Lean UX

Book description

The Lean UX approach to interaction design is tailor-made for today’s web-driven reality. In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.

  • Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomes
  • Bring the designers’ toolkit to the rest of your product team
  • Share your insights with your team much earlier in the process
  • Create Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are valid
  • Incorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycle
  • Make your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum framework
  • Understand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UX

Lean UX received the 2013 Jolt Award from Dr. Dobb's Journal as the best book of the year. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.

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Table of contents

  1. Dedication
  2. Praise for Lean UX
  3. Foreword
  4. Preface
    1. What Is Lean UX and How Is It Different?
    2. Who Is Lean UX For?
    3. What’s In It for You?
    4. A Note from Jeff
    5. A Note from Josh
    6. From Jeff and Josh
  5. I. Introduction and Principles
    1. 1. Why Lean UX?
    2. 2. Principles
      1. The Three Foundations of Lean UX
      2. Principles
        1. Principle: Cross-Functional Teams
        2. Principle: Small, Dedicated, Colocated
        3. Principle: Progress = Outcomes, Not Output
        4. Principle: Problem-Focused Teams
        5. Principle: Removing Waste
        6. Principle: Small Batch Size
        7. Principle: Continuous Discovery
        8. Principle: GOOB: The New User-Centricity
        9. Principle: Shared Understanding
        10. Principle: Anti-Pattern: Rockstars, Gurus, and Ninjas
        11. Principle: Externalizing Your Work
        12. Principle: Making over Analysis
        13. Principle: Learning over Growth
        14. Principle: Permission to Fail
        15. Principle: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business
      3. Wrapping Up: Principles
  6. II. Process
    1. 3. Vision, Framing, and Outcomes
      1. Assumptions
        1. Method: Declaring Assumptions
          1. Who
          2. Preparation
        2. Method: Problem Statement
          1. Problem statement template
          2. Prioritizing assumptions
      2. Hypotheses
        1. Subhypotheses: Breaking the Hypothesis Down into Smaller Parts
        2. Completing Your Hypothesis Statements
      3. Outcomes
      4. Personas
        1. Proto-Personas
        2. Persona Format
        3. Persona Creation Process
      5. Features
        1. Feature Brainstorming Process
      6. Assembling Your Subhypotheses
      7. Conclusion
    2. 4. Collaborative Design
      1. Collaborative Design in Practice
      2. Design Studio
        1. Running a Design Studio
          1. Process
          2. Supplies
          3. Problem definition and constraints (15–45 minutes)
          4. Individual idea generation (10 minutes)
          5. Presentation and critique (3 minutes per person)
          6. Iterate and refine (5–10 minutes)
          7. Team idea generation (45 minutes)
      3. Style Guides
        1. Creating a Style Guide
        2. Maintaining a Style Guide
      4. Case Study
        1. What Goes Into a Style Guide?
        2. Characteristics of a Successful Style Guide
          1. Accessible
          2. Continually improved
          3. Actionable
        3. How Do You Create a Style Guide?
        4. Maintaining a Style Guide
        5. Not Just for Designers
        6. A Word about Live Style Guides
      5. Collaborating with Geographically Distributed Teams
        1. Worldwide Collaborative Design Session
          1. Setup
          2. Priming the pump with affinity mapping
          3. Design Studio with remote teams
      6. Wrapping Up: Collaborative Design
    3. 5. MVPs and Experiments
      1. About MVPs and Experiments
      2. The Focus of an MVP
      3. Creating an MVP
        1. Prototyping
        2. Low-Fidelity Prototypes: Paper
          1. Pros
          2. Cons
        3. Low-Fidelity Prototypes: Clickable Wireframes
          1. Pros
          2. Cons
          3. Tools for creating low-fidelity clickable wireframes
        4. Mid- and High Fidelity Prototypes
          1. Pros
          2. Cons
          3. Tools for creating mid- and high-fidelity clickable wireframes
        5. Coded Prototypes
          1. Hand-coded and live-data prototypes
          2. Pros
          3. Cons
      4. What Should Go Into My Prototype?
        1. Demos and Previews
      5. Putting It All Together: Using a Prototype MVP
        1. Non-prototype MVPs
      6. Types of Non-Prototype MVPs
      7. Hybrids and Creativity
      8. Conclusion
    4. 6. Feedback and Research
      1. Continuous and Collaborative
        1. Collaborative Discovery
          1. Collaborative discovery in the field
          2. Collaborative discovery: an example
        2. Continuous Discovery
          1. Continuous discovery in the lab: three users every Thursday
        3. Simplify Your Test Environment
        4. Who Should Watch?
        5. A Word about Recruiting Participants
      2. Case Study: Three Users Every Thursday at Meetup
        1. Making Sense of the Research—A Team Activity
        2. Confusion, Contradiction, and (Lack of) Clarity
        3. Identifying Patterns over Time
        4. Test Everything
        5. Sketches
        6. Static Wireframes
        7. High-Fidelity Visual Mockups (Not Clickable)
        8. Mockups (Clickable)
        9. Coded Prototypes
      3. Monitoring Techniques for Continuous, Collaborative Discovery
        1. Customer Service
        2. Onsite Feedback Surveys
      4. Conclusion
  7. III. Making It Work
    1. 7. Integrating Lean UX and Agile
      1. Some Definitions
      2. Beyond Staggered Sprints
      3. Building Lean UX into the Rhythm of Scrum
        1. Themes
        2. Kickoff Sessions for Sketching and Ideation
        3. Iteration Planning Meeting
        4. User Validation Schedule
      4. Participation
      5. Design Is a Team Sport: Knowsy Case Study
        1. The Innovation Games Company
        2. A Shared Vision Empowers Independent Work
        3. Breaking the Design Bottleneck
        4. The Outcome
      6. Beyond the Scrum Team
      7. Conclusion
    2. 8. Making Organizational Shifts
      1. SHIFT: Outcomes
      2. SHIFT: Roles
      3. SHIFT: New Skills for UX Designers
      4. SHIFT: Cross-Functional Teams
      5. SHIFT: Small Teams
      6. SHIFT: Workspace
      7. SHIFT: No More Heroes
      8. No More BDUF, Baby
      9. SHIFT: Speed First, Aesthetics Second
      10. SHIFT: Value Problem Solving
      11. Shift: UX Debt
      12. SHIFT: Agencies Are in the Deliverables Business
        1. A Quick Note about Development Partners
      13. SHIFT: Working with Third-Party Vendors
      14. SHIFT: Documentation Standards
      15. SHIFT: Be Realistic about Your Environment
      16. SHIFT: Managing Up and Out
      17. A Last Word
      18. Conclusion
  8. A.  
  9. Index
  10. About the Author
  11. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: Lean UX
  • Author(s): Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
  • Release date: March 2013
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781449311650