Lean UX Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

Today startups need to adapt to continually changing environments. Continuously iterating is essential to keep ahead of the curve. To do that it’s important to experiment constantly, but only to do so with the confirmation of your customer feedback.

Determine your hypothesis - designs that you believe will lead to the desired outcome - as a team. Develop ”proto personas“ for your customers to learn more about them. Prioritize your hypotheses and features and assumptions you want to test according to how your personas achieve their goals through using that feature. Create MVPs to test hypotheses. Discard designs that customers reject.

About the Author

Jeff Gothelf is good at advising companies in building better products. He was once a software designer. He now works as a coach, consultant, and speaker advising companies on close the chasm between business agility, digital transformation, product management, and human-centered design. He is the co-creator of Sense & Response Press, a publishing house for business books. He is the author of Forever Employable to be published in May of 2020.

Topics

Other

Lean UX Book Summary Preview

Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Jeff Gothelf
In today’s world, companies need to make continuous improvements to their product to adapt to customers changing moods and a competitive environment. Amazon makes changes to their products every second. The Waterfall approach of making big changes at one time after careful planning and development no longer works. Lean UX approach allows companies to iterate quickly.
Lean UX is based on design thinking, agile software development, and collaboration. Design thinking is the idea that every aspect of business can be approached with design in mind. A Lean UX team consists of designers, marketing, business analysts, product, and engineers. It's a cross-disciplinary approach. Lean UX team prioritize action and feedback over planning and documentation. Product Iteration based on user feedback is key to success. The initial prototype is used to test market assumptions and thrown away if it doesn't fit. Product iteration follows based on user feedback. Bad ideas and inaccurate assumptions are discarded.

Lean UX principles

Lean Culture - Decisions are made based on facts and evidence. Product changes are tested with customers. Risk-taking is encouraged.

Lean teams can make business decisions on their own. They work together through the product life cycle. Lean teams consist of less than 10 members.

Lean Process - Lean team members don’t change the whole product at once. They work on small parts of it. They watch customers shed light on the issues with the design.

Focus on outcomes. For example, instead of focusing on adding X feature, focus on increasing revenue. What is the desired outcome? What do you want to happen? Come up with a hypothesis based on what the desired outcome should be. For example, if we change the CTA to Start Now more people will convert. Test each assumption. A product requirement is an assumption because what you create will change.

Make sure you’re aware of the problem that you’re trying to solve. What are the gaps and improvements needed to be made? What are the assumptions in the problem statement? Turn these assumptions into hypothesis statements.

Assumptions are the ideas that you have about the business. For example, a recruiting business’s assumption is that employers will use the service to interact with employees. Turn assumptions into testable hypotheses. What is the result that you want to achieve? The outcome for a recruiting business is that they want more job seekers to sign up. What are the personas that you want to attract? What is their behavioral and demographic information? What are their difficulties and needs? What are the potential solutions to their problems? Think about the features or actual products and services that might achieve your desired outcome. Use quantitative and qualitative data to test the hypothesis.

Make sure to revise your definition of the audience along the way. Remember that users don’t care about functionality - they care about goals. Determine what their goals are? What blockers are do they face?