Lean UX

The Lean UX approach to interaction design is tailor-made for today’s web-driven reality. In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.

• Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomes
• Bring the designers’ toolkit to the rest of your product team
• Share your insights with your team much earlier in the process
• Create Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are valid
• Incorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycle
• Make your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum framework
• Understand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UX

Jeff Gothelf on How to Do Lean UX in 5 Easy Steps

1. Solve problems together: Ensure that every member of your team is present during brainstorming for new projects. Give your teams problems to solve, not solutions to implement. The outcome will be a far more efficient and productive team creating higher quality products and experiences.
2. Sketch: Introduce the team to sketching in order to help them visualize their ideas and come to a consensus.
3. Prototype: Get to a product experience as quickly as possible. Use prototypes of varying fidelities to get a sense of what your product’s experience will be and validate that with customers to ensure you’re headed down the right path.
4. Pair your developers and designers: Have developers and designers pair up to create the user interfaces. Each will learn from the other and build the trust necessary for greater team collaboration and productivity.
5. Create a style guide: Codify your design elements in pattern libraries and code repositories so creating new pages and workflows in your product is as easy as picking the pieces from the style guide. It also allows the team to quickly piece together experiences for prototypes and empowers your developers to build interfaces without constant review with the UX designer.