Core Principles of Lean UX
1. Cross-Functional Teams
The lean design focuses on creating a team that includes members from different cross-functional teams like product, engineering, marketing, and operations for various ideation and feedback phases while working on a project.
2. Progress = Outcomes, not just Output
The major focus of Lean UX as an approach is to work, and validate where each validation result comes as an outcome. This outcome can be a crucial input for another round of validation. Basically, lean ux does specifically look out for just output, in fact, every time something new is found it is taken into consideration while working. Believing that achieving business/product goals are the outcomes and services of features gives output.
3. Dedicated Chunks
“Small dedicated chunks and co-located” is the fuel for the process. A small team which is of around 7 to 9 people who might be different in the same team/location or time zone, focused to solve a dedicated problem. This is how Lean ux works.
4. Problem Focused Workforce
The team works based on the hypotheses they think of, which says they do not just only focus on designing or building new features. They majorly focus on solving the root cause of a problem, which would make a better impact from a business and product point of view.
5. Eliminating Waste
Eliminate tasks. approaches and processes that don’t advance your business OKRs. It is believed that not all things or approaches work towards solving all kinds of problems. For a unique problem, there can be a possibility to look out for a unique approach instead.
6. Prioritise Task in Smaller Chunk
It is good to purely focus on one task at a time, rather than picking up multiple tasks together where the focus is divided. A dedicated focus would be needed to bring out the best solution. Take smaller objectives to work on and keep validating them on the go.
7. Continuous and Iterative Discovery
Lean UX says to never stop looking out for the reference, and data and use them to bring the best solution. Keep on collecting data from research, end users, and feedback from different teams and stakeholders. Doing so would enhance the outcomes.
8. GOOB
Stands for “Get Out Of the Building”, as also mentioned earlier UX is a very creative field, and just by making assumptions you can validate everything. Avoid internal debating of assumptions, and long discussions on just thinking, and taking notes. Rather go sit and talk with actual users and test concepts. This would make the argument even stronger and validation more full proof.
9. Collaborative Understanding
Don’t straight away start with the designing, or ideating alone on the data and ideas. Try to come together with teams then discuss, ideate, and analyze what can be done. Bring in everyone’s ideas, share information, and work collaboratively so that the whole team develops a product together. This would also bring in early feedback while the design stage only.
10. All For One and One For All
Noobs, freshers, or even experts – everyone’s ideas and thoughts are addressed the same. No one is valued differently, Lean UX says to value each and every team member as the same.
11. Open to All
Don’t limit the ideas just to one team, let people from all over the organization(wherever possible) bring in their ideas. Create an atmosphere where people can freely exchange ideas without being judged or complaining about being right or wrong. There are no good or bad concepts!
12. Let Analysis SPEAK
Debating over what might work and what might not help anyone in any sense. Sit and analyze based on what is found in the outcome. Don’t waste time questioning and assuming whether a plan will succeed. Test it out in a live or simulated environment using wireframes, prototypes or MVP then learn from it.
13. Growth with Learning
Experimenting is leveraged here in Lean UX. Keep experimenting and learning from those experiments, until you get to the right solution. Don’t ever straight away scale up things without testing and validating them.
14. Cherish Failures
Failures should be cherished and valued the same as success. If a feature or idea won’t fail you would never get to learn from it and think about what can be done to make it succeed. Make and break things to arrive at perfection over speeding iterations.
15. Get out of deliverables
Prioritize the outcomes of the designs, don’t just work for the sake of delivering work.
Lean UX – A Complete Beginner’s Guide
In the beginning, hearing a lot of new terms like “Lean”, “Agile” and “Waterfall” models can be very intimidating. Especially beginners tend to get confused about which term means what and which one to follow. For anyone whether beginner or expert, when creating a product you frequently aim for perfection by including cutting-edge features and options. To follow a streamlined path you develop a thorough concept, devise a foolproof internal plan, get buy-in from stakeholders, create a precise prototype, run user testing, compile the results, then repeat the entire process until you’re completely satisfied to launch.
There has always been some mismatch in different approaches like Agile and Waterfall, so lean is now quite popular. Let’s look into Lean UX and see what it brings to the table.
We’ll be looking into the following topics, to understand Lean UX in detail:
- What is Lean UX?
- Phases/steps in the Lean UX approach
- How is the Lean approach differ from other approaches
- Principles of Lean UX
- Core themes of Lean UX
- Benefits of using Lean UX.