I’ve just finished reading the brilliant Lean UX which overviews key Lean UX principles and gives advice on how to incorporate them into an agile development environment. Building upon the fundamentals of The Lean Startup, Lean UX encourages teams to move away from heavily documented handoffs to a process that creates only the design artefacts needed to move the team’s learning forward.
Being relatively new to agile, I found the ideas, case studies and guidelines helpful and practical. A lot of ground is covered such as collaboration with other team members of the product team, gathering feedback early and often and designing in short, iterative cycles.
Section 3 was particularly interesting. It tackled the integration of Lean UX practices into an organisation and the shifts needed to take place for the ideas to truly take hold. Common designer concerns were addressed, many of which I can relate to:
“For some designers, Lean UX threatens what they see as their collective body of work…“version one” of a project, and other low-fidelity artefacts are not the makings of a “killer portfolio,” but all of that now is changing.
Although your organization must continue to value aesthetics, polish, and attention to detail, the ability to think fast and build shared understanding must get a promotion. Designers can demonstrate their problem solving skills by illustrating the path they took to get from idea to validated learning to experience. In doing so, they’ll demonstrate their deep worth as designers. Organisations that seek out at and reward problem solvers will attract – and be attracted to – those designers.”
In summary, Lean UX is a great overview of what an effective Lean UX process should look like. There’s a good balance between theory, practical advice, and case studies with many takeaways that I will experiment with in future projects. Highly recommended.