What is Lean UX?

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LEAN UX Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience in Agile Environment Darren F. Gideon Principal Web Developer UI Citrix Web Services

Transcript of What is Lean UX?

Page 1: What is Lean UX?

LEAN UXApplying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience in Agile Environment

Darren F. GideonPrincipal Web Developer UICitrix Web Services

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First off, how does it fit into the development Process?

It’s focus is strictly on the design phase of software development process. Best practice is to use staggered sprints also known as Cycle 0 and Sprint Zero.

Design activity takes place one sprint ahead of development.

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What is LEAN UX?

It is a methodology inspired by “Lean Startup” and “Agile” for bringing UX designs to light faster with less emphasis on deliverables and with greater focus on the actual experiences being designed.

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How does it accomplish this?

It accomplishes this by getting out of the deliverables business and instead focusing on successful experiences. It focuses more on creating successful experiences by:

1. Removing waste from design process

2. Harmonizing the interaction of designers, developers, product manager, QA, etc. into a transparent cross functional collaboration of all involved parties.

3. Relying on rapid experimentation and measurement to quickly learn how well or not ideas are meeting the users goals. The designer’s role is one of designfacilitation instead of sole point of view.

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What does getting out of thedeliverables business mean?

• Not being judged by the depth and breadth of delivereddocuments (delivery of pixel perfect hi-defs and extensive documentation before presenting to collaborative team, customer, and or users).

• Being judged by the success of the end-state experience for the user.

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How does LEAN UX focus onthe end-state Experience?

It focuses on ensuring the ideas that have the most value get the most resources via:

1. Experimentation

2. Rapid Iteration

3. Evolutionary Process

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Can you give me an example of this process?

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Hi, HR its Darth Vader here. I need some personnel for a planetary operation.

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No problem Darth Vader. Will this candidate do? He says he knows Photoshop.

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No, I don’t need a designer. I need canon fodder for a ground assault.

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Oh, he knows COBOL too. What if we can outfit him with Storm Trooper equipment? Would he fulfill what you need then?

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He knows COBOL? He definitely will be good canon fodder then.

But I don’t need a Storm Trooper. The assault is on the ice planet Hoth.

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Oh, so you need him outfitted with cold weather gear. How about him now as a Snow Trooper?

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Perfect!

Get him outfitted with full Snow Trooper armor, weapons, and cold weather gear.

Then put him on the next transport to Hoth.

Oh, make sure he signs the proper “RELEASE” forms before he goes.

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Process Summary1. Darth Vader makes a request to fulfill an outcome

2. A “minimum viable product” (MVP) is presented to be critiqued.

3. The MVP is critiqued and sent back, starting the next iteration.

4. The MVP is adjusted just enough to prove the concept and then presented again for critique.

5. Additional rapid iterations happen where the MVP is evolved until it meets the desired outcome.

6. The MVP is then prototyped and goes through the iteration process again until approved. It is then sent to Hoth to be validated in battle.

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Why the focus on the end-state Experience?

Because the biggest lie in software development is “Phase II.”

A successful experience is a feature that actually ships that meets the customer and business goal(s). Delivering an experience that doesn’t do this with a promise of finishing the experience in Phase II is delivering a bad / incomplete experience to the end user that might never be rectified.

So why does this happen?

Usually because a team ran out of time and then there never was a phase II. Or the customer goals change in phase II leaving a bad / incomplete end-state experience in place.

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Okay so how does LEAN UXaccomplish this?

LEAN UX is based on three processes that are used to reduce waste and achieve a better end-state experience faster:

1. Design thinking

2. Agile development

3. Feedback loop that where a team works collaborativelyto iterate repeatedly through a path to achieve a desired outcome

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What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking starts with the goal or what is desired to be achieved by the user instead of starting with a certain problem. Direct observation of what “users” want to accomplish and what they like and dislike leads to innovation and the achievement of a successful outcome.

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How Does “Agile” apply?

1. Emphasis on individuals and interactions over processes and tools

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

4. Responding to change over rigidly following a plan.

5. The realization that the initial design will have somethingwrong in it. So the goal should be find out what is wrong as soon as possible, then adjust, and test again.

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What do you mean by “Feedback loop?”

A feedback loop is the process where you create the minimum viable product (MVP) to quickly test your assumptions, adjust the MVP based on feedback, and test again.

Getting your collaborative team and then customer feedback avoids you making incorrect market assumptions.

Your design is a hypothesis and your goal is to validate the solution by team and customer feedback.

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The feedback loop process

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No this isn’t just design bycommittee

By providing insight into the design work to your teammates sooner rather than later you accomplish the following:

1. It ensure that you’re aligned with the broader team and the business vision

2. Give developers a sneak peek at the direction of the application enabling them to spot challenges earlier and speed up development

3. Fleshes out your thinking, since displaying your concepts to others forces you to focus on areas that you didn’t initially think ofor deemed important

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Principles of Lean UX

1. Cross Functional teams2. Progress equals outcomes not output3. Problem focused not features implemented4. Remove waste5. GOOB, the new user centricity 6. Small batch size7. Continuous discovery8. Shared understanding9. Externalizing your work10. Don’t over analysis11. Learning over growth12. Get out of the deliverables business13. Permission to fail

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Principle: Cross functionalteams

Teams made up of the various disciplines involved in creating your product. Their involvement should be continuous from the first day of the project until the end.

The creation of a diverse team collapses the handoff process known as waterfall. Allows insight and foresight on each idea for all those involved. Which fosters greater team efficiency.

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Principle: Progress equals outcomes not output

Features and services are outputs.

The business goals they are meant to achieve our outcomes. By managing and measuring against outcomes we gain insight of whether the features we are building meat those outcomes.

If a feature is not performing well we can objectively decide as to if it should be kept, changed, or replaced.

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Principle: Problem focusednot features implemented

A problem focused team is one that has been assigned a business problem to solve (or an outcome to achieve) instead of a set of features to implement.

• It allows for innovation by the team• It shows trust in the team to find a solution• It fosters an investment by the team in the

outcome

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Principle: Remove waste

A core tenant is the removal of anything that doesn’t lead to the ultimate goal. Which is improved outcomes. You do this because team resources are limited.

The more waste a team can eliminate, the faster they can move.

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Principle: GOOB, the newUser centricity

“Getting out of the Building” coined by Steven Blank.

Meeting room debates about user needs won’t be settled in your office. The answers lie out in the marketplace. So you should give potential users a chance to provide feedback on your ideas as soon as possible.

It is better to find out early if you are missing the mark BEFORE you spent the time and resources to build a product that nobody wants.

The success of failure of a product isn’t the team’s decision but ultimately the end user.

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Principle: Small batch size

Create only the design that is necessary to move the team forward and avoid a big inventory of untested and unimplemented ideas.

Large batch forces a team to wait for big deliverables. It also keeps them from learning whether the ideas are valid or not.

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Principle: Continuous discovery

The ongoing process of engaging the customer during the design and development process.

The goal is to understand what users are doing with your products and why the are doing it. Research must be frequent and the entire team should be involved.

The involvement of the team will build empathy and understanding for the users and the problems they face.

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Principle: Shared understanding

It’s the collective knowledge a team builds up over time as they work together. The more a team collectively understands not only what it is doing but why, the less it has to depend on second hand reports and detail documents to continue it work.

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Principle: Externalizing yourwork

Getting your ides out of your head and into public view allows everyone to see where the team stands. This can be done by whiteboards, printouts, etc.

You do this to create a flow of information across the team. Which helps to inspire ideas off of ones that have already been shared. It also more quickly exposes possible issues with ideas that then can be interated on or discarded.

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Principle: Don’t over analysis

There is more value in creating a first version of an idea than spending half a day debating its merits in a conference room.

The most difficult questions will not be answered in a conference room debate but by users in the field. To get user input you need to make ideas concrete so that they have something to respond to.

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Principle: Learning over growth

It’s difficult to figure out the right thing to build and scale a business around it at the same time.

Scaling an idea that is unproven is risky. It might work and it might not. If it doesn’t work and you scaled it to your entire user base you have wasted valuable time and resources.

Ensuring the idea is right on a smaller scale mitigates this risk (e.g. Canary releases, beta groups, etc.)

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Principle: Getting out of the deliverables business

The focus of the design process should be creating the successful outcomes not documents.

Documents don’t solve customer problems – good products do. The team’s focus should be on learning which features have the biggest impact on their customers. The artifacts the team uses to gain that knowledge is irrelevant.

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Principle: Permission to fail

In order to find the best solutions to problems the team needs to experiment with ideas. Most of these ideas will fail.

The team must be safe to fail if they are to be successful. So permission to fail means a team has a safe environment to experiment in which creates a culture of experimentation and creativity.

Derek Silvers (CD Baby Founder) has a video called “Why you need to fail” which goes into this.

http://www.youtube.com/water?v=HhxcFGuKOys

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Do you have an example of Learning by failure?

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Why, yes, yes I do.

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Here we have our COBOL developer. One of his hobbies is to race cars, the Mach 5 in this instance.

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He is racing on course new to him and he is taking this corner at speed for the first time. He likes to use a “heel-and-toe shifing” method but will it be to fast for this corner?

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Oh no COBOL Racer! Your going to fast … hai!

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BOOM! BAM! CRASH!

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What did COBOL RacerLearn from failure?

He learned just how fast he can take this corner on this race track? If he didn’t fail he would never know how close he can push things to the edge without failing.

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Vision, Framing, and Outcomes

Traditional UX design projects are framed by requirements and deliverables. LEAN UX goal is not about create a deliverable but to create an outcome by starting with assumptions instead of requirements. The main tool for this is the Hypothesis statement which is made up of these elements:

• Assumptions• Hypotheses• Outcomes• Personas• Features

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Hypothesis Statement: Assumptions

A high level declaration of what we believe to be true. It’s a the starting point and the team should be involved so everyone is on same page.

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Hypothesis Statement: Hypotheses

More detailed description of our assumptions that target specific areas of our product / workflow for experimentation. Breaking down your assumptions into hypotheses allows you to test these assumptions.

• We believe this statement is true• We will know we’re right/wrong by the

following feedback from users• [qualitative feedback] and/or [quantitative

feedback] and/or [key performance indicator change].

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Hypothesis Statement: Outcomes

What we seek from the market / users to help us validate or invalidate our hypotheses. These need to be specific to be useful.

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Hypothesis Statement: Personas

Models of the people for whom we believe we are solving a problem.

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Hypothesis Statement: Features

The product changes or improvements we believe will obtain the outcomes we seek.

Once you have a list of outcomes you want to achieve then you can start thinking about tactics, features, products, and services you can put in place to achieve those desired outcomes.

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Integrating with Agile

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Beyond Staggered Sprints

The product changes or improvements we believe will obtain the outcomes we seek.

Once you have a list of outcomes you want to achieve then you can start thinking about tactics, features, products, and services you can put in place to achieve those desired outcomes.

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Incorporating into Rhythmof Scrum

The product changes or improvements we believe will obtain the outcomes we seek.

Once you have a list of outcomes you want to achieve then you can start thinking about tactics, features, products, and services you can put in place to achieve those desired outcomes.

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Beyond the Scrum Team

The product changes or improvements we believe will obtain the outcomes we seek.

Once you have a list of outcomes you want to achieve then you can start thinking about tactics, features, products, and services you can put in place to achieve those desired outcomes.

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Making Organizational Shifts1. Shifting from output to outcomes2. Move from limited roles to collaborative capabilities3. Embracing new skills4. Create cross-functional teams5. Create small teams6. Create co-located collaborative workspaces7. Eliminate “Big Design Up Front”8. Speed first, aesthetics second9. Valuing problem solving10.Embracing UX debt11.After LEAN UX transition back to company document

standards12.Be realistic about your environment

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Shift: Shifting from output tooutcomes

Teams must shift conversation with leadership from one based on features to one centered on achieving outcomes.

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Shift: Move from limited roles to collaborative capabilities

Discouraging cross-functional input encourage organizational silos which is the death of collaboration. Need to adopt mantra of “competencies over roles. Every team member has multiple competencies and skills. Both primary and secondary.

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Shift: Embracing new skills

While teams still need core UX and design skills you also need to add facilitation as a core competency.

Designers must open up the design process. The team not the individual most own the product design.

Designers must take a leadership role in the team where they provide leadership and facilitation in a group brainstorming activities.

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Shift: Create cross-functional teams

Collaboration for many teams is a single discipline activity; developers solving problems with other developers, etc.

Involving everybody in process facilitates communication. Allows for a broader range of insights and creates a greater cohesion of all members working toward the same goal.

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Shift: Create small teams

Large groups are less efficient than smaller groups. Smaller teams also forces members to work on smaller problems and be more focused.

Jeff Bezos calls these “two-pizza teams.” If the team needs more than two pizzas for a meal, it’s to big.

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Shift: Create co-located collaborative workspaces

Co-locate teams to the same workspace which makes everybody more visible and accessible. Face to face conversation is more effective than anything else for showing some work, discussing, sketching, and exchanging ideas, understanding body language and facial expressions (sub-text), when trying to reach a resolution on something.

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Shift: Eliminate “Big DesignUp Front”

Instead of documenting and presenting a complete product from end to end MVPs (minimum viable products) allow for ideas to be seen much sooner than before. It gives a glimpse into actual product experience and allows for a quicker iteration of designs to be more usable and feasible.

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Shift: Speed first, aestheticssecond

Jason Fried, CEO of 37Signals once said “speed first, aesthetics second.”

He is not talking about compromising quality.

It is creating about creating the MVP (minimum viable product) to demonstrate something to start the whole evolutionary cycle of iterations. Your first design will not be perfect, what you want is it to be useable enough to start to start the process.

Get it done, get it out there, discuss, modify based on discussion, and iterate.

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Shift: Valuing problem solving

Companies value problem solving over aesthetics. The ability to illustrate the path you take to get from an idea to validated learning to end experience is what is valuable.

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Shift: Embracing UX debt

It’s often the case in agile environment that you do not go back to improve the user experience.

“It’s not iterative if you only do it once.”

To improve the team needs to do more than refactor code and address technical debt. The team also has to commit to evaluating, reworking, and improving the user interface and experience based on user feedback and testing.

UX debt is the commitment to continuous improvement of the user experience.

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Shift: After LEAN UX transition backto company document standards

Yes, many organizations have strict documentation standards. However, as hypotheses are proven and design directions are solidify then transition back to documentation required by company. Otherwise it is waste to document something that you might discard after testing.

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Shift: Be realistic about yourenvironment

Change can be disconcerting for many individuals who are used to do things in a certain way. So in many cases it is best to ask forgiveness instead of permission.

Proving that you saved time and money or create a more successful outcome will better make your case than asking permission and explaining why you think it will produce better results.