Earle Stanton Olsen 1926-2011

My wonderful father-in-law, who painted in full passion until nearly his last day.

The forces behind Lean UX, Balanced Team and other collaborative approaches

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.
• As businesses increasingly become digital businesses, the ability to design, develop and maintain one’s own products becomes a critical internal capability.

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.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

Design is not…

Lovely quote from a thoughtful blog post by Erik Stolterman.

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 2-day workshop, July 9-10

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.

More details here. Space is limited: sign up now!

LeanUX Panel at Startup Lessons Learned 2011

I was lucky to share a stage with Janice Fraser, Tim McCoy, Jeff Gothelf, and Zach Larson at Startup Lessons Learned yesterday, the conference organized by Eric Reis to evangelize the concept of Lean Startup.

Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv
Our panel, called “Design + Lean Startup = Lean UX,” was a lot of fun: the goal was to talk about how design works within a Lean Startup context, Read the rest of this entry »

Entrepreneurial management? Innovation accounting? Eric Reis says you betcha!

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!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Not your average bike race

Made my heart pound just sitting at my desk. Thanks to my friend Jaime for pointing this one out.

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

People are strange and wonderful

Sometimes, we do things just because we can.

Casteller from Mike Randolph on Vimeo.

This video made me smile after a long, serious day. I’m grateful for that.

10 Questions and Answers about Lean User Experience

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 »

Advice for entrepreneurs, MVP edition

I saw this great post on Quora today from Isaac Hall, the co-founder of a Dropbox competitor. 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.

A nice articulation of the concept of Minimum Viable Product.