Basics of Lean UX
UX Research
Product Roadmap is an important tool in product development (Münch, Trieflinger, Bogazköy, et al 2020). With increasing market dynamics and rapidly evolving technology, software-intensive businesses rely on the development of quality products on time, within a given budget (Münch, Trieflinger, Knoop et al 2020). Organizations are struggling to provide a reliable and stable product roadmap (Münch, Trieflinger, Knoop et al 2020). With the adoption of lean and agile practices, it becomes increasingly difficult to plan and predict upfront what products, services or features need to be developed first (Münch, Trieflinger, Knoop et al 2020). This article aims to provide a better understanding of the implementation of a lean product roadmap. There are various tools made available to create an efficient roadmap which is discussed in this article.
Why use Lean UX?
Designers have many methodologies they can apply to a product design. Some of them use Agile methods, Test-driven development, Kanban-style Design-driven development, etc.; this list is never-ending (Douglas 2018). There are 4 reasons why a designer should consider using a Lean UX (Douglas 2018).
The ultimate goal for a lean UX roadmap is to produce a product as quickly as possible, with minimum use of resources, thereby saving time and satisfying customer needs (Liikkanen, Kilpiö, Svan et al. 2014). It’s a data-centric process for an extremely fast user-centred software development, especially useful for startups building radically new products (Liikkanen, Kilpiö, Svan et al. 2014). Lean UX is a paradigm shift. It creates efficiency and removes waste unlike other common design methodologies (Douglas 2018). A lean UX’s nature of continuous learning and testing brings us to the next important part of the equation; Principles of a Lean UX methodology (Elberzhager, Holl, Karn et al. 2017).
The main tenets of a Lean UX Methodology
Lean UX radically shifts the way we express our work, to how one defines success (Gothelf & Seiden 2016)? The goal of a UX designer is not to create a deliverable product or feature; it is to change the world by positively creating an impact on customer behaviour to produce an outcome. Rather than focusing on a feature, we focus on the ‘value’ we’re trying to create, with continuous testing, researching and learning, until we find an appropriate solution to fit that outcome (Gothelf & Seiden 2016: Anon 2021).
A Lean UX is a 4 step continuous product cycle. To reduce the risk of investing too heavily in the wrong features and designs, this method takes a softer stance by understanding what is ‘assumed’ to be true rather than what is ‘required’ (Gothelf & Seiden 2016; Elberzhager, Holl, Karn et al. 2017; Anon 2021). These assumptions alone are still filled with risk, but as we begin to research, design, and develop a product, new information will arise and this new information will force a course correction (Gothelf & Seiden 2016). For this reason, the process starts with ‘Assumptions’ and ‘Outcomes’ preferably more than ‘Features’ and ‘Requirements’ (Gothelf & Seiden 2016; Elberzhager, Holl, Karn et al. 2017; Anon 2021). The assumptions are used to create and test a hypothesis, after which, one would design and develop enough product, i.e, experiments and Minimum Viable Products(MVP’s), to test the hypothesis (Gothelf & Seiden 2016; Anon 2021). These small tests reduce the risk of going too far forward in the wrong direction (Gothelf & Seiden 2016).
Assumptions, Outcomes & Hypothesis: Traditionally, a UX project is built upon requirements capture and deliverables (Anon 2021; Gothelf & Seiden 2016). Lean UX is slightly different. You don’t focus on the deliverables, instead, you are looking to design changes that improve a product- primarily to mould an outcome for the better (Anon 2021; Gothelf & Seiden 2016). So how are assumptions generated? It’s simple. Get a team together, state the problem, let the team brainstorm and come up with viable solutions (Anon 2021; Gothelf & Seiden 2016). A hypothesis is created after. Starting by stating the belief and why it is important and who it is important to. Follow that with what can the team expect to achieve. Finally, determine what evidence would be needed to prove that the hypothesis is true (Anon 2021; Gothelf & Seiden 2016).
Designing & Creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): The core concept of a Lean UX is designing and creating an MVP (Anon 2021). The idea behind it is to create the most basic version of the concept, test it and if it doesn't yield valuable results, then one could simply abandon it and start over (Anon 2021). An MVP is defined as the smallest version of the end product delivered to the users that address the need for a user who benefits from it (Elberzhager, Holl, Karn et al. 2017). MVP’s help a designer validate each hypothesis before spending any time building something large with unlimited features (Douglas 2018).
Research, Testing & Learning: User research and testing, in a Lean UX method, is based on similar principles as used in traditional UX environments (Anon 2021). Testing gives answers. Testing validates the hypothesis at hand (Douglas 2018). Testing is said to be the backbone of Lean UX. It helps understand why users interact with the product in the way that they do (Douglas 2018). Responsibilities for research tend to spread more widely across the whole team. There is no ‘bottleneck’ created by having a single UX designer take the burden of completing the job themselves with tight timescales (Douglas 2018). The continuous testing and learning help define the start of a Lean UX Project- Assumptions before requirements! The very first step of a Lean UX process is to declare assumptions that should be validated along the process and repeated when new assumptions arise (Elberzhager, Holl, Karn et al. 2017).
Lean UX Tools List
“There is no single, correct way to do ANYTHING. Take the pieces from multiple approaches that work for YOUR situation, YOUR users, YOUR client, YOUR organization and jettison everything else” — Joe Natoli (Bird 2019).
REFERENCES
Anon 2021 “A simple introduction to Lean UX” by Interaction design foundation 07/2021 A Simple Introduction to Lean UX
Bird J 2019 “Implementing Lean UX in the Real World” by UX Collective 08/2021 Implementing Lean UX in the real world | by Jeremy Bird
Douglas. S 2018 “5 must-have essential lean UX tools: A curated List” by JustInMind 08/2021 5 must-have Lean UX tools for 2018
S. Douglas 2018 “Complete Guide to Lean UX” by Justinmind 03/2021 Lean UX: Almost everything you need to know, for UXers
Elberzhager F., Holl K., Karn B., Immich T. (2017) Rapid Lean UX Development Through User Feedback Revelation. In: Felderer M., Méndez Fernández D., Turhan B., Kalinowski M., Sarro F., Winkler D. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10611. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69926-4_43
Gothelf, J. and Seiden, J., 2016. Lean UX: designing great products with agile teams. “ O’Reilly Media, Inc.”.
Liikkanen. A.L, Kilpiö H, Svan L, and Hiltunen M. 2014. Lean UX: the next generation of user-centred agile development? In Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1095–1100. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2639189.2670285
Münch. J, Trieflinger. S, Bogazköy. E, Eißler. P, Roling. B and Schneider. J, “Product Roadmap Formats for an Uncertain Future: A Grey Literature Review,” 2020 46th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Portoroz, Slovenia, 2020, pp. 284–291, DOI: 10.1109/SEAA51224.2020.00055.
Trieflinger. S, Münch. J, Knoop. V and Lang. D, “Facing the Challenges with Product Roadmaps in Uncertain Markets: Experience from Industry,” 2020 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC), Cardiff, UK, 2020, pp. 1–8, DOI: 10.1109/ICE/ITMC49519.2020.9198359.
Wells R 2018 “What is Lean UX? A Beginner’s Guide with Principles, Methods & Tips to Start” by The Daily Egg 08/2021 What is Lean UX? A Beginner’s Guide with Principles, Methods & Tips to Start