Lean UX – Foundations, Key Principles, and Use  

Lean UX is a combination of Lean Start-up and user experience (UX) product development methodologies, but to understand how they have come together it is important to understand their individual histories. It began with Eric Ries and his book The Lean Startup; how today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses (2011). Ries had studied the Toyota lean manufacturing process, which according to Ries, "was a completely new way of thinking about the manufacturing of physical goods" (Ries, 2011). He wanted to find a way to apply this lean process to the entrepreneurial start-up environment of his own experience, where he had often worked on products that ultimately failed in the marketplace. Ries wanted to know why. He was also drawn to the ideas of Steve Blank who was promoting a new methodology called Customer Development that brought the customer to the forefront in start-up thinking (Unger & Chandler, 2012). Lean Start-up evolved for Ries into key principles like validation of a viable business model, creation of minimum viable product (MVP), resource efficiency, and creating products that customers will use and pay for (May, 2012).
Ries wanted to be sure that start-ups learned what customers wanted by applying focused testing early and often during design and development and adjusting the product vision quickly when necessary.

            Agile development methods also contribute to Lean UX. It has been challenging for user experience professionals to merge their processes with product development using the Agile method. Where the Waterfall development method allows for a series of steps; define, design, develop and deploy, Agile has a completely different approach with tight iterations of these steps and little focus on documentation or formal sign-offs (Unger & Chandler, 2012). In Marcio Cyrillo's article "Lean UX: Rethink Development," the author describes Lean UX as a "new way of thinking" where Lean UX challenges the traditional Waterfall dependency of UX (2011). For Cyrillo, another critical change is that UX designers, developer engineers and others work together closely on the same team. He encourages companies to "tear down the walls" between departments and enable teams to iterate ideas quickly for greater success in product development (Cyrillo, 2011).

            With these foundations, Lean UX has been increasingly adopted by both start-up and traditional companies as part of their new product development process.

Key Principles of Lean UX

Authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden agree and outline the principles of Lean UX in their book Lean UX, Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience (2014). For them, Lean UX is a combination of design thinking, Agile development and Lean Start-up methods. The authors discuss 15 principles of Lean UX, but the most prominent concepts of these are shared by many in the field when discussing its basic tenets.

• Cross functional teams

One of the foremost principles of Lean UX is the insistence on building cross-functional teams. These should include UX designers and researchers, development engineers, product owners and managers, and marketing and sales representatives. The idea is to collaborate quickly between departments rather than have areas of the company siloed as they have been in the past (McCoy, 2011). Working closely together, teams formulate idea hypotheses, test them, and act on the results of their analysis much more quickly. McCoy writes that "designing and building from the core out helps tune your product vision in response to stakeholder, market, and user feedback" (2011). Figure 1 illustrates the degree to which a team and representatives from all parts of the company work together. McCoy envisions a Product Ownership role which enlists the help of a Product Manager and Product Steward. The Product Steward, an evolution of the UX strategist role, has more responsibility towards the needs of users/customers.

It is important to note that the goal of Lean UX is to not simply solve a user feature problem, but to consider business goals in the larger view. Authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden describe this as "outcomes, not output" meaning that Lean UX is about solving business goals not refining product features (2016). In the article "Lean UX – The Next generation of User-Centered Agile Development," the authors agree that collaborative cross-functional design is more effective than a "lonely hero" designer coming to singular conclusions (Liikkanen, Kilpiö, Svan, & Hiltunen, 2014). With team members working together, they are more likely to work on the right challenge and find effective outcomes that benefit company goals.

As teams work to solve user problems with the bigger business picture in mind, another key Lean UX principle helps in that process. Continuous discovery means that users are engaged at all parts of the product design and development process. Users are part of the process to validate (test) ideas continually through many iterations of design. A team might begin with a low-fidelity mock-up and present it to users for early testing. As the project evolves, more of the product features become set and the next iterations presented to users can become progressively higher in fidelity. This validation is part of Learn - Build - Measure and is described by many regarding Lean UX practices (Unger & Chandler, 2012). See Figure 2.

As previously discussed, Lean UX favors multiple quick iterations of product prototypes over lengthy analysis. Long discussions about user needs are seen as less important than a functioning prototype that provides measurable feedback (Gothelf & Seiden, 2016). Rather than move forward with undefined success metrics, it is important to gather measurable feedback from many user tests. In A Project Guide to UX Design the authors state that key indicators are measured in the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP (Unger & Chandler, 2012). This MVP is not a product release as we are used to hearing it described in Agile, but rather a prototype of the product at any stage of its completion. Teams are using the MVP to test their hypotheses of user behavior, and record the measurable results. Included in this process is the belief that learning is the critical part of Lean UX. Teams are given "permission to fail" as experimentation is encouraged (Gothelf & Seiden, 2016). The obvious fact is that it is much better to fail in design and development than to fail after release to the marketplace.

Teams collaborating closely also means that less document sign-offs are required. For instance, if a developer and designer are working together on a team, there is no need for a wireframe artifact if a simple sketch of an idea is roughed out on a whiteboard (Gothelf & Seiden, 2016). This also applies to a larger team. When the sales manager can Skype with UX researchers just as a user shares their excitement over a new feature, that manager can see the benefit of this feature for the overall success of the product (Melder, 2016). There is no need for a lengthy description in a report. A simple bullet point in a final overview will do just as well, if not better.

Much like teams moving from Waterfall development to Agile, teams moving to Lean UX can also experience hurdles.

When teams combine from different parts of an organization, all members may not have the skills necessary to participate meaningfully in the UX process. In the experience of the authors of "Lean UX – The Next Generation," this meant an investment in teaching UI developers some UX research skills so that they could contribute in that area (Liikkanen, Kilpiö, Svan, & Hiltunen, 2014). That team considered a Lean UX process coach in the future. For other teams with members from a wide range of experience and backgrounds, a coach could be an important ingredient for success.

In their article "Why Agile teams fail without UX research," the authors describe five cases where Agile teams made errors in UX research which could easily apply to Lean UX teams (Convertino & Frishberg, 2017). They point out that a company client or customer is not always the final user. Teams should be wary of the purchaser of software, or the executive in charge of the buying decision acting as the user. This can also happen when sales support 'proxies' speak for the user. It is true that help/support individuals know much about their users, but they are not as knowledgeable about time of use or the environment of their users. This problem might be solved by creating several classes of persona or simply making sure  that real users are part of the Agile sprint user story.

          Additionally, the authors caution that teams must be aware that market research is not the same as UX research. Market research focuses on overall attitudes or likeliness to purchase, while UX research is about understanding the relationship between the product design and how people behave when using the product. UX research also places more emphasis on user responses after the purchase of a product (Convertino & Frishberg, 2017).

A key benefit of Lean UX is its fundamental position that developing a new product is a difficult and risky undertaking. It stresses that teams should not worry about getting bad feedback on an iteration/MVP. Striving to get information from real users cheaply and quickly benefits the company. Gathering feedback from users at every stage of development is how Lean UX can reveal flaws in the actual business strategy. As previously stated, this is a much better time to discover problems than in the alternative, where a product is created, released and there are no customers to buy or users who are willing to adopt.

With an understanding of what Lean UX brings to the success of new products for many start-up and traditional companies, it is not surprising that it is being fully explored and adopted by many teams. As with any new approach, there are cautionary tales and areas where there can be issues. Beverly May's article "Applying Lean Startup: An experience report," gives an important example (2012). Her company specialized in helping others launch products through UX services and she outlines what can happen when arrogance and corner-cutting get in the way of Lean UX best practices. Still, others emphasize that Lean UX is a flexible process and can be adapted to an individual company's needs. Lean UX is a methodology to strongly consider when developing a new product where there are many unknowns and a rapidly changing, and challenging, market. 

Convertino, G., & Frishberg, N. (2017). Why agile teams fail without UX research. Commun. ACM, 60(9), 35-37.

Cyrillo, M. (2011). Lean UX: Rethink development. Informationweek, (1316), 40-44.

Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J. (2016). Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience. Beijing: O'Reilly.

Liikkanen, L. A., Kilpiö, H., Svan, L., & Hiltunen, M. (2014). Lean UX - The Next Generation of User-Centered Agile Development? Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human- Computer Interaction Fun, Fast, Foundational - NordiCHI '14, 1095-1100. doi:10.1145/2639189.2670285

May, B. (2012, June-July). Applying Lean Startup: An Experience Report -- Lean & Lean UX by a UX Veteran: Lessons Learned in Creating & Launching a Complex Consumer App. Paper presented at the 2012 Agile Conference, Dallas, United States. Retrieved from
https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezproxy.depaul.edu/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6298105

McCoy, T. (2011, February 14). Lean UX, Product Stewardship, and Integrated Teams. Retrieved May 07, 2019, from https://www.cooper.com/journal/2011/02/lean_ux_product_stewardship_an

Melder, K. (2016). Nurturing Lean UX Practices. MSDN Magazine, 31(5), 52-55.

Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful business. New York: Crown Business.

Unger, R., & Chandler, C. (2012). A project guide to UX design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

Copyright 2019 Yvonne Nillissen