This document discusses lessons learned from building projects using lean UX and design thinking principles. It outlines the typical project process including design, build, challenges and solutions. Key lessons include numbering design thinking cards, conducting empathy interviews, prototyping for empathy, focusing research on validating hypotheses with users, and triaging stories for the best cross-functional pairs. The document promotes integrating product, design and development into one team to follow an iterative process of thinking, making and checking.
25. 9 Principles of Lean UX
1. Design + Product + Development = 1 team
2. Externalize!
3. Goal-driven & outcome-focused
4. Repeatable & routinized
5. FLOW: think, make, check
6. Focus on solving the right problem
7. Generate many options & decide quickly what to pursue
8. Recognize hypotheses & validate them
9. Research with users is the best source of information & inspiration
Thanks for having me. I’m super glad this community exists, even though I don’t get to come out to the events much.\nDavid Hendee, Design Director at Carbon Five\nC5 is a web and mobile software consultancy. Mostly Rails & iOS.\nDoing agile for 10 of our 11 years\nSmall, 25 people. \nAbout half our work right now is bootstrapping startups.\nStarted doing some full-service projects about a year ago.\nThis case study is one of our early attempts. We’re still learning.\n
List of links to follow along for those who have to have more than one thing vying for their attention at once.\n
This is my current, super secret project. We’re not doing design on it. This is all I can show you. I’m sure we’ve all seen this. A non-sustainable versioning scheme from a designer. I used to joke about this being totally dysfunctional. But this is reality right here. This is a current project and, despite a grueling deadline, it’s actually super functional. Maybe because of it. 5 weeks to design and build the thing with our design partner. So tons of overlap.\n
This is more our typical project. A design partner, or a design exists when we engage with a client. 2-4 months of building. Maybe some user testing during the build phase, probably not. And we’re not really on the hook once it launches.\n
This was our first project for ITVS, the same client that created OVEE. This was designed by our awesome design partners Hot Studio. We built it. We think it came out great. \n
This is more how we built OVEE. You can see it’s not done. We did a quick “inception” phase to borrow a term. It was a 2 week technical spike in parallel with some ethnography and user experience prototyping. Then an 8 week build phase that was further divided into mini milestones for user tests. Now we have a minimal product out in the market and we’re seeing where they take it. There’s a few pivots on the horizon for them most likely.\n
ITVS (independent television service) produces independent documentaries.\n
Here it is. I won’t be doing a demo tonight. You can check it out now if you want. Just turn down your volume.\n
We try to think about “design” as a verb rather than a noun at C5. I’ll be talking about 6 design activities we used when building the product.\n
This was the goal. (aka social screening)\n
this is community cinema. if you’ve been to a documentary film screening with a panel discussion afterwards, you’ve participated in community cinema. it’s valuable because of the documentary content, but more important because of the community that assembles. lots of non-profits making connections. but...how do we get there?\n
I split out Lean UX from Design Thinking. Sorry about that if in your head it’s the same thing. That’s totally valid.\n
But I hear a lot of people talking about how Lean Startup (not Lean UX per se) is great about optimizing but maybe not so great at innovating. You’ve probably all seen this diagram. It shows a local maxima. So this is your product right now. Lean is great at getting you to the top of whatever hill you’re on, but how do you get over here? Lots of folks just spitball it and see. I think Design Thinking is a great method to put some structure and collaboration around that Hill-finding process.\n
These are the design thinking modes. I’m not going to go through them all, but there’s a couple of links on the site. These circles are both a cyclical process and just a set of methods you can use whenever you need some help in one of the areas. Most of the time, we don’t get to tell clients “Hey, you need to back way up and do some empathy interviews.” Most of the time they’re already pretty passionate about their product ideas and the only way to really engage them is through prototypes and user testing. So we’ll talk a bit about a couple of design thinking activities we used on the project and then a few lean ux activities.\n
orient yourself to the space. other people have already had ideas. great ideas.\n
aka experience map\n
An activity, not an artifact.\n
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“Tell me about the last time you _____.”\nIf you get stuck ask “how” or “why”\ntwo people, one note-taker\none quote/observation per sticky.\ncluster.\nBe onsite\n
space challenged.\nput wireframes up on a wall. walk engineers through them. desk crit and quick and dirty user testing\n
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RITE Method, for Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation\nstickies for observations. we tracked “facts”, “needs” and “ideas” \nbut paul howe recommends just putting stickies on the wireframes on your wall\n