Design is not a form of art, not a form of science, and not a form of management. Design is not applied art, not applied science, and not the same as business practice. It is not the same as invention or creativity in general. Design is not a simple change in practical step-by-step procedures or the use of particular tools. Design is the activity we humans engage in when we are not satisfied with our reality and we decide to intentionally change it. It is an approach that deals with overwhelming complexity, that [relies] on judgment as its logic, and that is focused on the creation of the ultimate particular.
LUXr NYC will be hosting our next 2-day workshop on July 9-10 at Pivotal Labs in NYC. Come join me and Lane Halley at this fun and fast-paced weekend intensive.
The intensive is a two-day hands-on workshop for startup teams who want to improve the user experience of their product and for individuals who want to work more effectively by using lean user experience methods.
A few years ago, a development manager where I worked asked me to sit down for a chat. He had been running a very successful application development team that had done a great job adopting an agile development process. The cross-functional team had user experience designers from my staff, front- and back-end developers, business analysts, QA testers. They were a good unit, committed to collaboration and continuous improvement, one of the best teams in the company.
So I was surprised to hear how frustrated he was. “This isn’t going to work,” he told me, “unless we change the way executive management works around here. “They keep asking for feature X by date Y. That’s not how we’re doing our planning, not how we’re running our project. We need to figure out a way to get THEM to be agile!”
Recently, thanks to my friend Janice Fraser, I’ve had the good fortune of being exposed to the Lean Startup movement. I’ve been thinking and writing and talking about Lean User Experience for a few months now and have noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a simple explanation of the concept on the web yet. So this post is an attempt to fix that.
1. What is Lean User Experience?
Lean User Experience (LUX) is simply an approach to UX work that has been tailored to work in the context of a Lean Startup.
That’s it. It’s not a new, fancy thing. It’s not some special UX-on-a-diet, or UX-at-hyper-speed. It’s simply a context-appropriate way to do UX work.
2. That’s it? Why is that interesting?
It’s interesting for two reasons. First, for UX professionals, working in a Lean Startup culture offers some unique opportunities to do amazing work. And for entrepreneurs who are seeking to create value for their customers, the ability to do good UX work is key. UX people have been perfecting the core Lean Startup techniques of Customer Discovery and Customer Validation (the critical early phases of Customer Development) for 20+ years! Read the rest of this entry »
I saw this great post on Quora today from Isaac Hall, the co-founder of a Dropboxcompetitor. In a long, candid post, he talks about what he sees as the reasons for DropBox’s success. This part really jumped out at me:
If you’re starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused. Do one thing as best as you possibly can. Your users will beg and beg for more functionality. They will tell you their problems and ask you to fix it. …. Until you have a lot of resources, stay focused on your core competency.
I’m very excited to announce today the first LUXr NYC. The program, founded by Janice and Jason Fraser has been a hit in San Francisco. Now it’s coming to New York.
The Lean UX Residency is a 10-week user-experience program for early-stage startups. One day a week for 10 weeks, five companies come to our studio to work on their products with the help of expert designers. The program costs less than $10k.
Design is unfamiliar to most founding teams and too important (and costly) to outsource. Most early stage companies spend less than $25k on design prior to launch, and yet it’s widely cited as a strategic differentiator.
LUXr gives teams structured time for user experience, aligns the team around solid principles of customer development, and embeds good user experience thinking into the company. The focus is on doing the work together and learning to do it better.
Steven Johnson writes in Where Good Ideas Come From about the notion of the adjacent possible. Coined by Stuart Kauffman, this phrase describes the idea that at any given moment, the game board of life allows certain moves. As civilation has developed, certain ideas come into being, founded on the ideas that came before them. This opens up new moves on the game board. The adjacent possible explains why no-one invented a car in the 1600′s–it wasn’t just that the technology didn’t exist. The basic conceptual building blocks weren’t there either. This idea also explains the notion of multiple discovery. (The most famous example: calculus was “invented” by Newton and Leibniz at roughly the same time.)
I’m telling you this because we’re at a multiple discovery moment as we speak. The time has arrived that three communities–the business, design, and technology communities–have independently discovered the same thing. That the best way to build new technology products, services, and the businesses that deliver them is to work in small, cross-functional, highly collaborative teams. To use lightweight, informal methods. To use rapid cycles of designing, making, and validating in order to test and learn and improve. To focus on the customer. There’s no agreed-upon name for this way of working yet, but you hear the different communities talking about it in their own terms: Agile Software Development; User Experience Design; Customer Development; Agile UX; Lean Startup; Lean UX. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 30th, 2010 | Filed under:UX | No Comments »
I was talking with a friend of mine recently–let’s call him Bob–who is a partner in a design firm. Bob was telling me about a time that he was pitching a project to a big company in partnership with a management consulting firm. During the pitch, a partner from the consulting firm looked at the client and asked Bob, “Hey Bob. Tell the client how you think they will screw this project up.” Read the rest of this entry »
Q: What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians? A: A drummer.
We like to put people into boxes–roles that are defined by simple rules. Like: a musician is someone who makes “complete” music: melody and harmony and rhythm. If a person doesn’t make melody or harmony, how can he be a musician?
Designers? We like to say that we are problem solvers, but the larger culture thinks that we make things beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »
