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.

What is Lean UX?

Lean UX is an approach that integrates product development, design, and business and encourages ongoing improvement, frequent iteration, and validation. A method for creating and developing user experiences is called lean UX. Lean UX is fundamentally about letting the design team’s work be guided by the confirmation of hypotheses. Hypotheses are important for the team to openly think and assume scenarios. This suggests that there are only assumptions here and that designers never base judgments on their intuition or preferences. Designers can come closer to exceptional user experiences more quickly by constructing, measuring, and learning. 

Lean UX lets the team first think, and come up with a Hypothesis which later in the process they validate based on principles. Lean UX focuses on enhancing user value through ongoing research and waste elimination.

It is actually about “It should not be the statement you only workaround, it should be a problem statement which you believe can be true”.

Phases Involved in Lean UX Approach?

As mentioned Lean UX is all about experimenting based on the hypothesis and then designing a solution to validate that hypothesis using principles, called the lean ux principles. It involves the following steps:

1. Ideate & Build

The first step involves ideation, brainstorming and then building solutions around those ideas. All the data we have based on that data like customer feedback, customer research, competition comparisons, and watching their product in use, teams discuss potential areas for design and improvement. They formulate a problem description and choose the areas they want to advance. Once the data is finalized now it’s time to build a low-fidelity prototype that depicts the foundation and core elements of the proposed product concept.

2. Measure and Handover

In the next step, on the build designs run a round of testing to check whether it stands out as per the requirement. After that, discuss and collaborate with engineers and product managers around the solution and idea you have worked on.

3. Analyze & Learn

Take this step as a learning and incorporate feedback. As a team carries out validation for the hypothesis on which the whole work is being done. List down all the feedback and improvements mentioned during this step.

How is the Lean UX Approach Different From Other Approaches?

• Classic/Traditional UX typically focuses on users and business at the very beginning. “Design with Usability” is the prime concern of traditional UX. This approach stands for “What are we making”,  adding new values to the product or crafting an identity for a business. 
  
• Agile UX focuses on collaboration and works based on sprints. “How do we make it” is the question that is solved through agile. Agile focuses on producing polished and refined products.
  
• Lean UX stands for autonomy and creativity and involves users’ opinions at the end. The team comes up with a Hypothesis and then focuses on validating that. “Are we doing it right” is the concern, by which multiple products are produced having each product more polished – or increasing polish.

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. 

Core Theme of Lean UX Principles

Out of all the 15 principles of the Lean UX design approach, core values are given using the below-mentioned laws:

1. Act as a ONE team

Focusing on collaboration and coming together as a team to solve a problem.

2. Solve the RIGHT problem

Prioritize what you are solving, and what you are expecting as a result. Pick the right problem and focus on that one till the outcome is expected.

3. Effective Collaboration

Add collaboration to the overall process by incorporating white-boarding and brainstorming exercises within the design team as well as product and engineering to have all-around use cases covered.

4. Flexible to Change

The Lean UX approach is all about experimenting, so keep in mind the “Change”. Be prepared to adapt quickly, and iterate on feedback.

5. Emphasis on Outcome Rather Than Deliverable

Take this as a learning, grow with the outcome, and don’t just stick to deliverables. Concentrate on discussion, and solving route causes than just chasing deadlines.

Benefits of Lean UX

Lean UX is at the pinnacle of creative design for startups because it does not have the luxury of disposable income for trial and error. On the other hand, Traditional UX is a long and time-consuming approach that has a lot of roadblocks. Lean UX intensely focuses on solving problems and testing. Allowing designers to experiment, explore and validate their assumptions. Design teams may move through each design phase much more quickly if they are given the tools to increase output and reduce waste. The Lean UX approach is collaborative and adds to this by fostering teamwork and enabling everyone to not just express but also test their issues.
There is multiple other reasons why startups and beginners should start with Lean UX, let’s look into each of the benefits:

• Cost Effective: Lean method focuses on building and testing over and over again. The lean strategy keeps teams concentrated on what matters rather than squandering three months of valuable time on a project that is going nowhere. Repeated decision validation builds a strong foundation upon which a product can be constructed. This saves time and money together, as based on validation we are sort of monitoring the designs over and over again.
  
• User-Centered: Lean and UCD are both iterative techniques that keep the user and their demands in mind at every stage of the design process. Keeping user-centered comes from building and testing it with the user, and refining data based on the validations. Both approaches place a high value on letting validation lead the way. Both strategies encourage designers to keep their distance from the final product, with testing serving as a beacon.
  
• Data Driven: Lean UX believes in collecting data points from testing, and driving the designs based on those data points. All designs, hypotheses, and assumptions are based on all of their decisions on data. This assists in preventing production that degrades the product’s quality.
  
• Fast & Effective: Lean UX saves time from extensive documentation. This implies there won’t be any more lengthy documentation or protracted discussions with developers or any cross-functional only at the end. Being collaborative in nature, lean UX takes in input in parallel while ideating, and refining design. The lean approach doesn’t exactly follow a straight path, but it prevents the design team from wasting time.

Conclusion

Lean UX itself is a very potent approach to problem-solving. It doesn’t require a lot of time, money, and extensive documentation to hand over work. At the same time, teams don’t need to pick up new skills; instead, the organization needs to adopt a different way of thinking about product design. Comes with a lot of benefits, and these benefits are robust enough to inspire designers. Giving complete freedom to experiment, and validating assumptions based on a particular hypothesis.