Lean UX: Building Great Products with Agile Teams

“It’s been four years since I first started talking and writing about a new concept called the Lean Startup, and less than a year since I published my book, Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Achieve Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Business). In that time, I’ve seen these ideas grow and spread—from industry to industry, from sector to sector, from function to function. Each time we’ve broken new ground, we’ve relied on visionary leaders to help translate the key principles and develop new processes to implement them.

Lean UX is an important step in this evolution. For the first time, we have an outside perspective on how Lean Startup principles are applied in a design context. Along the way, the book introduces us to important new tools and techniques that enable seamless collaboration, faster product delivery, and—most importantly—significantly higher quality.” —Eric Ries, Foreword

“Lean UX breaks down the barriers that have separated software designers from real business needs on the one hand and the challenges of actual implementation on the other. Lean UX is not just about the designers; it also involves our business and technology partners working with us on the best solution along the way. Jeff once had a large pharmaceutical client. The agency Jeff worked for had been hired to redesign its e-commerce platform. The goal was to increase revenue by 15 percent. Jeff was the lead interaction designer on the team. The team locked themselves in their office for months and studied the current system, the supply chain, the competition, the target audience, and the contextual use cases. They researched personas and collected strategic models. Jeff created a new information architecture for the product catalog and came up with a completely new shopping and payment experience. When the months were up and the work was done, the team put everything together in a PowerPoint presentation. The presentation was quite a lot—as it should be, considering the $600,000 price tag! The team came to the client’s office and spent a full eight-hour day explaining every pixel and word in the presentation. When they were done, the clients gave them a standing ovation (yay!). Jeff and his team breathed a sigh of relief. The client loved their work. And Jeff’s team never opened the presentation again. Six months after the presentation was delivered, nothing had changed on the client’s website. The client never opened the presentation again either. The moral of the story: Creating pixel-perfect specs may be a path to six-figure consulting fees, but it won’t lead to a significant improvement in a real product that’s critical to real users. Designers don’t get into this business for specs either. We want to create services and products that matter, not write papers.” — Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, Introduction