In Lean Startups and Agile development situations, how do you do good User Experience work? What behaviors will predispose happy collaboration between design and development? To increase velocity and predispose positive UX outcomes, we need to develop a set of rituals -- regular organizational practices that are embedded into the workaday process.

1. PROPOSITION: Lean User Experience is a principle-driven process characterized by rituals that
predispose teams to high-quality and high-velocity user experience outcomes.
RITUALS
HOW EFFECT
Design Stand-Up 1. What did you work on yesterday? Increase frequency and density of
Brief, standing up, start of day, after 2. Progress communication across functions, while
dev standup. 3. What’s on today? decreasing weight of those interactions.
Participatns are design and
development functions, whoever 4. Goal for today?
they are
Pairing Designer and dev pair during detailed design Increase density of communications, speeds
Designer and developer sit next to and design implementation. decision-making, eliminates review cycles
each other, collaborate on the fly
Wireframe Check Print wireframe and look at it together. Ask Validates feasibility and appropriateness of
Standup-style, includes design and specifically: design decisions, esp with regard to
development (or another 1. Is this an accurate reflection of the system? development effort and other unforseen
discipline, as needed)
2. What’s hard to implement? implications
3. What easier alternatives are there?
4. Is it worth the effort?
5. “Walk around” with the wireframe; no big “review
meeting”.
TDD for Design Start with “how will we know if this is good? Improves the quality of the hypothesis.
Figure out how to test before Not always Metrics
ideation begins.
Forces you to frame the question well and
determine the value proposition per feature/page/
widget
(c) LUXr, Incorporated 2010