the emperor's new lean ux: why i'm not using lean ux, and perhaps why you shouldn't...

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Page 1: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 1

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.

The Emperor’s New Lean UX Why I’m not using lean UX and perhaps you shouldn’t either

Everett McKay UX Design Edge uxdesignedge.com @uxdesignedge UX Speakeasy VT, December 2015

Who is this guy?

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved.

Principal of UX Design Edge (from Vermont, USA) Offer UI design classes, workshops, and consulting

services, primarily to software teams that don’t have (sufficient) design talent and resources

Previously was a Windows PM at Microsoft, where I owned Windows Server security UI and wrote the Windows UX Guidelines (but not for Windows 8)

Before that, was a developer of Windows and Mac UIs As a UX consultant, I have experienced lean UX

vicariously Have taken Jeff Gothelf’s Lean UX Workshop

Today’s agenda

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Major lean principles

Secondary lean principles

My lean alternative

Group discussion

Ground rules

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I want to get through the material quickly, so let’s save most discussions for the Group discussion section

Sup?

Introduction

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Page 2: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 2

A quick survey

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5 minutes Are you using lean UX now (or plan to)?

If yes, how is it working?

If not, why not?

Can anyone claim that lean UX leads to better product design (based on shipping better products!)

Why this subject?

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Lean UX is a hot topic now

Several of my customers are adapting or considering

I believe the foundation of lean is weak, but nobody is challenging it

I see many promises, but not results

The goal of lean UX is great

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The goal: Build the right product, avoid wasting time

Who doesn’t want that?

But often methodologies boil down to practices and steps—the goals behind them tend to get lost!

Everett’s Law of Processes

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Any process can and will be misused…once practitioners lose sight of the goals behind the process

Over time, rituals and dogma take over

That’s not really agile!

But that’s what you are supposed to do!

Lean UX in a nutshell

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In theory

More efficient, collaborative, user/evidence-driven design

Build -> Measure -> Learn, using an MVP as a test vehicle

Objective: Avoid shipping big product that nobody wants

In practice

Used to justify weak design process

Code -> pretend to measure -> code some more

What successful lean UX looks like

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Start a project

Determine significant hypotheses

Validate them immediately (without production code)

Significantly change direction as a result

That is as good as it gets

Page 3: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 3

Groupthink

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People are embarrassed to admit if they aren’t using

People are embarrassed if it doesn’t work

If it doesn’t work, you aren’t doing it right!

Nobody is questioning agile or lean

UX South Africa informal survey, Dr. Eric Schaffer

Program from an upcoming UX conference

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Keynote: Great UX in an agile world

Session 1: Making agile UX work

Session 2: Making agile UX work in the real world

Session 3: Agile and lean UX

Session 4: Making agile and lean UX work in the real world Session 5: WTF—why isn’t this working?

Session 6: Trust us, it’s still better than waterfall

Why we must question lean

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If lean (and agile) work so well, where are the results?

Imagine a lean UX restaurant

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No “heroes” (expert chef or skilled cooks), no clear roles

Decisions are made in collaborative, closely working teams

All meals are a hypothesis with evidence-based learning

No cookbooks or recipes

Cook -> eat -> learn

No written “deliverables”, whiteboard notes and conversations instead

Q: What would you expect the results to be?

The foundation of lean UX

Major lean principles

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Get out of the deliverables business

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Top goal is to reduce waste

Traditional deliverables such as UI specs are considered waste

Who wants to write (or read) a 200 page UI spec?

Lean UX teams don’t write any specs, terrified of sinning

It’s all on whiteboards, so it’s OK!

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12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 4

But…

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Q: What would you do if you needed to have your team deliver a well-designed product or feature as quickly as possible? I would write a spec!!! Learn a tremendous amount quickly!

Lean assumes specs are mostly about paper and typing

Good specs are about making design decisions and communicating them efficiently

Only poorly written, unnecessary deliverables are wasteful—the others exist for a reason!

The prototype as the design doc

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Using a prototype to document the design is a lean recommendation

This is the worst way to prototype

Discrepancies…

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In lean, “learning” (and therefore failure) is supposed to be good

But apparently only if do through group activities, code, MVP…

Traditional design tools are considered pure waste

All designs are a hypothesis

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For evidence-based design, you need to validate your designs through some kind of test

Build -> Measure -> Learn

Designs are not based on expertise of designers, but the output of a evidence-based collaborative process

But…

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This simply isn’t true…assumes we know nothing about good design or our customers

Need a much higher bar on things to test—we don’t have to learn everything

UX design is hard, evidence-based user research is much, much, much harder

Creating meaningful tests and metrics, creating something to test, performing the test, analyzing the results, drawing the correct conclusions, making the right changes—is extremely difficult for people without a UX background

More likely to be mislead as to be informed

Discrepancies…

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Lean UX is just rediscovering the need for user research and user testing

Except lean teams lack the expertise to do well

Page 5: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 5

A/B Testing

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A favorite evaluation technique for lean UX

Normally, A/B tests are scientifically valid tests performed on a very large sample to measure conversion

For lean, A/B tests are performed on a small sample to measure usability and preference

But…

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Evidence-based != flawed test with arbitrary metrics

If you don’t know how to do scientifically valid experiments or set meaningful metrics and you do the test anyway, what do the results mean?

…but it’s science!!

Discrepancies

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Validating everything wastes a lot of time, but our goal was to avoid waste

Skeptical that lean UX teams actually learn anything Key: Do lean teams throw away working code?

Do lean teams really abandon designs if the test results don’t support them?

In practice: lean teams either don’t do the hypothesis testing, or make the minimal chances to code to address problems (never starting over)

Minimal viable products

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A minimal viable product (MVP) has sufficient features to satisfy early adaptors (Eric Ries)

But…

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For most teams, lean boils down to creating the MVP

They don’t actually test anything to validate hypotheses

And for most teams, that MVP consists of working code (not wireframes, demos, etc.)

But what exactly is an MVP, and how do you prevent it from being crap (Minimal Vcrappy Product)?

Page 6: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 6

From Gothelf’s Lean UX

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MVPs are used to validate assumptions to minimize waste

The smallest thing to validate each hypothesis to decide to proceed

-or- the simplest product that delivers value to the market

Could be a sketch, wireframe, prototype, demo, preview—or—a working product

Design only what you need, deliver it quickly, and get meaningful feedback fast

From Klein’s UX for Lean Startups

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An MVP is minimal, viable, and a product…that isn’t crappy

What is crappy?

A crappy product often tries to do too many things at once, and it doesn’t do any of those things particularly well

Excuse me, but WTF?

Recommends a fake landing page as an MVP!

Nobody knows what an MVP is!!

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I challenge you to apply either book to determine if something is an MVP (vs. a non-MVP prototype, etc.)

And determine if it is an effective MVP

Is Zombo.com a good MVP?

Nobody knows how to evaluate an MVP

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Great design doesn’t sell itself

Examples from popular culture: books, actors, musicians

Best tech example: What was the MVP for the iPad?

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“It's not the

customer’s job to

know what they

want.”

Steve Jobs

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Page 7: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 7

A visualization

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© Projectcartoon.com, http://projectcartoon.com/cartoon/516243

No UX heroes or rockstars

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Instead, all roles must collaborate, and beautiful mockups are downplayed

Shouldn’t have one authority bottleneck

But…

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UX design is much easier if someone on the team actually knows what they are doing

Way to easy to misinterpret as: no ux design talent or having those dreaded unicorns

Instead should be: no design bottlenecks

Lean and agile go together well

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Radical claim: Lean and agile are a lousy combination

Why? Effective lean: avoid writing code until hypotheses proven

Agile manifesto: Working code is the ultimate measure of progress

Gothelf’s MVP revision (purely an assumption)

Lean + agile = working code MVP -> not really agile or lean

Let’s just get something out there! Translation: Let’s just get the code to work—and worry about the

UX later

My two insights to successful lean UX

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Everybody: Build -> Measure -> Learn

Joshua Kerievsky: Learn -> Measure -> Build This is the right order!!

Insight 1: Critical learning -> meaningful metrics -> MNPCE* *Minimal non-production-code experiment

Insight 2: Critical learning is almost always a question of delivering value

This makes total sense to me!

x

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x

Page 8: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 8

Still more promises…

Secondary concepts

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Shared understanding

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Gothelf: Shared understanding is the currency of lean UX

My Lean UX workshop experience

My conclusion: this is only an aspiration

Collaborative, cross-functional teams

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Constantly hear (in theory): Need to break down the silos!

Constantly hear (in practice): More stakeholders makes things worse rather than better

Small core teams work best, involving everybody is overrated, leads to design by committee

Working with many stakeholders

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“…a horse designed

by committee” Sir Alec Issigonis

Brainstorming vs. crazy eights, 10+10

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…also called Design Studio

To brainstorm, Gothelf recommends individuals come up with 8 sketches in 10 minutes (so, 1.25 minutes per)

I love brainstorming, but

Visual brainstorming limits thinking

Arbitrarily small time limit focuses on trivial/obvious ideas

Page 9: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 9

Get out of the building (GOOB)

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Steve Blank: There are no facts inside the building

Me: Bullshit!

Problem: Talking to users is extremely difficult to do well

If you don’t know how to do it, likely to be mislead

Topics conspicuously missing from Lean UX

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Traditional user research

Leveraging existing knowledge through design principles, guidelines, and patterns

What to do instead…

My lean alternative

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My problem with lean UX

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The root cause of our biggest UX design problems: using code-driven, feature-based, requirements-based design

Both agile and lean attempt to solve this problem—with code-driven, feature-based, requirements-based design!

See the problem?

Things to not do

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Avoid fads or trends

Don’t adapt your project to a process—should be the other way around

If something doesn’t work, fix it or stop it Don’t assume that it’s your teams fault

Don’t be dogmatic (write some specs!)

Question everything before committing your project to it

Don’t overdesign

Ship small releases to stay on target

Things to do

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Be very clear on the process/design problems you are trying to solve

Don’t lose sight of the goal: the best product developed with the least waste

Use Learn -> Measure -> Experiment, only to determine if you are delivering value

Production code is the least lean way of making most design decisions

Train your team!! (knowledge and skill beats process) Communicate well: devs oppose what they don’t

understand

Page 10: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 10

Key questions to ask

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Are you really shipping awesome user experiences that meet users’ goals?

Are you really minimizing waste?

Does your team make important design decisions quickly and confidently?

Are you really validating hypotheses, and significantly changing direction as a result?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no”, you’re only pretending to be lean

So, what do you think?

Group discussion

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Ground rules

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Any mention of waterfall is not allowed!

Group discussion

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So, what do you think?

Wrap up

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Got feedback?

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Would love to hear it!

Please send it to [email protected]

Let’s connect on LinkedIn

Page 11: The Emperor's New Lean UX: Why I'm not using lean UX, and perhaps why you shouldn't either

12/14/2015

Copyright 2015 UX Design Edge. All rights reserved. 11

Thank you!

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