I’m thrilled today to announce the start of my new venture: Proof.
Proof is a product innovation studio that combines lean processes with strategy, design and technology. With my fantastic partners Giff Constable and Jeff Gothelf, Proof will work with startups and large companies that want to create new products, enter new markets, and launch new businesses.
And by the way, if you’ve never been to an Ignite event, you should go. The format is a blast–5 minutes, 20 slides, slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. Lots of nerve-wracking fun. And at Ryan’s events anyway, lots of booze to lubricate the crowd.
On Monday night, John Halloran and I presented “Replacing Requirements with Hypotheses” at the Agile Experience Design Meetup in NYC. Here are our slides from the talk.
There was some feedback after the event that folks wanted more detail, both from the SnappSchool case study and in terms of connecting these ideas to the tactical concerns of UX practitioners. I think those are fair points. Stay tuned for the next version of the talk in which we’ll push into more detail.
Thanks to all who came out, and for all your feedback.
Posted: September 28th, 2011 | Filed under:UX | No Comments »
Robert Fabricant of frogdesign has a great piece today on Fast Company’s Co.Design blog. Writing about the current state of American design, Robert ends with a call to action that I agree with wholeheartly–in fact, I think it’s really resonant with what’s been going on in the Balanced Team, Lean Startup, Lean UX worlds. (And yes, very reflective of the work we’re doing at LUXr. )
Robert writes:
Startups are embracing a lean, agile model not just in Silicon Valley, but in Nairobi, Cairo, and Cambodia with small teams working through the design and development of new products and services in real time. Even companies like SAP are adopting agile models that allow them to launch new products in less than 90 days. This is a very exciting period in which product ideas can be developed and launched at warp speed. Small teams are able to engage end users in unprecedented ways as they launch and adapt new services with their user communities in real time. Read the rest of this entry »
I was pleased again to be able to attend the Balanced Team conference this past weekend in San Francisco. Balanced Team is a conference about collaboration methods for technology development. It’s put on by a small group of designers, developers, testers and managers who are working to evolve new methods of cross-functional work.
The talk outlines a method we use at LUXr to frame requirements in terms of assumptions. I wrote about why you might want to do this here. If you find it interesting, I’d love to hear from you.
What makes Lean UX Lean? What makes it different enough from other ways of working to merit its own name?
Lean UX is not some essential form of UX.
Some have suggested that Lean UX is about reducing UX work to its essence–that by taking a minimalist approach to our work, we can trim our work down to its essential elements–and that doing this makes our work “Lean.” While I believe there is great value in reducing our work to its essential elements, I don’t think this justifies the name Lean: it doesn’t capture the sense of the word evoked by Lean Startup, which is the connection to Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System
At LUXr, we talk about the 9 Principles of Lean UX. And while they’re all important, for me, #8, “Recognize your hypotheses and validate them,” is the keystone, the one that makes the whole system stand up.
The keystone principle: recognize your hypotheses.
Here’s a great post by Khoi Vihn describing the changing context of design work. If you want to understand a designer’s perspective on the forces driving Agile teams, Lean Startup, and related approaches, this is a great starting place.
Key points:
The dominant service offered by designers is changing: from narratives about products to the design of products themselves.
The nature of product design is changing: from one-shot efforts to ongoing involvement.
With these forces at work, the traditional working relationship between outside designers and internal capabilities has broken. The results we’re seeing are a myriad of deeply collaborative approaches to the design of digital products, embodied in movements like Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Lean UX, Agile UX, Balanced Team, etc.
