Lean User Experience Survey

RESEARCH PROJECT

What UX design service would most help early stage companies?

Janice Fraser The Lean UX ResidencyJune 2010

janice@twotopLabs.com

PRE-MONEY SEED

SERIESA

SERIESB

We surveyed 19 early-stage companies. Each

recently launched a product and believes that

MOCKUPPROTOTYPE

PRIVATEPUBLIC

GROWTHBEYOND

NOTIMPORTANT -- --

STRATEGICDIFFERENTIATOR

user experience is strategically important.

How are you funded? How far along is your product?How important is user experience to your product’s success?50%

42%93%

$<5k 5-10k $10-25k $25-60k $60-100k $100k+

Despite its perceived importance, these companies don’t invest heavily

in design services.

How much capital would you allocate prior to product launch to ensure that your product or service has a great user experience (don’t include payroll costs)?

Top 4 reasons early-stage companies don’t invest in UX design services

Designers are here then gone.“It has to be an iterative and continuous process.”

I don’t know where to find the right person.“Designers often don’t know the cost of each design element.”

At the beginning, it’s way too expensive.“Capital is very expensive at the outset.”

It’s too important to outsource.“I would not trust someone external with such an important function.”

14% 25%

Better than Good

Private Beta Launch Growing

50% 37%

Worse than Good

43% 37%

The companies’ high confidence in their internal UX capability diminishes as usage grows.

“GOOD”

Cross-tab: product stage vs. perceived user experience skill

(Also, this data shows that entrepreneurs need help more than they realize.)

We know that public reaction helps teams see UX problems (launch = humbling). So it stands to reason that confidence drops as participation grows.

FINDING:

A UX service should mitigate this drop in confidence. This is a success metric of the program.

Analysis revealed two clusters. The program must address their

differing needs.

-Spend more $ on UX-Less comfortable with agile

-Want tools & design patterns-Don’t know where to find

the “right” person-Spend less $ on UX-Want to design in sprints

-Comfortable with sprints, pairing and collaboration

Everyone wants design to live in-house.

SPRINTERS

SPENDERS

CONCLUSIONS design services for early-stage companies should feature...

Long duration / frequent contact.

Define what makes a designer “right” and expand network into design community

Drastically reduce cost

Strong focus on coaching the internal staff; bolster internal competence in UX design

Emphasis on rational basis for design decisions

The best verbatim response...

"Key question for me is can [UX design] really be separated from product management overall?"

(Ed: Nope, it can’t.)

APPENDIX1. Verbatim Responses.

2. Data

APPENDIX 1Verbatim Responses

Any thoughts on how you'd like to structure design work?

1. “We use waterfall at first, with some collaborative/agile work throughout development.”

2. “Instead of hiring a designer I'd like to hire a design firm that has several clients. That firm is effectively on my payroll as my designer. This is good because individual designers are crazy unreliable and I hate managing them. The current solution is to hire in house designers but that is usually a waste of resources and early stage companies don't have those resources. “

3. “For contractors, defined projects work best. But thats why we don't like contractors. We bring long term core strategic features in-house because we need to build institutional knowledge around them.”

4. “a great designer should lead the whole shebang. problem is... there are very few great designers on earth.”

5. “key question for me is can it really be separated from product management overall?”

6. “Not sure, but one thing would be to have the designer work very closely with the engineers implementing it, and not just hand off a small set of recommendations. I think it has to be an iterative and continuous process, and may not necessarily be easily scoped as a project.”

7. “Our design process drives our development process, not the other way around. (In fact I insist that everyone's official title is "designer" and not "engineer").” (CONTINUES ON NEXT PAGE)

Any thoughts on how you'd like to structure design work?

7. CONTINUEDWe divide our work into two types of iterations:

1) Design Steps: Iterations that address "known" personas, scenarios, and goals fall under the purview of design steps. These are usually quick cycles that try to go from brainstorm to design to code to release within a 1 week timeframe.

2) Design Leaps: On the other hand, about once a month we have a design leap that addresses a new persona or scenario that we don't understand well. In this case, we model things under the IDEO "deep dive" where we spend a whole week developing personas/scenarios, prototyping parallel ideas in different forms of media (post-its, paper, balsamiq, fireworks, code), and generally spend time to really understand what are the primary scenarios and personas. These usually lead to a full week of design (without much code), followed by specific projects to be coded up the week after.

What other barriers do you see to using UX design services?

1. “I would not trust someone external with such an important function. We know our product better than anyone, and we must control our own user experience 'destiny.' The notion of outsourcing that is almost absurd to me.. :)”

2. “It would be great to know what you are specifically referring to when you say "User experience". Visual design? graphic design? graphic design? ethnigraphic [sic] reasearch? Interaction design? all of the above?” [ed: All of the above]

3. “We use a number of outside firms already. However, we prefer teams that can build and design.”

4. “Capital is very expensive at the outset. Sweat equity is better. When starting, you want cofounder partners, not mercenaries.”

5. “It's important enough for us that I would rather hire designers as employees and then develop all of our talent in-house. My girlfriend works for IDEO also, she helps us with the product and design process also.”

APPENDIX 2Data

Lean User Experience Survey

Design

Transcript of Lean User Experience Survey

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