Lean UX and Rapid Innovation

Lean UX Approaches

Similar to lean body mass, lean UX approaches are less about creating deliverables and more about delivering a user experience. Lean UX approaches involve the creation of low-fidelity prototypes, concepts, maps, internal validation, usability tests, and plenty of design and development iterations. These are necessary, even essential, but discrete from the user experience itself.

So, while UX designers use both fat and lean UX approaches, since the end goal is ultimately the rapid innovation of great, healthy user experiences, that end justifies only a minimal amount of fat in a superlatively lean process.

The Story of Lean UX at Enchanting Tales

For Enchanting Tales, lean UX was essential to get their product to market quickly. They wanted the new service to house their published magazine content and upset the market in a way that kept them competitive within their product’s market space. The product team had plenty of ideas about who its users might be and what they might want, providing a starting point for the project. They needed to generate cheap, but valuable ideas quickly, so the team had to conceptualize, communicate, develop, and test quickly.

Once we had conducted a contextual inquiry and aggregated the available marketing research, we developed personas, then focused our research on the first area of knowledge that Enchanted Tales defined as a business goal. Our goal was to provide data to users in multiple facets.

After conceptualizing solutions with the business, we wanted to learn about the market response, so we sketched a low-fidelity prototype. We used this prototype to test the concept with users in the marketplace and learned that data organization was very important to them. During our interviews, which were part of a contextual inquiry during which anthropologists and researchers visited users in their natural environment, we experienced users categorizing different types of information from the magazine to facilitate better understanding.

Using our lean UX process to iterate on our prototype, we then validated the business goal of providing data to users in multiple facets. Our low-fidelity prototype categorized the following overarching data types: articles, videos, and photos, displaying them on multiple device types through responsive Web design. Once usability testing had validated this business goal, we developed our UX design solution. It met the needs of users by organizing data effectively and fulfilled the business goal by segmenting data, then providing it to users in multiple facets.

Once the development team had developed the actual code, using an agile process, we went back out to test the build with users. On our second go round, we learned that users tended to access the Web site from multiple devices. Therefore, while they were pleased with segmented content, the site’s information architecture did not sync with their mental model of the magazine. Users were looking for content, not by type, but by date of publication.

Luckily, our lean UX process afforded us the ability to sketch a revised low-fidelity prototype and validate it in the marketplace with real users, then provide the results to the team. We were able to redesign the information architecture, while also remedying problems in the responsive design that may have caused some usability issues during our first round of testing. Using lean agile practices, the development team was able to code our latest designs quickly for a new round of testing and validation.

Conclusion

To get an innovative product to market quickly and efficiently, it’s best to employ a lean UX approach during each iterative development cycle because it lets you validate business goals and identify market needs and provides opportunities for innovative change. For Enchanted Tales, a lean UX approach validated the business goal of providing data to users in multiple facets, identified the fact that the organization of magazine content is incredibly important to users, and through iterative UX design and development, enabled this startup to stay ahead of the curve, while discovering what might come next.