Lean UX: Are You Collecting Sufficient Feedback and Validating Enough?

Understanding Lean UX and Its Suitability For Teams

In today’s dynamic environment, development teams need to be nimble and adept at dealing with change. No longer can development be done in isolated rooms for months at an end without understanding who it is for, do they really need it, and how do users respond to the product.

Agile methodology, design sprints and Lean UX are words that are mentioned often as being a staple in many development cycles. This article examines the lean approach, why it is important to get constant feedback and validate features, and whether Lean UX is a good fit for every team.

What is Lean UX?

In a recent article, O’Reilly pretty much summed it up perfectly:

Lean UX is a call to work iteratively, to streamline design and eliminate waste, to collaborate on cross-functional teams and, most importantly, to maintain a customer-centric perspective in our decision-making.

Deriving Lean from Agile

Lean UX and Agile UX are not exactly the same. But, yes, there are parallels and practices that are common to both. Agile is focused towards blending designers and developers into one team and ensuring that the development cycle is not rigid like in the waterfall model. Lean certainly borrows from the concepts of agile development, in that both are flexible and they aim to keep the development process as swift as possible.

But one of the highlights of Lean UX is applying the practices of lean startups and replicating that dynamic environment across small cross-functional teams. Quick collaboration and constant feedback within the team ensures a swift build-measure-learn cycle. Designers and developers work alongside product and business development people, which ensures that the entire team is focused on a single target. By having dedicated team members from different domains in the same space, teams are able to be nimble and adopt a quick problem solving approach.

Eric Ries’ book did help popularize the concept of lean startups and methodologies, but already the demand for innovation has become more intense and teams have shrunk over time for the purpose of saving costs. This meant having a development cycle that was conducive for faster iterations and quicker adaptation to users was only a natural evolution.

A Result Focused Environment For Collecting Feedback

A major focus in Lean UX is on producing an end result after each iteration that focuses on a specific goal. This could be a prototype or a mock design. It is essential that each development cycle produces some output which can then be tested and reviewed. Feedback on the output contributes to learning from that iteration and helps guide future iterations. If something is not validated, it is dropped and if it is validated, it is further expanded upon.

Unlike conventional development processes where the tasks are focused on heeding to a list of requirements in an uninterrupted cycle, lean approach concentrates on tackling particular challenges. This means time is wasted if your team goes down the development rabbit hole without considering the outcome and how valid the result will be.

Consider a Minimum Viable Product.

Already a lot of companies have adopted MVPs as a necessary step in the process of innovation. A minimum viable product or MVP ensures that only those features are built into a product that have been validated in the market.

Getting early feedback from users ensures that what is shipped is useful and delivers value to them. Dropbox founder, Drew Houston came up with the idea of testing out their minimum viable product to see user response. They released a simple video giving users a glimpse of how they could use Dropbox. As it turned out, the video gained loads of views and Dropbox’s beta list exploded overnight from 5,000 to 75,000 people. This gave the team validation that their product was, in fact, solving a genuine problem for users and would find traction.

Focus on what the users actually derive from the product. Whatever is most ardently adopted by users should be further built upon, and what is not finding any traction can be discarded or improved upon. This fail often, fail fast approach helps cull dead weight and ensure maximum value is delivered to the user.

Validate Assumptions and Learn from Metrics

To be able to iterate quicker and test new features, teams also need to challenge assumptions and track metrics.

Assumptions are an important concept within Lean UX. Since every requirement is not known from the get go in this approach, teams work with certain assumptions to work towards their target.

This post on guerrilla usability testing of Airbnb showcases how assumptions help shape the design process. Trying to understand the pain points in Airbnb’s rental booking process, the author makes one central assumption about the user persona, i.e. their age. The basis of the assumption is the age of employees at the companies Airbnb has partnered with, and the age of target audience represented in the marketing campaigns and pictures on Airbnb’s website. Assumptions, such as these, help give a solid base to the design process. While the article mentioned here is not aimed at an official redesign of Airbnb’s platform, it gives a peek into the kind of pointers Lean UX teams needs to keep in mind when making assumptions about the design process.

Assumptions are only useful if validated by hard data from the design process. Dropping whatever assumptions are invalid rapidly and learning from them is an equally important part of the lean approach. Challenging assumptions helps promote critical thinking and look for areas to improve and innovate in. Asking questions that challenge the status quo help gain insights into not only current user behavior but also anticipate how users may react in the future.

Asking questions such as — what is the most valuable feature for my user base? What is the easiest way users can navigate through the application? Should the search features be available from every screen to the user? What is the general workflow in which my application is used?

Design sprints help test and answer critical questions. source: http://www.gv.com/sprint/

GV’s Design Sprint lays out a week’s plan for creating a road map, when it comes to “answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers”. This DIY guide outlines how teams can conduct quick sprints covering hypothesis to mock ups to user testing in a week’s duration.

This post by Jay Vidyarthi lays out his hybrid sprint methodology by combining the Design Sprint and Jeff Gothelf’s Lean UX:

Once you have all that data collected from various assumptions, it’s time to start finding what matters and what doesn’t. Beware of vanity metrics and be sure to track actionable metrics. One example of a vanity metrics would be page views for a product’s selling page. It would be wrong for the team to track how many people visited or even shared the page. These statistics would only indicate engagement, which is clearly not the goal if the page is setup to sell something.

What the team should be tracking, rather, is how many people who visited the page clicked on a CTA or how many of the visitors went on to buy the product. These would constitute actionable metrics that provide solid data to the UX team to understand what the users are doing, why they may or may not be doing it, and what rectifications can be made to lead to the desired outcome. In this example, that would mean ensuring that maximum people convert or buy the product after visiting the page.

Understanding what are the important metrics will vary from case to case. It is key to identify clear, specific, quantitative and time-based metrics.

Is Lean UX A Good Fit For Your Team?

Well, it depends on the needs and circumstances of your team.

Unsurprisingly, an early startup can derive great value from the lean approach. Companies that are just starting out can do with a minimum viable product to validate their value delivery to users. Having a nimble setup can allow startups to pivot quickly if need be and adjust according to market demands. This approach can help nascent companies develop their product through quick iterations while ensuring they discard bloated features and get to the fundamental value of their offering that will connect with users.

Bigger established companies that are looking to test out a certain feature or validate a new launch can also adopt Lean UX. By following this approach, larger teams can be broken up into smaller units that compete against each other to validate their respective solutions. This would help ensure all eggs are not put into one basket and all possible avenues have been explored before a go-ahead is given for larger R&D exercises.

A great example of where a lean approach works is this article by Crazy Egg, about how they balance improving the core product’s features and working on newer features that customers are requesting:

To put is simply in the words of their product team:

Let customers guide your choices

Measure value by asking customers about their “willingness-to-pay”

Crazy Egg does this by showing low-fidelity mocks of features to customers. They then create a 2x2 matrix to prioritize what features would deliver more value to the customer, and to their business.

The priority matrix followed by Crazy Egg’s product team. source: https://www.typeform.com/blog/inside-story/crazy-egg/

Of course, there are also situations where Lean UX is not the best idea. Lean UX requires there to be a dedicated cross-functional team. Some enterprises are just not setup like that. The workflow may not allow complete dedication to one project in such intensive bursts. In those cases, teams will waste more time rather than gain value by following a lean approach.

Final Thoughts

Because of the streamlined nature of Lean UX, many people have started associating it with cost cutting measures. That perception is not an accurate reflection entirely. This post by Rick Bohan outlines why.

The most essential aspect of Lean UX is not limiting resources, rather it is having a nimble setup that allows flexibility and agility in a cross-functional team. Unlike teams where UX designers are consultants or guests on a team, Lean UX advocates having a fully dedicated designer or designers within the team, interacting with the product and business side of things along with engineers. Because of the concentrated problem solving and rapid learning focus of Lean UX teams, they are able to break down specific problems and tackle them at speed while deploying continuously. Learning from each iteration is then used to trim down the product’s focus to the valuable features that ensures a users are getting what they really need.