Developing a Lean UX Practice

Presented at Charlotte UX Meetup

Transcript

1. Developing a Lean UX Practice
   Senior Product Designer, Windsor Circle
   Wren Lanier
   @heywren
   

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2. Who I Am
   - Work at Windsor Circle, a startup in Durham
   - Design software for ecommerce marketers
   - UX Team of One
   …I love working on interesting problems
   

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3. My happy place
   

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4. Solutions in search of a problem are waste
   

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5. Reduces waste on design &
   product teams
   Lean UX
   

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6. Toyota Way (origin of Lean)
   

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7. Build
   Measure
   Learn
   

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8. The output of Lean teams is
   validated learning (not deliverables)
   Lean UX
   

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9. doubt certainty
   Reduce risk, replace it with learning
   

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10. Continuous validated learning 

    about your users
    Lean UX
    

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11. Four Lean Habits Anyone Can Adopt
    

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12. Focus on problems, not solutions
    1
    

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13. Product Death Cycle 

    by @davidjband
    

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14. Organizations who have grown up in a
    feature mindset will struggle with the
    shift to customer problems.
    “
    ”
    - Jared Spool
    Themes: A Small Change to Product Roadmaps with Large Effects
    

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15. Develop an efficient research cadence
    2
    

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16. • Pick a dedicated time for research
    • Same day, same time, every week
    • Divide it into time slots
    

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17. Use an office hours tool to allow
    users to self-schedule
    

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18. Committing to weekly research
    keeps your team accountable
    

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19. Use research to discover problems,
    share experiments, test mockups or
    prototypes
    

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20. Turn assumptions into hypotheses
    3
    

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21. • Because people will use this and love it
    • Because our competition built it
    • Because it will cause customers to do [thing]
    

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22. Assumptions are where risk
    hides in projects
    

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23. We can reduce risk by testing
    our assumptions
    

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24. Assumption: 

    Adding links to our daily email will increase logins
    Hypothesis: 

    When we add links to our daily email we will see an
    increase in logins. We will know this is true when we see
    increased click % and increased logins via the daily email.
    

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25. You can turn almost any piece
    of work into a hypothesis
    

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26. Test solutions with rapid experiments
    4
    

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27. An experiment is any low-effort
    way to test an assumption
    

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28. Experiments should try to
    simulate “real” conditions
    

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29. Real clients require more
    creativity and more honesty
    

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30. Usability tests are a great way to
    measure all sorts of things
    

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31. Run “beta” experiments with
    active customers
    

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32. Don’t get hung up on statistical
    significance
    

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33. Be honest about what you’re
    learning & what it means
    

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34. QUESTIONS?
    

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