These are slides from my presentation at the Philly Front-end UX July 2016 meetup. I talk about leveraging ideas from feature film/animation story methods in a lean product and service design process.

1. Test Experiences,
not Products
Joel Eden, @joeleden
Philly Front end/UX/UI, July, 2016

2. Experiences vs Products
Lean (Startup)
Lean + Design
Topics

3. This is a product

4. This is a product, not an experience

5. More interesting view of a product, still not an experience

6. This is an experience!

7. This is an experience from the user’s perspective

8. Art (designer’s perspective) vs. Design (problem’s perspective)
Interactions happen over time therefore Interaction Design
must consider the interaction aesthetics of use (not just
visual):
(all senses…sense of timing, sense of rhythm, sense of humor)

9. This is a product, not an experience

11. All touchpoints are part of the experience
 the experience is the real product in many ways

12. Prototype fidelities vs Experience fidelities
Similar to Bill Buxton’s sketch concept:
“A prototype is a question rendered as an artifact”
–Scott Klemmer, PhD (teaches Coursera HCI course)
but…too often “prototype” is taken to mean “build”
Typical Prototype fidelities
-Visual (pencil sketch…Photoshop mock)
-Interaction (paper prototype…real behavior)
-Data (lorem ipsum…real data)
Instead, think about Experience fidelity:
-How do we get people to have a target experience that we
want to test, regardless of, or with the cheapest of material
prototype fidelities?

13. Lets try it…get out your paper and pencil

14. Lets try it…get out your paper and pencil
Draw: Your phone

15. Lets try it…get out your paper and pencil
Draw: Your phone
Draw: Your phone’s user interface

16. Lets try it…get out your paper and pencil
Draw: Your phone
Draw: Your phone’s user interface
Draw: Your phone’s user experience

17. Representing Experience – leverage story methods

18. Represent products/services as stories
After a long meeting, Anne pulls out her personal assistant to note
a couple of items she needs to follow up on, confirm the location of
her next meeting, and see if anything important has come up in the
last couple of hours.
The PA shows her the subject and location of her next
meeting, which is in 25 minutes. There’s also an indication that she
has three messages marked urgent (including one from her boss),
one message from a client whose messages she’s told the PA are
top priority, and a dozen others that can probably wait.
Narrative Scenarios
Storyboards
Product as a person

19. Hyper-real (Disney/Pixar trick)believable futures

20. Lean…lean startup, lean UX, agile UX
“A startup is a temporary organization used to search for
a repeatable and scalable business model.” –Steve Blank
“Lean Startup isn't about being cheap [but is about]
being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.” –
Eric Ries
“Lean is about continuously prioritizing and testing your
riskiest assumptions as fast and as cheap as possible…
always...not for a special week in a special room.” -Me

21. Lean (Startup) Build, Measure, Learn loop
But…
Goal is validated learning (loop around), as
fast as possible.

22. Lean Loop – But, need to go backwards to plan
experiments
1. What is my most
important/riskiest
hypothesis?
2. What would I need
to see happen to
(in)validate it?
3. What’s the fastest,
cheapest, least effort thing I
can make or do to test it
(learn)?

23. Need to go backwards to plan experiments
1. What is my most
important/riskiest
hypothesis?
2. What would I need
to see (data) to
validate it?
That’s what
MVP meant!!!!!
not “Build”
3. What’s the fastest,
cheapest, least effort thing I
can make or do to test it
(learn)?

24. Lean Canvas (1 page alternative to biz plan)
(Business Model Canvas  Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas  My
tweak)
Validate in numbered order

25. Defining experiments from hypotheses
Highest priority item gets tested
(place smaller bets, on smaller batches)
Turn assumptions  falsifiable hypotheses
www.slideshare.net/luxrco

26. Test what? Ash Maurya’s 3 stages of a
startup
Offer  MVP  Product
Instead of MVP at first:
Ash Maurya’s Offer: Unique Value Proposition, Demo of UVP, Exchange of

27. Lean Design
How can we test product and
service design ideas earlier, faster
and cheaper?

28. Test what? Ash Maurya’s 3 stages of a
startup
Offer  MVP  Product
Instead of MVP at first:
Ash Maurya’s Offer: Unique Value Proposition, Demo of UVP, Exchange of

29. Test offers (value propositions) using stories
After a long meeting, Anne pulls out her personal assistant to note
a couple of items she needs to follow up on, confirm the location of
her next meeting, and see if anything important has come up in the
last couple of hours.
The PA shows her the subject and location of her next
meeting, which is in 25 minutes. There’s also an indication that she
has three messages marked urgent (including one from her boss),
one message from a client whose messages she’s told the PA are
top priority, and a dozen others that can probably wait.
Narrative Scenarios
Storyboards
Your goal is to create value, not software, hardware, etc…
so test value!
Your value proposition is the intersection of your
customer’s needs and your solution.

30. Pitching value
Should be analogous to feature film story artists, iterating
and pitching (value) stories:
-Our customers/users or the product/service are the heroes
of these stories.

31. Experience Mapping (user story maps, customer journey maps, etc)
These are great for communicating current state, bridging into
product/dev work, but not as good for exploring and testing value.

32. Value pipeline: from story to building
In feature animation, as scenes and shots are approved, they move
further down the production pipeline, towards final rendering.
-We can follow a similar process, keeping track of decisions and
dependencies.
Pipeline hierarchy:
•Discover Needs
•Story (scenarios of use)
•Interaction Framework
•Interaction design (+ Visual, Industrial, etc)
•Software engineering

33. Goal Directed Design (human centered design)
Goal Directed Design has valid, rigorous design
research and interaction design methods…
BUT, if you’re not careful, can be a bit
waterfallish, linear, ~dogmatic.
Personas Scenarios IxFrameworks, IxDesign

34. Lean Canvas (1 page alternative to biz plan)
(Business Model Canvas  Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas  My
tweak)
1st
4 boxes - Human Centered Design (same methods, but lean tweaks towards rapid
experimental mindset)

35. Human Centered Design “poured into” Lean loop…
= Non-linear, lean human centered design
(“pull” design efforts through as hypotheses require,
Now, there’s no difference
between design and research…it’s
all just experiments. Any act of
“making” (what looks like “design”)
is in the act of learning, so it’s both
research and design, intertwingled.

36. Lean meetup: goal is rapid experimentation
Next meetup is August 17th at Jefferson Health

37. Some great references: