Lean user experience principle

This article is the second chapter "Lean UX", and translated by the Graduate School of Design, Jiangnan University Liu Zhaofeng, Author: Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. As far as I know, Lean comes from Toyota's Lean Manufacturing. It is a high-quality product that is flexible and adaptable to the needs of the pursuit of reasonableness and high efficiency in the production process, reducing waste. Recommended reading "Lean Thinking Series: Toyota mode (Leadership)" and "Toyota mode: Lean manufacturing 14 management principles." "Lean Startup" is Eric's introduction of the concept of lean manufacturing, and its introduction into the product design process, and agile development has many differences. "Lean User Experience" is to reflect on and optimize the design process from the perspective of designers, it is worth to designers, especially design management personnel to read. This article is for study and research only, is forbidden to reprint.

In implementing Lean User Experience, you will find that it has a core set of principles. These principles cover the implementation process, collaboration, management and more. Teams following these guidelines will benefit greatly from using lean user experience. As your team embarks on a lean user experience, these principles can give your team direction, keeping these principles in mind, and the lean user experience process I'll describe later in this book. Depending on the individual teams, you will inevitably have to adjust the lean user experience process to match your team, and these chapters explain these principles, which will provide guidance for your work.

Finally, if you apply these principles to practice, you will find that you will change the entire team culture. Some principles will have a significant impact compared to the other, while promoting more difficult, while others are relatively easy to implement. Either way, each principle is described in detail here to help you build a product design team that is strong in all aspects of collaboration, cross-functionalism, practicality, etc. to better suit today's realities.

Lean user experience of the three major

Lean user experience has three basic, the first is the design thinking.

Tim Brown, chief executive and president of IDEO, the legendary design house, sees design thinking as "an engine of innovation ... direct observation of what people want in their lives, what they need, what they do about a particular product's production, packaging , Marketing, sales, and service habits ... [Design Thinking] is a discipline that uses the power of designers to translate viable technologies into business strategies and users that translate into customer value and market opportunities The needs match. "

Design thinking is important in a lean user experience because design thinking needs to work in every aspect of a business activity that can be solved by design. It gives designers access to authority and guidance at work, breaking the limitations of what was once designed. Design thinking also encourages non-designers to use design methods to solve the problems they face in their respective jobs. Design thinking is to encourage people in different roles in a team to work together and to consider product design as a whole an important foundation.

The second foundation of lean user experience is agile software development. For years, software developers have used agile development methods to shorten design cycles and deliver results to customers in a continuous manner. While the agile approach to development poses some challenges for designers (solutions are covered in Part 3), the core values ​​of agile development are also the focus of lean user experience. The Lean User Experience applies the four core principles of agile development to product design:

Personal and interaction outperform processes and tools. In order to quickly produce the best solution, you have to mobilize the power of the entire team, the team frequently to exchange ideas. The constraints of the current design process and production tools prevent colleagues from talking to each other. The available working software is better than the comprehensive document. Every business problem has an endless solution, and every team member may come up with the best solution. The challenge is finding the most viable solution from numerous solutions. By rapidly building the available work software for analysis, the market fit and feasibility of the solution can be assessed. Consumer participation outweighs contractual negotiation. Build consensus and propose solutions to a problem with your team members and users. This approach creates a consensus-based solution. What is the result? Faster product iterations and real involvement in the manufacturing process are all based on the team's confirmatory perception of the idea. It also reduces the reliance on heavy documents, and everyone in the team is involved in decision making, which in the past typically required written communication and discussion. The plan responds to changes. The assumption of lean user experience is that the initial product design was wrong, so our goal now is to get the problem out of the way. Once we find out what works and what does not work, we improve our advice and test again. This input from the market keeps us agile and continues to drive us in the "more correct" direction.

The third foundation of the lean user experience is the creation of a lean startup by Eric Rice. Lean startups use a feedback loop called "development-evaluation-awareness" to reduce project risk and speed up team building and learning rates. Teams create MVPs that are delivered quickly so team members have some understanding of the product as early as possible.

"Lean Startup initially advocated the creation of rapid prototyping to test market assumptions and improved design based on user feedback that would be much faster than traditional software engineering practices ... Lean startups reduce resources by increasing the frequency with which real users come in contact Wasteful and therefore require testing as soon as possible to avoid false market assumptions. "- Eric

Lean user experience is the application of this design philosophy directly to product design practices.

Each design is to propose a business solution - a hypothesis. Your goal is to use user feedback as effectively as possible to validate the proposed solution and feasibility. To validate each hypothesis, you can establish the most basic MVP for testing, the most streamlined and viable product. MVP does not need to write code, it strives to be close to the end user experience. Collect data from MVP tests to improve design ideas and then do a test.

The Lean User Experience is a lean user experience approach that aims to show the true nature of the product as soon as possible, reduce the reliance on design documents through a collaborative and cross-functional approach, and focus on building consensus on the real-life aspects of the product.

in principle

For the rest of this chapter, I'll show you some of the principles of lean user experience. When you practice lean user experience in practice, it's important to keep these principles in mind. Take this experience of lean user experience as a learning trip. By using these principles, you and your team stay in the right direction.

Principle 1: Praise the functional team

what is this? Cross-functional teams are created from members of diverse disciplines to create a product-team structure. Anyone with a background in software engineering, product management, interactive design, visual design, content strategy, marketing, and quality assurance (QA) should be absorbed into the Lean User Experience team. Lean user experience requires a high level of collaboration across disciplines. Their participation must be sustained and can not be halted, from the first day of the project until the last day of the project.

Why did you do this? Diverse team mode subverts the traditional design of so-called waterfall-like links. Members of different academic backgrounds can come up with ideas for each idea early in the design process. Inter-departmental communication is encouraged in the team to promote the efficiency of the team.

Principle 2: small, dedicated, gathered

what is this? Simplify team size and keep your core team members at no more than 10 people. All members should get together and work together in one project.

Why did you do this? The interests of small teams boil down to three words: communication, focusing, and friendship. Smaller teams make it easier to keep the project phase, content changes and new perceptions flowing. Put the team into a project and keep everyone in the team always on the same priority. Team members all get together in the same place so that good relationships between colleagues can be quickly established.

Principle 3: Project Progress = Achievement, not output

what is this? Features and services are output. The business goal is to achieve the product or service results. The Lean User Experience assesses project progress based on well-defined business outcomes.

Why did you do this? When we try to predict which features will bring specific results, it can often be seen as a speculation. While specific features are easy to manage prior to launch, we also have no idea of ​​its effectiveness until it actually reaches the market. By managing the results (and the progress they make), we can take control of the effects of the features we've created. If a feature does not work well, we can make an objective decision: maintain the status quo, change the strategy, or replace other features.

Principle 4: Focus on the team

what is this? The problem-focused team is a team that is designed to solve business problems rather than focus on the implementation of one function. This is a logical extension of the payoffs team that focuses on outcomes.

Why did you do this? Allowing the team to solve business problems independently shows the trust of the entire team. Allow team members to come up with their own solutions that drive the deep sense of honor and ownership that members have when they solve the team's problems.

Principle 5: Reduce waste

what is this? A core principle of lean manufacturing is to remove those elements that are not relevant to achieving the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal in implementing lean user experiences is to optimize the results of improvements; therefore, any element that is not relevant to improving the results can be considered a waste of disguise and should be removed from the team's practice.

Why did you do this? Team resources are limited. The more elements the team proposes to waste resources, the faster the team works. What the team wants is an efficient operational team that can face the challenge at work. Removing waste can focus the team's focus on the issue's point.

Principle 6: Small quantities

what is this? Another basic principle from lean manufacturing is the use of small quantities. Lean Manufacturing maintains a balance of low stocks and high quality by practicing this philosophy. Porting this philosophy to lean user experience means that creating a design prototype is a must for pushing team work processes to avoid large untested inventories and unrealized design ideas.

Why did you do this? High-volume design brings low team productivity. Because of the need to force the team

Waiting for high volume design delivery. This prevented the team from validating the idea's idea, leaving some team members inevitably idle and idle, leaving some of the design ideas to be left behind and ultimately unused. This method is a waste of resources, not to maximize the cognitive potential of the team as a whole.

Principle 7: Continuous Discovery

what is this? Continuous discovery refers to the continuous engagement of users in the design and development phases. This participation process is achieved through regular activities, both quantitative and qualitative. Our goal is to understand how users use your product and why they want to do it. Do regular research on a schedule that involves the entire team.

Why did you do this? Regular conversations with users provide the team with more opportunities to validate new product ideas. By integrating the entire team into the research cycle, the team is able to establish empathy for the user and the problems that face them. Finally, team members get together to explore ways to reduce the need for verbal communication and document reporting in the future.

Principle 8: GOOB's new user-centric approach

what is this? It may sound like a baby's first words, but GOOB is actually an acronym for what Stanford University professor, entrepreneur and author Steve Blank called the "going out of the building." This is because people are aware that in the meeting room, discussing what the user's needs are and ultimately getting the solution they want. Instead, the answer to the question is in the market, outside your office building. Many years after advocating for user research, UX researchers eventually got Steve Blank from the business world. Blanck's advice is: Give your potential users faster feedback on your ideas than in the past. Test your thoughts with cruel facts early in your design. It is better to find mistakes in the design direction earlier so you do not have to spend time and resources creating a product that nobody else is interested in.

Why did you do this? Ultimately, the success or failure of the product is not by the team, but by the user's decision. The Buy Now button was designed by you, but whether you click or not depends on the user. The sooner you get feedback from your users, the sooner you know whether the idea works.

Principle 9: Consensus

what is this? Consensus is a shared understanding that teams have built up over a long period of cooperation, including a rich understanding of problem areas, products, and users.

Why did you do this? A common understanding is essential in lean user experience. If team members agree on what is being done and why, then the team does not have to rely on secondhand research and detailed documentation to continue the rest of the job.

Principle 10: Opposites - Stars, Masters, and Masters

what is this? Lean User Experience advocates a mentality based on teamwork, while celebrities, masters, masters and other elite experts take an uncooperative attitude that undermines team cohesion.

Why did you do this? Celebrities will neither share their thoughts with you, nor will they share the glory of the spotlight. When someone in the team is self-conscious and determined to stand up and become a star, team cohesion suddenly collapsed. When collaborations are broken, the team loses the environment previously created to promote a teamwork that works efficiently, and inevitably falls into the process of repeated design iterations.

Principle 11: Externalization

what is this? The idea of ​​externalization is to show your mind and your computer ideas and scenarios to the public. Let team members, colleagues, and users see the progress of the team with foam boards, whiteboards, drawing walls, printed notes and notes.

Why did you do this? The work of externalizing the idea of ​​each team member's mind on the wall, so that everyone can see the team is now at what stage. This creates a constant flow of information within the team, drawing ideas from the shared ideas and inspiring new ideas. It allows all team members - even those who are usually speechless - to participate in information sharing activities. Notes or whiteboard sketches are as important as the most prominent members of your team in your team.

Principle 12: Do things better than analysis

what is this? Lean user experience advocates doing things better than analysis. It would make more sense to create the first version of an idea as soon as possible than to spend half a day in a conference room discussing its advantages.

Why did you do this? Encounter problems, can not find the answer in the conference room. Instead, the answer to the question exists for the user. In order to find the answers to these questions, you need to be specific - you need to make something that gives people feedback. The controversy over ideas is a waste of time and effort. Make something out of the building to verify it, instead of analyzing every possible situation in the room.

Principle 13: Learning Outweighs Growth

what is this? Finding the right product and expanding your business at the same time is hard. They are a paradox. Lean user experience advocates learning cognitive first, business expansion second.

Why did you do this? Feeling free to expand an unconfirmed idea is a dangerous thing. It may or may not achieve its purpose. If it eventually turns out to be unmanageable and you've extended it to the entire user base, that means the entire team wasted precious time and resources. Be sure to make sure the idea is correct before scaling to mitigate the inherent risk of extensive feature deployment.

Principle 14: Failure Rights

what is this? To find the best solution to a business problem, the Lean UX team needs to validate ideas experimentally and most of the ideas prove to be wrong. If a team wants to be successful, they must be able to resolve them safely when they fail. Having a failed entitlement means that the team needs a secure lab environment. Such environments refer to both the technical environment - they can promote ideas in a safe manner and cultural environments - they are not punished for the failure of their ideas to be verified as failures.

Why did you do this? The failure of the right to produce a so-called experimental culture, that experiment gave birth to innovation, in turn, innovation has created a new solution. When teams no longer feel scared of failing to work, they tend to take the risk of trying, and those good ideas are ultimately rooted in high-risk attempts. As the saying goes to failure is the mother of success, the same applies here.

In the video, "Why You Need Failure," Derek Severs, founder of CD Baby, tells an interesting story about ceramics. On the first day of classes, the teacher announced that the students will be divided into two groups.

A group of students only need to make one pottery per semester, their grades will depend on the quality of that clay pot. Another group of students is based on the weight of their terrine made during the semester. If they do a 50-pound pot or more, they get an A, 40 pounds will get B, 30 pounds to C and so on. Grades and what they actually do nothing at all. The teacher said he would not even look at the pots they made, and he only weighed the students by the bathroom scale on the last day of the semester.

At the end of the semester, a fun thing happened. External observers of the course pointed out that the highest quality clay pots have been completed by a "weight-determining" panel. They spent the whole semester making pots as quickly as possible, sometimes failing sometimes. But they learned something new from every experiment. Through this learning process, they have better achieved their ultimate goal: to create high-quality pots.

In contrast, the group of students who did only one pottery did not learn to grow quickly without experiencing failure, and no student in the "weight-determination" group did well. They spent a semester pondering how to make a clay pot that could achieve Class A, but did not have a concrete practice to carry out this grandiose idea.

Principle 15: Do not talk about delivery

what is this? The lean UX design process is a shift from creating output documents to implementing end-result teams. As cross-functional collaboration increases, the conversation between the team and the stakeholders is no longer about what exactly to do, but more about what to achieve and what to expect.

Why did you do this? The final good product instead of the document to solve the problems faced by users. Teams should focus their attention on recognizing the features that have a primary impact and impact on users. It does not matter what prototype to use to discover, the most important is the quality of the product, and the quality of the market through its feedback to determine.

summary

This chapter presents a set of basic lean user experience principles. These are the key attributes that any Lean User Experience team must possess. As you start your Lean User Experience practice, I encourage you to use these principles to define your team composition, place of work, project goals, and concrete practices. In the second part, I'll put these principles into action and elaborate on my entire lean user experience.

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