Lean UX for Startups

In the current context, lots of new business ideas and projects are born every day and reaching the market quickly is a main priority. Therefore, it is important to take into account the design cycle since if it lengthens too much, there is a risk of losing business opportunities given that the needs of the market are constantly changing. For this reason, Lean UX is extremely important because it faces the rapid transformations of the market with the creation of usable and useful products for its users. It enables you to know how to launch new products minimizing risk.

What is Lean UX?

Lean UX can be defined as a user-centered design process that embraces Lean and Agile development methods to reduce waste and also build user–centered products. The methodology of Lean UX is based on learning from the users’ behavior in order to get their feedback by exposing the MVP as early as possible. Its main objective is to bring value with each of the experiences that are designed to obtain a successful product.

Characteristics of the methodology

• User-centric: you learn from the feedback it provides to improve the product and make it grow.
• Collaborative: the whole process involves several departments to design the product.
• Fast and efficient: small objectives are set out to accomplish.
• It involves working with a multidisciplinary team and makes communication more direct.
• Work is divided into small blocks to reduce risk and obtain more quality.

The 3 Lean UX fundamental principles

This concept created by Jeff Gothelf involves 3 fundamental principles:

• Design Thinking: Lean UX is always focused on the user and involves working collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams. It also includes the business and development part which allows to obtain a more complete vision of where the problem is and what is the solution to implement.
• Lean Startup: Build-Measure-Learn. This process allows the business to validate and implement ideas faster and more agile as well as learn what the end user wants to improve the product through learning.
• Agile methodology: the whole process is based on short work cycles. Small deliveries are made to the customer in order to minimize the risk and be designed according to the changes.

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The Lean UX process

The Lean UX process is a feedback-based process characterized by being a cyclic process made by three different stages: Think, Make and Check. Once the last phase is completed, the results are analyzed, new ideas are generated and the cycle begins again with all the improvements obtained in data analysis.

• Think: It is the stage of thought and consists in defining the problem that has to be solved in an effective way to arrive at hypotheses. There are different ways to devise such as competitive analysis, the ideation of assumptions, through research, through mental models and usability results, among others.
• Make: Once the hypothesis is defined, we move on to the stage of creating. It consists of moving abstract ideas to the generation of concrete products and creation of MVP. A Minimum Viable Product is designed to validate the hypothesis. At this stage the value proposition is defined, wireframes and prototypes are created developing landing pages.
• Check: When MVP is done, the time comes to validate whether the hypotheses are true or false. This data helps us to start the cycle again by knowing how to improve the product. The validation can be carried out in various ways such as the A/B test, with usability tests or user feedback.