UXBC #26: Lean UX

Marcin Kinderman
&
Wojciech Staszczyk
21 XII 2016

Agile refers to a set of values and principles put
forth in the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto was a
reaction against heavyweight methodologies that
were popular, yet crippling software projects from
actually doing what they needed to do – create
software that helped the customer! I believe Agile’s
values & principles work because of the science
behind Lean and so you’ll see a lot of similar themes
repeated in agile.
1. Highest priority is customer satisfaction
7. Progress measured by working software
2. Welcome changing requirements
8. Sustainable development pace
3. Frequent delivery of software
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence
4. Business people & developers cooperating daily
10. Simplicity
5. Build projects around motivated people
11. Self-organizing teams
6. Face-to-face conversation is best
12. Regular reﬂection & adaptation
Lean vs Agile
Lean comes from Lean Manufacturing and is a set of
principles for achieving quality, speed & customer
alignment (same as what we’re trying to do with agile
development, right?).
1. Eliminate Waste
2. Deliver Fast
3. Build Quality In
4. Respect People
5. Create Knowledge
6. Optimize the Whole
7. Defer Commitment
In a nutshell, Lean says to relentlessly eliminate anything
that isn’t adding value and only work on what we
absolutely need to be doing at this moment in time.
Eliminating waste means eliminating useless meetings,
tasks and documentation. But it also means eliminating
time spent building what “we know” we’ll need in the
future (things are constantly changing so we often end up
not needing them – or if we do, we have to rework them
because conditions and our understanding has changed by
then). It also means eliminating inefﬁcient ways of
working – like multitasking (!) – so we can deliver fast.
link do źródła

Authors:
Jeff Gothelf & Joshua Seiden
Hey! I’m Jeff Gothelf and I’ve worked for 20+ years as a designer, team leader,
author and coach. These days I spend my time as a coach, workshop leader and
public speaker. In 2013, I published my ﬁrst book, Lean UX: Applying lean
principles to improve user experience (O’Reilly). In 2016 I published the 2nd edition
of Lean UX and a new business book called Sense & Respond (Harvard Business
Press)..
My work today mainly focuses on building and training evidence-based, customer-
centered executive & product teams. These teams often utilize lean principles and
agile software development.
I am a strategist, designer, and coach in NYC.
Also a frequent conference speaker.
More Than This is my blog.
Here is my book on Lean UX.
I also wrote Sense and Respond.
A overview of my portfolio of work.
My proﬁle on Linkedin.
My presentations on Slideshare.
My Flickr page.
Follow me on Twitter.
Get involved with the IxDA.

Chapter 1. Why Lean
UX?
Part I. Introduction and Principles

Chapter 2. Principles
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and
tools
2. Working software over comprehensive
documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan. The
assumption in Lean UX is that the initial product
designs will be wrong, so the goal should be to ﬁnd
out what’s wrong with them as soon as possible

Chapter 3. Vision,
Framing and Outcomes
Part II. Process
The hypothesis statement is the starting point for a
project. It states a clear vision for the work and shifts
the conversation between team members and their
managers from outputs (e.g., “we will create a single
sign-on feature”) to outcomes (e.g., “we want to
increase the number of new sign-ups to our service”).

Assumptions
The ﬁrst step in the Lean
UX process is to declare
your assumptions. Every
project starts with
assumptions, but usually
we don’t explicitly
acknowledge this fact.
Instead, we try to ignore
assumptions, or worse,
treat them as facts.

Hypotheses
• it’s so important to include qualitative feedback in your
success criteria. Are people delighted by a design? Do
they recommend your product to their friends? Do they
tweet about it? When you look for success metrics,
remember that it’s not all numbers.
• The Importance of Benchmarks: Remember, none of
your metrics will be meaningful if you don’t have a
benchmark in place prior to writing your hypotheses. That
benchmark — the current state of the metrics you’re using
to determine your idea’s success — needs to be captured
ahead of time to ensure that the team knows what it’s
targeting.

Outcoms
KPI prioritization with candy
After consolidating to the list
shown in the photo, each
executive was given four M&Ms.
As long as they managed not to
eat their votes, these executives
were able to vote (with candy)
for each metric they felt was
most important.
Setting priorities with the client using M&M's

Personas
In Lean UX, we change the
order of operations in the
persona process. When creating
personas in this approach, we
start with assumptions and then
do research to validate our
assumptions. Instead of
spending months in the ﬁeld
interviewing people, we spend a
few hours creating proto-
personas. Proto-personas are
our best guess as to who is
using (or will use) our product
and why.
Persona created together with the client at the workshop

Chapter 4.
Collaborative design

Design Studio
Design Studio follows this path:
1. Problem deﬁnition and
constraints
2. Individual idea generation
(diverge)
3. Presentation and critique
4. Iterate and reﬁne (emerge)
5. Team idea generation
(converge)
Here’s what you’ll need:
• Pencils
• Pens
• Permanent markers (multiple colors/
thicknesses)
• Highlighters (multiple colors)
• Sketching templates (you can use
preprinted 1-up and 6-up templates or you
can use blank sheets of 11″ × 17″ paper
divided into six boxes)
• 25″ × 30.5″ self-stick easel pads
• Drafting dots (or any kind of small
stickers)

Style Guides
• One tool that makes collaborative design easier is the style guide. A style
guide is a broadly accepted pattern library that codiﬁes the interactive,
visual, and copy elements of a user interface and system. Style guides
(also known as pattern libraries) are a living collection of all of your
product’s customer-facing components. If it’s made of pixels, it goes in the
style guide. Headers, footers, grids, forms, labels, button logic, and
everything else that goes into your product’s user experience goes in the
style guide.
• Characteristics of a Successful Style Guide: A successful style guide
has three important characteristics: it’s accessible, it’s continually
improved (a.k.a. a living document), and it’s actionable.
• Maintaining a Style Guide: Assign an owner to the style guide. That
person need not be singlehandedly responsible for the creation of content
in the style guide itself,

General Electric (case study)
The IIDS is based on modern HTML5
frameworks such as Bootstrap, jQuery,
and others, but looks nothing like them
(see Figure 4-5 and Figure 4-6). It is
a branded, functional UI design
pattern library. It provides the
graphical assets, code snippets, and
usage rules for each of GE’s
templated product experiences. The
team also built example applications
to aid other teams in the composition
of applications. The IIDS also includes
typical customer personas so that
project teams can get a clear sense of
their target customers and how the
intended customer affects the design
pattern choices they make.

Chapter 5. MVPs and
Experiments

Creating an MVP
When you start planning your MVP, the ﬁrst
thing you have to do is consider what you’re
trying to learn. It’s useful to think about these
three basic questions:
1. Is there a need for the solution I’m
designing?
2. Is there value in the solution and features
I’m offering?
3. Is my solution usable?
(…) And keep one last thing in mind: in many
cases, your MVP won’t involve any code at all.
Instead, you will rely on many of the UX
designer’s existing tools: sketching,
prototyping, copywriting, and visual design.

Prototyping
• Knowing your audience allows you to create the smallest possible prototype that will
generate meaningful feedback from this audience.
• Stakeholders, often less familiar with their own product than they’ll ever admit, will likely
need a greater level of ﬁdelity in the prototype in order to truly grasp the concept.
Types:
• Low-Fidelity Prototypes: Paper
• Low-Fidelity Prototypes: Clickable Wireframes
• Mid- and High Fidelity Prototypes
• Tools for creating mid- and high-ﬁdelity clickable wireframes
• Coded Prototypes
• Hand-coded and live-data prototypes

Demos and Previews
• Prototypes help show the project’s stakeholders
that progress is being made. If your team has a
demo day (and if it doesn’t, it should), bring the
prototype there to show progress on the project.
The more exposure the MVP gets, the more insight
you’ll have as to its validity. Next, take your
prototype to customers and potential customers.
Let them click through the experience and collect
their feedback.

Non-prototype MVPs
The mantra to keep in mind when creating non-prototype
MVPs is this: you can always go leaner. To plan your MVP,
ask yourself the following questions:
1. What am I trying to learn?
2. What are the main signals I need from the market to
validate my hypothesis?
3. Are there any other signals I can test for that will serve as
indicators for my main signal?
4. What’s the fastest way for me to ﬁnd this information?

Chapter 6. Feedback
and Research

Continuous and
Collaborative
Lean UX takes basic UX
research techniques and
overlays two important ideas.
First, Lean UX research is
continuous; this means that you
build research activities into
every sprint. (…) Second, Lean
UX research is collaborative: you
don’t rely on the work of
specialized researchers to
deliver learning to your team.
Instead, research activities and
responsibilities are distributed
and shared across the entire
team.

Continuous Discovery
In general, knowing you’re never more than a few
days away from customer feedback has a powerful
effect on teams. It takes the pressure away from your
decision making because you know that you’re never
more than a few days from getting meaningful data
from the market.

Making Sense of the
Research - A Team Activity
• When the team has reassembled, ask
everyone to read their findings to each
other. An efficient way to do this is to
transcribe the notes people read out
loud onto index cards or sticky notes,
then sort the notes into themes. This
process of reading, grouping, and
discussing gets everyone’s input out on
the table and builds the shared
understanding that you seek. With
themes identified, you and your team
can then determine next steps for your
MVP.
• Park your outliers: As tempting as it is
to ignore outliers (or try to serve them in
your solution), don’t do it. Instead,
create a parking lot or backlog for them.
Research in LaWonderlab with post-it summary after each test

Chapter 7. Integrating
Lean UX and Agile
Part III. Making It Work

Beyond the Scrum Team
• Proactively reach out to your product owners and executives.
• Let them know:
• How the project is going - What you tried so far and learned -
What you’ll be trying next
• Keep the conversations focused on outcomes (how you’re trending
towards your goal), not feature sets.
• Ensure that dependent departments (customer service, marketing,
ops, etc.) are aware of upcoming changes that can affect their work.
• Provide them with plenty of time to update their workﬂows if
necessary.

Chapter 8. Making
Organizational Shifts

SHIFT: New Skills for UX
Designers
Designers must open up the design process.
The team — not the individual — must own the
product design. Instead of hiding behind a monitor
for days at a time, designers must bring teams into
the design process, seek their input, and build that
insight into the design. Doing so will begin to break
down silos and allow a more cross-functional
conversation to take place.

SHIFT: Managing Up and
Out
You must constantly reach out to members of your organization who
are not currently involved in your work to make sure they’re aware of
what’s coming down the pike. This communication will also make you
aware of what others are planning and help you coordinate. Customer
service managers, marketers, parallel business units, and sales
teams all beneﬁt from knowing what the product organization is up to.
(…) Two valuable lessons to ensure smoother validation cycles:
• There are always other departments that are affected by your work.
Ignore them at your peril.
• Ensure that customers are aware of any signiﬁcant upcoming
changes and allow them to opt out (at least temporarily).

Thank you for your attention
and please visit us on our fanpage
All quotes are taken from the book
„Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience”

UXBC #26: Lean UX

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