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Tear down the walls between designers and developers for a faster way to design and develop software By Marcio Cyrillo
Lean User Experience, or Lean UX, is a software development discipline that can be a game changer for Web and mobile applications. The goal is to get digital products to market quickly after an idea is born, without compromising design quality.
Lean UX is based on a model in which the project leader, whom I'll call the Lean UX designer, must work with designers and developers, rather than relying on the traditional waterfall model in which the UX professional is in charge of finding all pieces of the solution and getting the client's approval before development starts.
This article examines how Lean UX works and provides pointers on using the technique to improve the agile development of an interactive experience.
The User Experience
There has been a lot of discussion about the formal definition of UX and how it works. Lean UX designers (sometimes referred to as product stewards) are responsible for creating interaction models that improve the user's experience. They ensure that designers and developers work in tandem to amplify the UX based on the business vision.
The word "lean" in Lean UX can be misleading and is incorrectly associated with using a shallow approach that seeks to speed software development at the expense of user-centered design and design fine tuning. The term is borrowed from Lric Ries's book, The Lean Startup, where it refers to the principles first enunciated in the nowfamous Toyota Production System. (Toyota revolutionized manufacturing by introducing process changes that simultaneously increased value and reduced waste. Some elements of Toyota's approach have recently been rediscovered in software development with the emergence of lean IT and lean software development, both evolutions of agile methodologies.)
The blogger Luxr coined the term Lean UX, defining it as "a cross- functional, principle-driven process characterized by rituals that predispose teams to highquality, high-velocity user experience outcomes." While "quality" is self-explanatory, "velocity" in agile methodologies is a measure of a team's productivity and should be maximized at all times.
The exact definition of Lean UX isn't terribly formalized. If you're following Lean principles when implementing your UX strategy and depending on a lean, agile development...