Agile/Lean UX

Agile or Lean UX (User eXperience) is about incorporating UX into the flow of work of a development team. Many try the approach of having the UX people work 1-2 Sprints ahead of the development team. This can work, however the pipeline model leads to some additional challenges with work being done on items that change before implementation, therefore wasting the UX person’s time. The approach from Lean UX is to instead increase collaboration between UX and the rest of the development team. Over time, this collaboration increases the amount of UX work done in Sprint and reduces the amount done ahead of time.

Abbreviated Principles

Team Group:

• Problem (or Outcome) focused, not Deliverable focused
• Truly Cross-Functional i.e. includes UX

Culture Group:

• Run Experiments to go from Doubt to Certainty
• Shared Understanding is key
• No Rock Stars or Ninjas

Process:

• Continuous Discovery
• GOOB - Get Out Of the Building - cute way of saying test with real customers
• Making over Analysis

Shortest Summary of the Method

• Declare Assumptions - find them in your problem statement and anywhere else you can.
• Hypotheses - create testable hypotheses for the most important assumptions that need to be validated.
• Outcomes - what outcomes would make each Hypothesis testable
• Personas - lightweight proto personas over heavily researched. Favouring testing to discover if we understood our audience. Key parts: Name and sketch; Demographics/Personal Information; Pain Points; Solution.
• Features (or user stories) are only created to support outcomes. Don’t create features and then seek to justify them; instead focus on the features that support outcomes.