree of comprehension and backing for UX work inside the advancement group as well.

Lean UX can be incredible for the groups with little assets and can likewise be advantageous for the groups which need to amplify their yield and diminish squanders. It goes inseparably with Agile advancement structure, therefore making it smooth to adjust in the present framework.

Posted by Paul Osborne

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Lean UX: A Guide to Improve User Experience and Productivity

Lean UX can benefit design teams, helping them create better and more user‑focused products. Learn more about this approach here.

User experience (UX) has become one of the hottest buzzwords in product and software design. Instead of guessing what the user wants and making a product from those guesses or gut feelings, businesses are involving the user as part of the design process. This approach is completely different from traditional design and manufacturing. It prioritizes subjective feedback on your solution to meet users' needs.

Companies in every industry are looking for ways to involve the customer in the design process in order to make exactly what they want and need. This puts the user at the center of every design, allowing companies to develop every product for users.

While tracking UX after products are purchased is part of a normal feedback process, looking for feedback as the design is being made is an exciting new development. The ability of a design team to adjust plans as they receive user suggestions takes flexibility and ingenuity. Designers need to ask the right questions and listen carefully to the answers in order to make the best changes for a product.

Adding an additional element to this process is Lean UX. Lean UX relies on gaining a new perspective as designs progress. It introduces a methodology to product development that learns from continued iteration and validation. It speeds up the process of incorporating UX, which lowers costs for production. Let's look into Lean UX, including what it is and how it works to improve productivity and UX.

Understanding Lean UX

What is the definition of Lean UX? Lean UX is a methodology used in design to gain a better understanding of what users want and need. It's a way to receive validation of the hypotheses that a design is based on. Lean UX is the guide for how a design is made.

Instead of starting with a plan and adding features, the designers create a hypothesis and then look for validation from UX that can be measured. This process informs the design team that they're fulfilling a real need users have. There's no guesswork involved.

Using hypotheses and validation to guide the design process means that you'll create a product that people actually want. Lean UX doesn't ask designers to immediately jump in with a design. Instead, it uses a gradual process that gives designers room to continue making changes as validation is received.

Lean UX principles

What are the principles of designing using Lean UX?

The Lean UX methodology includes:

• Requires cross-functional collaboration instead of working in silos
• Prioritizes finding solutions and solving problems
• Reduces waste by using a minimum viable product (MVP) to accelerate progress
• Creates builds quickly and early in the pathway
• Allows designers to fail by encouraging experimentation
• Invests minimal amounts of resources into each design, saving money in the long run

How does the Lean UX process work?

The Lean UX process has 3 phases:

Designers use a cycle of these 3 phases and repeat it as they work on the design.

The Think phase starts with brainstorming assumptions about the problem you're trying to solve with your product. The team gathers assumptions about the following:

• Who are the users
• When your product is used
• What is your product used for
• Which features and functions are most important

From your gathered assumptions, you can put together a hypothesis.

When you write your hypothesis, there needs to be a measurable goal to test it. You can't determine validity if there's nothing to be measured.

After you complete the Think phase, the next phase is Make. This phase focuses on building a minimum viable product (MVP) early in the process. The MVP is very simple; it's a basic version of the product made primarily to test a hypothesis and get feedback from users.

How you design the MVP depends on what your hypothesis is and what you're testing for. This is true whether your product is something tangible or a service or software product. Your MVP or prototype is built solely for testing. For example, this can be a basic website landing page.

Phase 3 is Check. This is the phase where you test your MVP. During this stage, users will test your MVP and give you feedback that will either confirm your hypothesis or reject it. The main concept is testing for specifics and gathering the results. This can be done in a number of ways depending on the type of product you're evaluating- website analytics, A/B testing, testing usability, and so forth.

When you review the results of the Check phase, you start the cycle again at the Think phase. It may be that you have proven your hypothesis and can add to it. Or maybe you'll have to start from scratch because your hypothesis was invalidated. As you go back to Think, you can begin to gather ideas to form the next hypothesis.

Lean UX vs. traditional UX

What are the differences between Lean UX and traditional UX?

With the traditional UX design process, designers spend time upfront to learn more about their target users through in-depth research. The focus is on figuring out product features and requirements long before they get to the design stage. This research is comprehensive, and the goal is to meet the needs of users once the product is built with UX design tools .

When using Lean UX, your goal is different. You're not trying to get it all right at the beginning. Instead of making a large investment in money and time, you build an MVP early on. Doing so begins the cycle of continuous feedback, allowing the product to be refined through iteration. Each version of the product design continues the feedback loop to improve the product.

Lean UX offers more collaboration than traditional UX. With Lean UX, your design cycles are short with a myriad of back-and-forth conversations from all participants, including designers, developers, users, and product managers. This keeps information and creative thinking flowing throughout the process.

Traditional UX has collaboration and user research but has less feedback, idea sharing, and testing than Lean UX. Traditional UX features a longer-term research phase, with more documentation before the design stage. Lean UX works on building the MVP early in the process, seeking user feedback, then cycling through the three-phase process repeatedly to make small improvements to the design as you go.

Benefits of using Lean UX

There are several benefits to using Lean UX, including:

Cost-effectiveness

The primary reason businesses implement Lean UX design is to save money. At each stage of the design process, only a little time and money is spent. Therefore, it's fine to spend months on a design and find out it's a failure.

Instead, the design team stays focused on the important issues, and decisions can be validated throughout. This gives the design team a solid foundation for building the product. You know your product will be a success because it's already been tested.

Time-saving

Not only does Lean UX save money, but it also saves time. There's no need for reams of documentation. Instead, since it's collaborative, everyone important is involved in the design cycle. This reduces a lot of back-and-forth interaction between UX designers and developers. Less time is wasted.

The basic idea is to use quick solutions rather than numerous hours developing a new feature.

Consumer-focused

While there's some overlap, Lean UX design focuses on the user's needs and wants throughout the process. Oftentimes, feedback from users involves the law of proximity to make design features easier to use.

Data-driven

Even though the Think phase creates assumptions and is where you start, the process is data-driven. Each idea is tested thoroughly and data is compiled from users testing the MVP. It's the data that designers receive that then informs the next phase of the cycle.

Limitations of Lean UX design

There are some limitations to using the Lean UX methodology. Drawbacks to consider include the following:

• Too many assumptions are made about who will use your product.
• There’s a lack of empathy because there isn't a deep dive into users at the beginning of the process.
• Less research is done on users.
• A lack of continuity can occur if a user's needs aren't considered for future releases.

Should you use the Lean UX methodology?

Using the Lean UX methodology depends on whether your design team can adapt their process. There needs to be excellent communication between everyone involved. Communication is the key factor required to make Lean UX run smoothly.

If you're considering Lean UX for a large or enterprise-size business, creating smaller teams to work within this framework is best practice. It's a good idea to start small, whether you're working on a professional website or building innovative products.

Improving your design process with Lean UX

The Lean UX approach can improve the design process for many types of companies. Your design team will have to determine if this is a framework they can adopt. Otherwise, they may have to stick to traditional UX. No matter the type of UX you use at your business, it’s important for your team to communicate effectively and understand the needs of users.

With Mailchimp’s marketing tools, you can provide UX designers with user data to set them up for success.

Jeff Gothelf

How to use the Lean UX Canvas

Josh Seiden and I just finished the manuscript for the 3rd edition of the Lean UX book . It’s hard to believe it’s been 8 years since the first edition was published and nearly 10 years since we started writing it. The new edition of the book uses the Lean UX Canvas as the backbone of the book so I thought it would make sense to do a quick video that goes through what we expect to see in each box on the canvas.

In addition, Josh and I have been working on self-paced Lean UX video course . That should be out shortly as well and also uses the canvas as it’s table of contents. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Have you tried using the canvas? What’s worked well for you? Did you learn anything in the video that conflicts with how you’ve been using it? Drop a note in the comments

Hey folks. Lean UX Canvas has been out for a few years now but Josh Seiden and I just finished rewriting the Lean UX book. In fact, for the third time. The third edition of the Lean UX book is coming out soon and it’s organized around the Lean UX Canvas. The backbone of the book is the Lean UX Canvas. On top of that, we’re working on a self-paced video Lean UX class. Again, that’s structured around the Lean UX Canvas. I thought I’d take just a couple of minutes and walk through what we expect to see in each one of these boxes because this is a question that comes up over and over again even after people have taken classes with us. Let’s take a look at each box very quickly and then let’s get a sense of what we expect to see in each box.

We’ll start off with the business problem statement. That’s box number 1. What we’re expecting to see is a statement that really frames the work for the team. It frames the work so that it encourages discovery. Things we’re looking for here include what is the current state of the system, the product that we’re working on? Why did we design it in the first place? Why isn’t it meeting expectations at the moment? That’s the problem that we’re trying to solve. Then the final piece in here is if we solve it, how we will we know? In other words, what customer behavior or metric shift will we see? Those are the kinds of things that expect to see here in the business problem statement area of the canvas. If you framework this way, you don’t tell the team what to do, they have to go figure out. They have to do product discovery. They have to do Lean UX. There’s no solutions in here. 

Once we’ve got the statement in there, we can move over to box number 2. Box number 2, what we’re really focusing on are customer behaviors. Business outcomes are just regular old outcomes. You could call them key results. Most importantly, you should call them measurable changes in human behavior. These are the measures of success. If you think about it, they’re leading indicators of the metrics that we put in the business problems statements. These could be things like retention, usage, kind of all the pirate metrics, if you will. Acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral. These are all the kinds of expressions that we’d see here. There have to be numbers here. They should be ratios or rates assuming you have a baseline. If you don’t have a baseline, then an absolute number works but ultimately you want to ratio or rates because they tell you how you’re trending. This could be things like 50% increase in return visits. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re looking for here. Once we’ve decided what the behavior changes are that we want to see, the next conversation we want to have is about which users. Whose behavior we actually want to change. 

There’s a couple of different ways to start this exercise. Most importantly, the first thing that you need to do is make a list of all the different persona types. Often when we teach this, we teach the proto persona exercise which is just an exercise in shared understanding. The first thing you want to do is make a list of all the different persona types. Who are all the different people who might be users in your system? Just make a list of it. It could be customers, perspective customers, vendors or clients. If you’re building internally facing products, it could be engineers, product managers, or designers. Then we want to identify one of them. Pick one from that list and really think about three things. You want to give it a name and a sketch. Just something that gives you something to wrap around it. We want to look at the behavioral, demographic, psychographic characteristics that would impact usage of your product. Things that would go in the top right of your proto persona would be things like level of education, disposable income, age if it makes a difference in how they use your product, gender, only if it makes a difference in how they use your product, do they have a family or not have a family, if it makes a difference. You really have to think about the things that would impact their use of your product. Tech savviness is another big one. 

Then in the bottom third of the proto persona, this is where the meat is, is needs and obstacles. We’re looking to define this particular user with the needs and obstacles. What do they need? What’s getting in their way? If you’re familiar with the Value Proposition Canvas, this is like pains and gains. Remember, your users don’t need features. They need to achieve some kind of a goal. I need to never miss a meeting. I don’t need calendar integration. That’s what we’re talking about here. 

We’ve defined our problem. We’ve defined our success criteria. We’ve got a sense of whose behavior we actually want to change. Now let’s talk about user outcomes and benefits. This is always a squishy one but this is really the reasons why your target audience would go looking for your product or service. What benefit do they get? What goal do they achieve? Is there a status they reach because of this? This is things like I get to spend more time with my family. I get to look good to my boss. I get to get home for my kids’ soccer game. I make fewer mistakes at work. I’m more efficient. I save money. These are the kinds of benefits that you want to talk about because when you write your hypothesis statements, this is really the piece that appeals to your target audience. This is where you go and mine for calls to action on your landing page. “Get home every day for your kids’ soccer game by downloading this product which will help you achieve some kind of efficiency.” That’s the kind of stuff that goes in here. It’s emotional end states or goals for your target audience. That’s what goes in box 4. 

In box 5, we’re talking about solutions. This is the stuff that we make. We’re talking about output here, features, solutions. This could be initiatives if you’re launching a new program. Program is a good one. Policy. Anything that you make for the people that you serve, we want to brainstorm as many of these ideas as we can. Get creative here. This is your opportunity to really get some of these ideas out that you’ve been sitting on for a while.

It’s amazing that at this point, we’re declaring assumptions as we work through the canvas. We’ve got all the pieces now that we need to write our hypothesis statement. The hypothesis statement is written right here in box number 6 in the canvas. It says, “We believe that this business outcome will be achieved if this user attains this benefit with this feature.” Not coincidentally, every one of those variables, in brackets, lines up to box 2, box 3, box 4, and box 5. What we’ve seen teams do, that works particularly well, is we’ve actually seen them move items from those boxes. You have box 2, the business outcomes. Box 3 is the users box. Box 4 is the user outcome or benefit. Box 5 is the solution. What we’re trying to do here is write a story. You’re telling a story when you’re aligning these things up. You often see teams do stuff like this to find combinations of the assumptions from these other boxes that make a hypothesis that actually makes sense. That’s ultimately the goal. What you’re doing here, with hypothesis writing, is you’re telling a story. Completing a hypothesis statement is your first attempt at telling a compelling story. You must believe your hypothesis. If you don’t, you’re never going to convince anybody else that this is something that you should be working on. As you’re aligning your assumptions throughout the canvas, you’re putting together these statements that say, “We believe that we will achieve this outcome for this user because it will help them achieve this benefit with this solution.” You have to believe that statement. If you don’t believe that statement, you’re never going to convince anybody else. That’s what goes in box number 6. 

Before we go to box number 7, we have to choose which hypothesis we’re going to proceed with first. You’re going to write multiple hypotheses based on all of the assumptions you’ve declared in the canvas. One thing you want to do is prioritize your hypotheses. We put together this canvas called Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas. The idea here is that you want to map all of your hypotheses on this 2×2 matrix. If you think about all the hypotheses that you’ve written, as you write them, you want to figure out where they go on this 2×2 map. This 2×2 map is made up of a risk axis and a perceived value axis. The x-axis is risk. Risk is going to be contextual to your hypothesis. It could be design risk or marketing risk or brand risk. Then the y-axis is perceived value. This is about how much of an impact you think you’re going to have on the customer and ultimately, on the business itself with each hypothesis. You map these on this matrix and the hypotheses that end up in box number 1 are the ones that we actually test because these are high risk and they’re high value. If you get these right, you’re going to have a big impact on the company. If something ends up box number 2, it’s low risk and high value. This is something we should just build, ship, and measure and make sure it lives up to our expectations. Anything that falls below the risk line, we definitely don’t test. In most cases, we just throw it away especially if it lands in box number 4 where it’s high risk and low value. We’re just going to toss that away. If it lands in box number 3, we’re definitely not testing it. We’re probably not building it unless it’s something that we need to participate in our marketplace like taking payments, for example.

Finally, once you prioritized your hypotheses, your goal is not to let them linger over here. Anything that lands in box number 1 should be tested and then either moved to box number 2 because we’ve increased our confidence in it or moved onto box 4 and we’re going to end up throwing it away. That’s ultimately our goal there. 

We’ve written our hypotheses. We go to box number 7. We’ve identified the hypothesis that we want to test. The question here is, “What’s the most important thing we need to learn first about that hypothesis?” And really what we’re talking about here – this is a conversation around risk. The interesting thing here is that when you ask this question about your hypotheses, you’ll get as many answers at least as there are disciplines in the room. You’re going to get technical risks, marketing risks, design risks, business risks, brand risks, etc. That’s great but your job is to identify the thing that’s most important right now. The thing that if you get it wrong, it breaks the hypothesis and you can move onto something else.

Finally, once you’ve identified the most important thing you need to learn first about your hypothesis, we move to box number 8. Box number 8 asks the question, “What’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing?” That’s the thing we decided on in box number 7. The answer to these questions, these are your experiments. These are your landing page tests, your customer interviews, your paper prototypes, A/B tests, etc. These are your experiments to help you learn whether or not you’ve achieved whether or not the risk that you’re testing is real and whether or not you should keep working on this hypothesis and how best to solve these challenges in this hypothesis so that you solve your problem. Really the goal of this is to run this experiment. Once you’ve run this experiment, you collect that data and you try to get a sense of where you stand on your hypothesis. Does the hypothesis still make sense? Should we keep going with it? If we should, then we ask the questions again in box number 7. What’s the next most important thing we need to learn? What’s the next biggest risk? Then we ask the question box number 8, “What’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn that?” The experiments get a bit more high fidelity. We invest a bit more. We learn a bit more and we continue to invest more as long as we get good feedback from or experiments. If at any point, we get bad feedback, feedback that says, “This isn’t going to work,” then we either pivot or we kill that hypothesis and then we either go back to our list of hypotheses to see where we ended up, what’s left, what we can test or we take what we learn and we consider the canvas as a whole. What assumptions still make sense? What doesn’t make sense? What should we rewrite? Then we start the process again. 

That was a very brief run through of the Lean UX Canvas. I hope you learned something. If you have any questions, please leave the questions in the comments. Please do look forward to the third edition of the Lean UX book. It will be out in the Fall of 2021 as well as the self-paced video course of Lean UX which will be out in just about a month or so on my website, on Josh Seiden’s website. You’ll see it on our Thinkific page as well.

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It’s hard to believe it’s been 8 years since the first edition was published and nearly 10 years since we started writing it.

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Hypothesis statement

• Introduction to Hypothesis statement
• Essential characteristics

Introduction to hypothesis statements

Brainstorming solutions is similar to making a hypothesis or an educated guess about how to solve the problem.

In UX design, we write down possible solutions to the problem as hypothesis statements. A good hypothesis statement requires more effort than just a guess. In particular, your hypothesis statement may start with a question that can be further explored through background research.

How do you write hypothesis statements? Unlike problem statements, there's no standard formula for writing hypothesis statements. For starters, let's try what's called an if-then statement.

It looks like this: If (name an action), then (name an outcome).

Hypothesis statements don't have a standard formula. Instead of an if-then statement, you can formulate this hypothesis statement in a more flexible way.

Essential characteristics of a hypothesis statement

To formulate a promising hypothesis, ask yourself the following questions:

Is the language clear and purposeful?

What is the relationship between your hypothesis and your research topic?

Is your hypothesis testable? If so, how?

What possible explanations would you like to explore?

You may need to come up with more than one hypothesis for a problem. That's okay! There will always be multiple solutions to your users' problems. Your job is to use your creativity and problem-solving skills to decide which solutions are best for each user you are designing for.

• #ClearLanguage
• #HypothesisVSResearchTopic
• #PossibleExplanations

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Create, define problem statements, next article • 8min read, understand human factors, table of contents, esc hit escape to close, introduction to ux, what is user experience.

User experience, definition of a good design, lifecycle product development

UX Design Frameworks

Key frameworks.

User-Centered Design, the five elements of UX Design, Design Thinking, Lean UX, Double Diamond

Equity and Accessibility

Designing for all.

Universal design, inclusive design, and equity-focused design

The importance of Accessibility

Motor disabilities, deaf or hard of hearing, cognitive disabilities, visual disabilities

Design for the Next Billion User (Google)

Majority of people that gets online for the first time

Design for different platforms

Responsiveness, Call-to-actions, navigation and more

The 4Cs of princples of design

Consistency, Continuity Context and Complementary principles

Assistive Technology

Voice control and switch devices, screen readers, alternative text and speech

Impostor Syndrome/Biases

Overcome the impostor syndrome.

Impostor Syndrome is the feeling that makes you doubt that you actually earn your accomplishments.

Most common Biases

Learn about favoring or having prejudice against something based on limited information.

Prevent Biases

Recognize your own biases and prevent them from affecting your work.

Design Sprint

Introduction to design sprint.

Introduction to the framework, benefits and advantages

Plan a Design Sprint

Tips and tricks about design sprint planning

Write a Design Sprint brief

Insights and free canvas about making a design sprint brief.

Design Sprint retrospective

What went well? What can be improved?

UX Research

Introduction to ux research.

Learn techniques of research for designing better products

Foundational Research

Easily center on a problem or topic that's undefined in your project's scope

Design Research

Find stories, engage in conversations, understand the users motivations

Post-Launch Research

Know the impact of pre- and post-launch publicity and advertising on new product sales

Choosing the right Research method

Learn which research method to pick depending on the questions you still have unanswered

Benefits and drawbacks

Learn how to create an optimal product for the user

Recruit interview participants

Learn how to determine interview goals and write questions

Conduct user interviews

Insights on how to be prepared before speaking with real users

Create interview transcripts

Discover new topics of interest through a written transcript

Empathize with users

Master ability to fully understand, mirror a person's expressions, needs, and motivations

Consider a11y when empathizing

Learn why empathizing and accessibility go hand in hand

Empathy Maps

Learn how to empathize and synthesise your observations from the research phase

Identify pain points

Identify a specific problem that your users are experiencing

Understand personas

Learn how to shape product strategy and accompany it the usability testing sessions

User stories

Learn how to base your user stories on user goals and keep the product user focused

Create a user journey map

Learn how to make a visual representation of the customer experience

Determine value propositions

Set and explain why a customer should buy from you

Create and define a problem statement

Learn how to focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered yet

Learn how to predict the behavior of a proposed solution

Learn how people interact with technology

Competitive Audits

Introduction to competitive audits, limits to competitive audits, steps to conduct competitive audits, present a competitive audit, design ideation, understand design ideation, business needs during ideation, use insights from competitive audits to ideate, use "how might we" to ideate, use crazy eights to ideate, use journey map to ideate, goal statements, build a goal statement, introduction to user flows, storyboarding user flows, types of storyboards, wireframing, introduction to wireframes, paper wireframes, transition from paper to digital wireframes, information architecture, ethical and inclusive design, identify deceptive patterns, role as a ux designer, press shift to trigger the table of contents.

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