hypothesis statement lean ux

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A Simple Introduction to Lean UX

Lean UX is an incredibly useful technique when working on projects where the Agile development method is used. Traditional UX techniques often don’t work when development is conducted in rapid bursts – there’s not enough time to deliver UX in the same way. Fundamentally Lean UX and other forms of UX all have the same goal in mind; delivering a great user experience it’s just that the way you work on a project is slightly different. So let’s take a look at how that might work.

Lean UX – What is It?

Lean UX is focused on the experience under design and is less focused on deliverables than traditional UX. It requires a greater level of collaboration with the entire team. The core objective is to focus on obtaining feedback as early as possible so that it can be used to make quick decisions. The nature of Agile development is to work in rapid, iterative cycles and Lean UX mimics these cycles to ensure that data generated can be used in each iteration .

Author/Copyright holder: Vimeo. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain

The Need for Assumptions in Lean UX

In traditional UX the project is built upon requirements capture and deliverables. The objective is to ensure that deliverables are as detailed as possible and respond adequately to the requirements that are laid down at the start of the project.

Lean UX is slightly different. You aren’t focused on detailed deliverables. You are looking to produce changes that improve the product in the here and now – essentially to mould the outcome for the better.

This works in practice by ditching “requirements” and using a “ problem statement ” which should lead to a set of assumptions that can be used to create hypotheses.

What is an assumption? An assumption is basically a statement of something that we think is true. They are designed to generate common understanding around an idea that enables everyone to get started. It is fully understood that assumptions may not be correct and may be changed during the project as a better understanding develops within the team.

Assumptions are normally generated on a workshop basis. You get the team together and state the problem and then allow the team to brainstorm their ideas for solving the problem. In the process you generate answers to certain questions that form your assumptions.

Typical questions might include:

Who are our users?

What is the product used for?

When is it used?

What situations is it used in?

What will be the most important functionality ?

What’s the biggest risk to product delivery?

There may be more than one answer to each question. That leaves us with a greater number of assumptions than it might be practical to handle. If this is the case, the team can prioritize their assumptions quickly following their generation. In general you would prioritize your assumptions by the risk they represent (what are the consequences of this being badly wrong? The more severe the consequence the higher the priority) and the level of understanding of the issue at hand (the less you know, the higher the priority).

Author/Copyright holder: visualpun.ch. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Creating a Hypothesis in Lean UX

The hypotheses created in Lean UX are designed to test our assumptions. There’s a simple format that you can use to create your own hypotheses, quickly and easily.

An example:

We believe that enabling people to save their progress at any time is essential for smartphone users. This will achieve a higher level of sign up completions. We will have demonstrated this when we can measure an improvement of the current completion rate of 20%.

We state the belief and why it is important and who it is important to. Then we follow that with what we expect to achieve. Finally, we determine what evidence we would need to collect to prove that our belief was true.

If we find that there’s no way to prove our hypothesis – we may be heading in the wrong direction because our outcomes are not clearly defined.

One of the big advantages of working like this is it removes much of the “I don’t think that’s a good idea” and political infighting from the UX design process. Every idea is going to be tested and the evidence criteria clearly determined. No evidence? Then it’s time to drop the idea and try something else.

If everyone can understand a hypothesis and the expectations from it, they tend to be happy to wait to see if it’s true rather than passionately debating their own subjective viewpoint.

The Minimum Viable Product and Lean UX

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a core concept in Lean UX. The idea is to build the most basic version of the concept as possible, test it and if there are no valuable results to abandon it. The MVPs which show promise can then be incorporated into further design and development rounds without too much hassle.

This is a great way of maximizing your resources and one of the reasons that it works so well with Agile development – it allows for a lot of experimentation with no “sacred cows”.

Author/Copyright holder: Jussi Pasanen. With acknowledgements to Aarron Walter, Ben Tollady, Ben Rowe, Lexi Thorn and Senthil Kugalur. Copyright terms and license: All rights reserved

User Research and Testing in Lean UX

User research and testing, by the very nature of Lean UX, are based on the same principles as used in traditional UX environments. However, the approach tends to be “quick and dirty” – results need to be delivered before the next Agile Sprint starts; so there’s much less focus on heavy-duty, meticulously document outputs and more focus on raw data.

Responsibilities for research also tend to be spread more widely across the whole team so that there’s no “bottleneck” created by having a single UX design resource trying to get the whole job done in tight timescales by themselves. This often gets development resources to do “hands on” UX work and increases the level of understanding and support for UX work within the development team too.

This is a very high-level overview of Lean UX and, of course, there’s a lot more to it than you can cover in a short(ish) article. However, these basic concepts should enable you to start heading in the right direction when it comes to implementing Lean UX in your Agile environment.

References & Where to Learn More

Header Image: Author/Copyright holder: Rosenfeld Media. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

Course: UX Management: Strategy and Tactics

User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide

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Hypothesis statement

• Introduction to Hypothesis statement
• Essential characteristics

Introduction to hypothesis statements

Brainstorming solutions is similar to making a hypothesis or an educated guess about how to solve the problem.

In UX design, we write down possible solutions to the problem as hypothesis statements. A good hypothesis statement requires more effort than just a guess. In particular, your hypothesis statement may start with a question that can be further explored through background research.

How do you write hypothesis statements? Unlike problem statements, there's no standard formula for writing hypothesis statements. For starters, let's try what's called an if-then statement.

It looks like this: If (name an action), then (name an outcome).

Hypothesis statements don't have a standard formula. Instead of an if-then statement, you can formulate this hypothesis statement in a more flexible way.

Essential characteristics of a hypothesis statement

To formulate a promising hypothesis, ask yourself the following questions:

Is the language clear and purposeful?

What is the relationship between your hypothesis and your research topic?

Is your hypothesis testable? If so, how?

What possible explanations would you like to explore?

You may need to come up with more than one hypothesis for a problem. That's okay! There will always be multiple solutions to your users' problems. Your job is to use your creativity and problem-solving skills to decide which solutions are best for each user you are designing for.

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Lean UX Canvas V2

( Here’s a short video on how to use the Lean UX Canvas )

It has been nearly 3 years since the original Lean UX Canvas was published. During that time I’ve used it extensively in my work as a coach, consultant and trainer. I’ve also received a lot of feedback and many questions about how it’s supposed to be used, what do certain sections mean and how to better differentiate the different boxes with stakeholders, clients and team members. With the recent launch of the Professional Scrum with UX course , the Lean UX Canvas began to figure prominently in the conversations I was having with Josh Seiden, Gary Pedretti and Erik Weber (the co-creators of the course). Since we were leaning heavily on the canvas in that class and the amount of feedback and questions about it had been piling up for a while, I thought it was time to update it.

Below, you’ll find the updated version of the canvas and download links here ( PDF ) and here ( PPTX ).

Before I get into the differences and the rationale for the changes from V1 to V2, I want to cover what purpose I believe the canvas serves and how I imagined it would be used:

• It’s a facilitation tool for cross-functional teams designed to create a customer-centric conversation about the work the team is doing
• The goal was to help the team focus on “why” they’re doing the current work
• It provides an initial recipe for teams to follow in the early stages of agile adoption
• It’s a kind of “insurance policy” to ensure learning takes place in every sprint
• It exposes the gaps in the team’s understanding of the problem they’re solving, who they’re solving it for and why they believe their solutions will work
• It’s a first step in the shift of the conversation from outputs to outcomes

So what’s new? Let’s get into it:

Box 1 – Business problem statement What’s changed: Better and more detailed instructions along with some hints about what specifically should go in this box. Why it changed: There wasn’t enough clarity around what exactly a good business problem is and how it should be worded. This box is designed to help the team articulate what’s changed in the world that has impacted their business in a way that needs to be solved.

e.g., Connectivity is now a commodity. As an organisation that once was a one-stop-shop for connectivity and content we’re now viewed as a “dumb pipe.” How might we might increase the value of our service beyond this perception and increase lifetime customer value and retention?

Box 2 – Business outcomes What’s changed: More detail about what a good outcome should be. Why it changed: A clearer distinction was needed between this box and Box 4. Also, this is an attempt to be clear that what’s needed in this box is a change in someone’s behaviour — a customer, a user, an employee, an executive, etc.

e.g., 25% increase in customer retention, 35% decrease in support calls about the mobile app

Box 3 – Users What’s changed: A simplification and clarification was added that this is where we’re we add persons and that they should focus not just on customers or users but admins and buyers among other users. Why it changed: Having had several canvases sent to me (and seeing them in action with the teams I work with) I noticed that teams were taking a bit of a shortcut with this box. While there are certainly user characteristics everyone believes, it’s important to ensure the team is aligned around a shared vision of the customer.

e.g., Rochelle the IT Administrator who needs to install the system easily and configure hundreds of users at a time on a quarterly basis

Box 4 – User outcomes and benefits What’s changed: The name of the box has been updated to include benefits and the explanatory text does a more thorough job of explaining what should go in here and why this is an important, unique part of the canvas. Why it changed: This has been the part of the canvas with the most confusion. The original goal here was to call these “outcomes” out as emotional goals but the language got confusing. I’ve had many questions over the years about how this differs from Box 2. With this update the difference has been made more distinct. This is a conversation about goals, benefits and emotions. Occasionally we may use metrics here but ideally this is a conversation about empathy.

e.g., Rochelle spends less time configuring users and more time optimising the system for her company’s specific needs

Box 5 – Solutions What’s changed: Again, better instructional text and hints. Why it changed: Depending on the team using the canvas, the items created for this box can vary greatly in scope. This change was designed to help teams see that this box provides the opportunity to offer up solutions big, small, innovative and perhaps a bit “weird.” The goal was to help enhance the brainstorm for this box to include not just tactical features, but new systems or business models as well as non-technical solutions.

Box 6 – Hypotheses What’s changed: No significant change here. Why it changed: It didn’t because it was good enough the first time. 🙂

e.g., We believe a 25% reduction in administration costs will be achieved if Rochelle the System Admin spends less time configuring users with a batch configuration tool.

Box 7 – What’s the most important thing we need to learn first? What’s changed: Better instructional text to help the user through the two-step process necessary to completing this box successfully. Why it changed: When discussing risks with a cross-functional team every discipline, if not every person, on the team will provide their perspective. And they’ll be right. The exercise behind this box is designed to get all those risks out on the table and then choose the riskiest one for the team right now . The hint was added to point out that if you’re in the early stages of a hypothesis, value should be the main focus, not feasibility in most cases.

e.g., Does it make sense to add 100 users at a time into our system?

Box 8 – What’s the least amount of work to learn the next most important thing? What’s changed: No significant change here. Why it changed: It didn’t but that’s because experiment design is tricky and can’t really be boiled down into a box on a canvas other than to remind you that it needs to be done as the next step in this process.

e.g., Interview 10 admins that match Rochelle’s profile to understand how they add users today.

While the changes to the canvas overall are subtle, they make a difference in the way we work with it. They clarify and make more explicit the details each box seeks to expose. Take it out for a spin and let me know what you think of this new version.

P.S. — One other thing you’ll note is an overlay page in the PDF version that provides the rationale behind the design of the canvas. Again, this was done to help make clearer the purpose of this tool.

Jeff Gothelf’s books provide transformative insights, guiding readers to navigate the dynamic realms of user experience, agile methodologies, and personal career strategies.

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5 responses to “Lean UX Canvas V2”

Hi Jeff, I’m loving how much I am learning from you and your blog–but for some reason, when I click on the “Subscribe” button for your newsletter, it’s not working. I tried this on both Chrome and Firefox. Thought I’d let you know in case others are facing the some issue as well.

Hi Jeff, Thank you for this Canvas. Do you mind if we use it in our application Agoora : http://www.agoora.fr ? It is a digital application to virtualize and share notes. Of course we will credit you and your work. Thanks in advance, Anaël RACINE

Great. Do you have an example of this canvas with filled fields?

The download links aren’t working

vewwt sa http://al24.ru/goto.php?goto=https://cloud-cover-cannabis.weebly.com

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Inside Design

A beginner’s guide to Lean UX (+ 5 lessons from Jeff Gothelf)

Tony ho tran,   •   sep 6, 2019.

W hen it comes to creating experiences that blow your users away, a good management system is key.

It’s not enough to design a product and hope your users are happy with it. You need a process that allows you to create that product, and then make changes if need be.

This requires collaboration between teams and departments, as well as frequent interactions with your users.

That might seem like a lot to handle. After all, how can you keep up with the constant flux of your users’ needs and expectations while involving multiple teams and stakeholders?

Enter Lean UX.

Lean UX is a design management system built to help create well-designed products through frequent collaboration between teams, constant iteration, and frequent contact with your users.

Like many design systems, Lean UX contains a lot of moving parts. But once your team gets going with it, you’ll find that it’s an intuitive, fruitful way to get fast insights on what your users want.

That’s why we want to walk you through what exactly Lean UX is, its benefits for designers, and how you can start applying the process to your own company.

What is Lean UX?

Jeff Gothelf, organizational designer and UX design team leader, introduced Lean UX to the world when he published Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams in 2013. 

He helped develop the system after seeing frustrations with his team at TheLadders . They even created a diagram breaking down the exact pain points they were having with their management system.

He took what he learned with his team and developed Lean UX. He’s since spent the past few years teaching the system to all who will listen. 

( Streamline your teamwork by brainstorming with InVision Craft .)

The book laid the groundwork for different ways that companies handle their UX process, and introduced a system that emphasizes the following:

• Removing waste. The system seeks to cut through common, time-consuming tactics like frequent documentation by creating minimal viable products that drive learning quickly.
• Constant collaboration. Lean UX brings together teams from “designers, developers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, marketers, and others” through frequent contact and communication (From Lean UX ).
• More experimentation. Designers leverage rapid experimentation with their designs to uncover more grounded information and lessons on their products. 

( Watch our webinar with Jeff Gothelf where he breaks down the lessons he learned from five years of teaching and implementing Lean UX. )  

At the heart of Lean UX is the idea of radical transparency . Each team needs to communicate to one another their findings often in order to address any roadblocks and do the work needed to deliver a product quickly.

From Lean UX :

“By having these conversations early and often, the team is aware of everyone’s ideas and can get started on their work earlier. If they know that the proposed solution requires a certain backend infrastructure, for example, the team’s engineers can get started on that work while the design is refined and finalized. Parallel paths for software development and design are the fastest route to reach an actual experience.”

Once you break down the walls of communication between members of your team, then you’re primed for Lean UX. 

As such, Lean UX is much less of a system than it is a mindset that each member of your company must adopt if you want to see success.

How the Lean UX process works

Before you jump into the Lean UX process, you need to remember what Gothelf says: Lean UX is a mindset. 

In order for a mindset to become effective it needs to be adopted by everyone in your company. 

“This reframing requires an organization-wide position of humility. It requires teams and managers to use their knowledge and skills and creativity as scientists might: they propose their best solution and then they test to see if they’re right.”

All members of your organization need to be on board and understand Lean UX for it to be effective.

With that, let’s take a look at the process itself.

Source: Chapter 5, Lean UX: Minimum Viable Products and Prototypes

The system can be broken down into four processes:

• Outcomes, assumptions, hypotheses
• Creating the MVP
• Research and Learning

Let’s take an overview of each and see how they work.

Note: This is a BRIEF overview. There’s a lot to be said about each section. To gain a fuller understanding of the Lean UX and the full process, pick up a copy of Lean UX and read it for yourself. 

Outcomes, assumptions, and hypotheses

Where most software creation processes focus on features and deliverables, Lean UX shines a light on the outcomes of the product and how they benefit (or don’t benefit) the user.

To create good outcomes, Lean UX shifts away from what designers think is required of a product to their assumptions. 

Assumptions are simply your belief or expectation based on what you know about your users. 

Yes, these are filled with risk and can be outright wrong. But they’re important to create a launching point for your team. 

There are four types of assumptions:

• Business outcomes. This is what done looks like. How do you know your product was successful?
• Users. The people you’re creating your product for. Who are they? What’s their persona look like?
• User outcomes. This is what your users want from your product. What are their pain points? How can your product solve them?
• Features. How you will improve your product going forward in order to give your users the desired outcome. 

From your assumptions, you’re going to then move onto creating a hypothesis. This involves turning your assumptions into hypotheses statements. 

Example: We believe our users are middle-aged homemakers who need help with their housework. We will know we’re right if we see an increase in app usage and hear that it has helped them save time on housework. 

( Lay out your hypotheses using InVision Freehand .)

The hypotheses is a great way to establish what you believe you know about your users and what they need. This is the groundwork for your work going forward.

This is where you begin to actually design your product. This might also be the time where you can test your hypotheses.

“For example, if you’re in the early stage of a project, you might test demand by creating a landing page that will measure how many customers sign up for your service.”

And it’s not enough to shut your team of designers in a room slowly filling with water and force them to design a product before they drown (too specific?). Remember: You must design collaboratively.

For example, the teams from across departments must sketch and create wireframes together, and everyone must feel comfortable giving their feedback on everything. Designers should see themselves as facilitators to these conversations and meetings. 

There are a variety of different ways you can structure your meetings and conversations as your designs progress. For more, check out chapter four of Lean UX. 

All of this work becomes part of the minimum viable product.

MVP (Minimum viable product)

What’s the least amount of work we can do to learn more about our hypothesis? That’s the question behind your minimum viable product (MVP). 

We’ve written about this before , but an MVP is the most basic expression of your product. The idea is to get a simple product out to see how your target audience reacts to it. 

In The Lean Startup by Eric Riess, MVP is defined as “a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings about customers with the least effort.”

And your MVP can come in a variety of different shapes. Here are a few:

• Wireframes. Low-fidelity versions of your product. For more, here’s our article on how to create a wireframe . 
• Mockups. Higher-fidelity, full-scale versions of your product complete with designs, colors, and icons. 
• Prototypes. Very basic version of your product with minimal functionality and design. For more, check out our guide on rapid prototyping . 

You need to build your MVP based on your assumptions and hypotheses. Your target audience’s reaction and feedback to your MVP will give you the most insights into whether you’re on the right track. 

If you’d like to learn about how to create a MVP, read our article all about it here .

Once you have your MVP, it’s time to take a deep dive into how your users are reacting. 

Research and learning

This part of the process is all about validation. 

Are you on the right track? Is your product giving your users what they need? What needs to be changed?

Research and learning requires two things to be effective in Lean UX:

• Continuous. Bake “small, informal, qualitative research” techniques into every sprint (from Lean UX ). 
• Collaborative. Teams must work cross-functionally instead of in individual silos to “build shared understanding” (from Lean UX ). 

The goal is for your organization to gain insights in a quick but comprehensive way. This can only happen if you research frequently and collaboratively. 

( Work better together using InVision Cloud .)

Your users will be a part of this process as well, whether through conversations, interviews, surveys, or whatever else. The conversations you get will validate your hypotheses. Once you know what you need to change and improve, it’s time to start back up at the top and do everything again! 

Rinse and repeat until you have a product that satisfies your users’ needs. 

Should you use Lean UX?

While there are plenty of great benefits to Lean UX, there are five that might sway you to trying it out for yourself:

Increased collaboration

Improved outcomes, streamlined feedback process, reduced time-to-market, strengthened user research.

Lean UX teams are traditionally cross-functional. 

This means that they involve people from across a variety of different disciplines to work together when creating a product.

“Diverse teams create better solutions, because each problem is seen from many different points of view,” writes Gothelf. “Creating diverse teams limits the need for gated, handoff-based processes. Instead, teams can share information informally, which creates collaboration earlier in the process and drives greater team efficiency.”

Rather than focus on output (the end product), Lean UX relies on the product’s outcome (how the product impacts the user).

“Although it’s easy to manage the launch of specific feature sets, we often can’t predict a feature will be effective until it comes to market,” Gothelf writes. “By managing outcomes (and the progress made toward them), we gain insight into the efficacy of the features we are building.”

This gives designers the freedom to produce minimum viable products quickly based on their assumptions and see how it performs. If it doesn’t perform well, they can respond and make tweaks as necessary. 

Gothelf continues, “If a feature is not performing well, we can make an objective decision as to whether it should be kept, changed or replaced.”

This ties in with the next benefit of Lean UX:

Lean UX is built upon the concept that it’s more beneficial for designers to do rather than talk about doing.

“There is more value in creating the first version of an idea than spending half a day debating its merits in a conference room,” writes Gothelf.

When you create a product, the most important feedback you can get isn’t from a manager or a member of your team. The most crucial feedback and critiques come from your users (i.e. the people who will actually be using your product). 

If you spend your time deliberating and falling into the dreaded “paralysis by analysis,” you create waste—which you do not want with Lean UX.

That brings us to …

The system of Lean UX trims the fat that most design processes experience by removing aspects that don’t contribute to creating a product for the users.

Whatever doesn’t contribute to that goal is waste—and is cut out mercilessly.

According to Lean UX methodology, at the heart of each of your decisions should be the question, “Does this really help us create a good product for the users?” If the answer is no, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. 

This applies to meetings, documentation, and even the stakeholders. Your users should come first with each of your design decisions—that brings us to…

Like any good design process, Lean UX puts the user first. However, Lean UX puts an emphasis on including the user as early and often as possible.

How? With GOOB.

No, that’s not something that a kid would call you on the schoolyard (though, it’s probably that too). GOOB stands for “getting out of the building.” 

It’s the idea that teams shouldn’t just be cooped up in the offices arguing about minutiae about a design. Instead, they should actually go out into the world and get feedback from their users—and they should do it sooner rather than later.

“Test your ideas with a strong dose of reality while they’re still young,” writes Gothelf. “Better to find out that your ideas are missing the mark before you’ve spent time and resources building a product that no one wants.”

Before you do anything, be sure to head to your local bookstore to pick up a copy of Lean UX. 

Like we said earlier, this is a very brief overview of the process. To gain a fuller understanding of Lean UX and how exactly you can apply it to your team, be sure to pick up a copy for yourself. Better yet, make sure everyone on your team has a copy too. 

Best of luck—and be sure to let us know about your experiences with Lean UX!

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by Tony Ho Tran

Tony is a content marketing consultant and freelance writer. His work has been seen in Business Insider, MSNBC, Hootsuite, and GrowthLab.

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Lean UX: Expert Tips to Maximize Efficiency in UX

Everything is about lean these days. The lean startup, lean manufacturing, lean software development, lean UX, and the list goes on! The goal with all of these lean processes is to trim the fat. Remove the systems and processes that slow or disrupt productivity.

Key takeaways:

• Lean UX is a collaborative approach to UX design that incorporates principles from Lean and Agile methodologies.
• It is an off-shoot of a book in early 2000s about Lean software development.
• It has 15 principles such as prioritizing learning, placing importance on outcomes, continuous discovery, and more.

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What is Lean UX?

Lean UX is an outcome-based design process that promotes collaboration and encourages lots of testing and experiments on minimum viable products (MVP).

Lean UX prioritizes outcomes over deliverables . Instead of asking “what are we designing,” lean UX asks, “why are we designing?” By replacing what with why designers must find reasons and supporting data to do design—rather than building something because someone thinks it’s a good idea!

In this way, lean UX design is more of a thought process than a workflow concept. Designers must formulate and validate a hypothesis before they commit to building it. This thinking process is why testing and experiments on MVP concepts are a significant part of a lean UX workflow.

The History of Lean UX

Lean UX is an off-shoot of the 2003 book Lean Software Development and the Agile methodology . Janice Fraser , an internationally recognized design and business expert, coined the term lean UX in the late 2000s stating, “Lean UX is UX practice adapted for Lean Startups…”

Janice used her knowledge and experience of innovation and scaling several Silicon Valley startups to apply lean concepts to UX design.

Agile UX vs. Lean UX

Agile UX and lean UX are similar concepts; however, Agile UX is effective for teams using Agile, while the lean UX process is suitable for any startup or organization.

The Lean UX Process

It’s important to note that the lean UX process still involves all of the traditional UX design thinking phases, just in a different protocol.

The five stages of the design thinking process include:

• Empathize: Discover what your users need
• Define: Determine the problem you want to solve
• Ideate: Develop possible solutions to users’ problems
• Prototype: Create prototypes
• Test: Test your prototypes with users & stakeholders

While lean UX breaks the process into three stages:

• Think: Outcomes, assumptions, user research, ideate, mental models, sketches, storyboards
• Make: Wireframes, prototypes (minimum viable products), value propositions, hypotheses
• Check: Analyze data & analytics, usability testing, stakeholder and user feedback

As you can see, both processes include the same elements; only the methodology differs.

Lean UX Principles

In an informative article, Ben Ralph outlines 15 core lean UX principles:

• Cross-functional teams —build teams with members from several departments working on the same project.
• Small, dedicated, co-located —keep teams small (5-9), focused on a single problem, and in the same workspace (or the same timezone for remote teams).
• Progress = outcomes, not output —achieving business goals are outcomes, features and services are output.
• Problem-focused teams —teams must focus on solving problems, not designing new features.
• Removing waste —remove work and processes that don’t get you to your business goals. Does your team attend meetings or generate reports without explicit reasoning?
• Small batch size —teams must focus on completing one task or objective at a time.
• Continuous discovery —engage with customers, end-users, and stakeholders regularly.
• Get out of the building (GOOB) —don’t debate assumptions internally. Test ideas with real users.
• Shared understanding —collaborate and share ideas so that the entire team learns and grows together.
• Anti-pattern rockstars, gurus, and ninjas —every team member is valued the same. 
• Externalizing your work —create an environment where people are free to share ideas. There are no right or wrong ideas!
• Making over analysis —don’t waste time debating whether something will work. Try it and learn from the experience.
• Learning over growth —make the right thing first, then scale.
• Permission to fail —experiment and take risks! As Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “move fast and break things.” Prioritize speed to market over perfection.
• Getting out of the deliverables business —keep UX documentation to a minimum. Prioritize the outcome.

There are two common themes across all of these 15 lean UX principles:

• Take action—turn ideas into minimum viable products and prototypes. Test, and test again!
• Teamwork—share, communicate, collaborate.

Benefits of Lean UX

Traditional UX design processes involve time-wasting roadblocks like oversight meetings, unnecessary documentation and deliverables, department/team silos, and poor communication.

Lean UX optimizes the UX workflow by encouraging inter-departmental collaboration and avoiding protocols that don’t add business value. 

Lean UX’s outcomes-based means that UX designers focus intensely on solving user problems and testing ideas rather than meeting to discuss the color of the CTA button.

Building cross-functional teams with representatives from multiple departments means that designers can draw from diverse ideas, experiences, and perspectives. With this wealth of knowledge, teams can build better MVPs and test more ideas faster. 

We can summarize Lean UX benefits in five bullet points:

• Eliminates waste
• Fosters collaboration
• User-centered

The Lean UX Methodology

There are three main principles central to the lean UX methodology:

Assumptions

• Minimum viable products (MVP)

Assumptions are just ideas. But the beauty of an assumption is that you’re allowed to be wrong—which complements the lean UX philosophy of experimenting and taking risks .

To make an assumption, you must have the research knowledge and a problem statement you acquire during the think phase. With this knowledge, you can make assumptions about:

• Business outcomes—what is a successful outcome?
• Users—be specific about the people you’re helping (user personas).
• User outcomes—what is a user pain point, and how can your product solve it?
• Product features—product improvements required to solve the problem.

Armed with a set of assumptions, you can begin making hypotheses for solving your problems.

A UX hypothesis is a testable assumption with three variables:

• What you’re going to do
• To solve a problem for (users)
• To achieve a desired outcome

You can write a hypothesis statement as follows:

We believe [doing this] for [these users] will achieve [this outcome] .

A theory must be tested, not debated. Team members must avoid getting into debates over opinions on how a hypothesis will turn out. Let the test results determine what to do next!

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Instead of designing an entire product, teams create the bare minimum (MVP) to test their hypothesis. 

If your hypothesis works, you have a small functional product to expand on. If the hypothesis is incorrect, you can ditch the idea and move on with minimal time wasted.

Designers can build an MVP using wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to test anything and everything. Teams may even create a paper MVP during early testing to flush out many ideas quickly before committing to a slower digital design process.

The MVP must be able to test the hypothesis. For example, if you want to test a button interaction, a paper prototype will not give you a meaningful result. It would be better to use a high-fidelity prototype with color and content to test the interaction in the context of the digital product.

Conversely, you don’t need to spend hours or days building a fully functioning high-fidelity product prototype to test a signup form. A simple wireframe will get the job done faster.

Minimum Viable Products in UXPin

With UXPin’s built-in design libraries , designers can drag-and-drop components to build minimal viable products quickly. You can also add advanced interactions, so prototypes look and feel like the final product.

Need more fidelity for better accuracy during testing?

Take your MVPs to the next level with UXPin Merge —a technology that bridges the gap between design and development. Sync UXPin’s design editor to your company’s design system via a repository (Git and Storybook integrations available) so designers can build prototypes using fully functioning code components.

A fantastic case study of how Merge optimizes the lean UX process was PayPal’s experiment when they first adopted the technology. A designer made two one-page prototypes (or MVPs)—the first with a traditional design tool and the second using UXPin Merge. Using the traditional design tool, the designer created an MVP in a little over an hour. With UXPin Merge: eight minutes. And, the Merge prototype had higher fidelity and functionality.

Read more about UXPin Merge and how it solves DesignOps challenges with sophisticated code-based design technology.

Once you designers complete building a minimum viable product, it’s time for testing!

Finally, teams get to test their hypothesis and MVP. Testing prototypes don’t only help validate ideas, but researchers can also gather valuable insights from observing user behavior and how they interact with a prototype.

Usability testing can also expose usability issues and business opportunities, which designers can add to the next iteration.

With test results, lean design teams can return to the think stage with new insights to start the process again.

The Lean UX process reorganizes a traditional design process to optimize workflows and enhance collaboration. Your teams don’t have to learn new skills, but rather the organization needs a mindset shift to a new methodology of designing products.

As we’ve highlighted throughout this article, UXPin can help foster lean UX tenets and workflows. Using comments , teams can communicate, assign tasks and mark them as resolved once completed.

With built-in design libraries, designers can skip low-fidelity prototyping and go straight to high-fidelity minimum viable products that deliver meaningful, actionable feedback from usability participants and stakeholders.

Best of all, UXPin also minimizes deliverables with built-in documentation so designers can annotate and create instructions on user interfaces for developers during design handoffs.

Ready to try UXPin to optimize your lean UX process? Experience the power of the world’s most advanced code-based design tool. Sign up for a 14-day free trial .

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by UXPin on 23rd August, 2023

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What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget? —Eric Ries

Lean UX design extends the traditional UX role beyond merely executing design elements and anticipating how users might interact with a system. Instead, it encourages a far more comprehensive view of why a Feature exists, the functionality required to implement it, and the benefits it delivers. By getting immediate feedback to understand if the system will meet the real business objectives, Lean UX provides a closed-loop system for defining and measuring value.

Generally, UX represents a user’s perceptions of a system—ease of use, utility, and the effectiveness of the user interface (UI). UX design focuses on building systems that demonstrate a deep understanding of end users. It takes into account what users need and wants while making allowances for the user’s context and limitations.

A common problem, when using Agile methods, is how best to incorporate UX design into a rapid Iteration cycle that results in a full-stack implementation of the new functionality. When teams attempt to resolve complex and seemingly subjective user interactions, while simultaneously trying to develop incremental deliverables, they can often churn through many designs, which can become a source of frustration with Agile.

Fortunately, the  Lean UX  movement addresses this by using Agile development with Lean Startup  implementation approaches. The mindset, principles, and practices of SAFe reflect this thinking. This process often begins with the Lean Startup Cycle described in the  Epic  article and continues with the development of Features and Capabilities  using a Lean UX process described here.

As a result, Agile teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) can leverage a common strategy to generate rapid development, fast feedback, and a holistic user experience that delights users.

The Lean UX Process

In Lean UX , Gothelf and Seiden [2] describe a model that we have adapted to our context, as Figure 1 illustrates. It follows SAFe’s Continuous Delivery Pipeline and focuses more on team-level activities.

Benefit Hypothesis

The Lean UX approach starts with a benefit hypothesis: Agile teams and UX designers accept the reality that the ‘right answer’ is unknowable up-front. Instead, teams apply Agile methods to avoid Big Design Up-front (BDUF), focusing on creating a hypothesis about the feature’s expected business result, and then they implement and test that hypothesis incrementally.

The SAFe Feature and Benefits matrix (FAB) can be used to capture this hypothesis as it moves through the Continuous Exploration cycle of the Program Kanban :

• Feature  – A short phrase giving a name and context
• Benefit hypothesis  – The proposed measurable benefit to the end user or business

Outcomes are measured in Release on Demand and best done using leading indicators (see Innovation Accounting in [1]) to evaluate how well the new feature meets its benefits hypothesis. For example, “We believe the administrator can add a new user in half the time it took before.”

Collaborative Design

Traditionally, UX design has been an area of specialization. People who have an eye for design, a feel for user interaction, and specialty training were often entirely in charge of the design process. The goal was ‘pixel perfect’ early designs, done in advance of the implementation. Usually, this work was done in silos, apart from the very people who knew the most about the system and its context. Success was measured by how well the implemented user interface complied with the initial UX design. In Lean UX, this changes dramatically:

“Lean UX literally has no time for heroes. The entire concept of design as a hypothesis immediately dethrones notions of heroism; as a designer, you must expect that many of your ideas will fail in testing. Heroes don’t admit failure. But Lean UX designers embrace it as part of the process.” [2]

Continuous Exploration takes the hypothesis and facilitates a continuous and collaborative process that solicits input from a diverse group of stakeholders – Architects , Customers , Business Owners , Product Owners , and Agile Teams .  This further refines the problem and creates artifacts that clearly express the emerging understanding including personas, empathy maps, and customer experience maps.

Principle #9 – Decentralize decision-making provides additional guidance for the Lean UX process: Agile teams are empowered to do collaborative UX design and implementation, and that significantly improves business outcomes and time-to-market. Moreover, another important goal is to deliver a consistent user experience across various system elements or channels (e.g., mobile, web, kiosk) or even different products from the same company. Making this consistency a reality requires some centralized control (following Principle #9) over certain reusable design assets. A design system [2] is a set of standards that contains whatever UI elements the teams find useful, including:

• Editorial rules, style guides, voice and tone guidelines, naming conventions, standard terms, and abbreviations
• Branding and corporate identity kits, color palettes, usage guidelines for copyrights, logos, trademarks, and other attributions
• UI asset libraries, which include icons and other images, templates, standard layouts, and grids
• UI widgets, which include the design of buttons and other similar elements

These assets are an integral part of the Architectural Runway, which supports decentralized control while recognizing that some design elements need to be centralized. After all, these decisions are infrequent , long-lasting and provide significant economies of scale , as described in Principle #9, Decentralize decision-making.

With a hypothesis and design in place, teams can proceed to implement the functionality in a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF). The MMF should be the minimum functionality that the teams can build to learn whether the benefit hypothesis is valid or not. By doing this, the ARTs apply SAFe Principle #4 – Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles , to implement and evaluate the feature. Teams may choose to preserve options with Set-Based Design , as they define the initial MMF.

In some cases, early designs could initially be extremely lightweight and not even functional (ex., paper prototypes, low fidelity mockups, simulations, API stubs). In other cases, a vertical thread (full stack) of just a portion of an MMF may be necessary to test the architecture and get fast feedback at a System Demo . However, in some instances, functionality may need to proceed all the way through to deployment and release, where application instrumentation and telemetry [4] provide feedback data from production users.

MMFs are evaluated as part of deploying and releasing (where necessary). There are a variety of ways to determine if the feature delivers the right outcomes. These include:

• Observation – Wherever possible, directly observe the actual usage of the system, it’s an opportunity to understand the user’s context and behaviors.
• User surveys – When direct observation isn’t possible, a simple end-user questionnaire can obtain fast feedback.
• Usage analytics – Lean-Agile teams build analytics right into their applications, which helps validate initial use and provides the application telemetry needed to support a Continuous Delivery model. Application telemetry offers constant operational and user feedback from the deployed system.
• A/B testing – Is a form of statistical hypothesis comparing two samples, which acknowledges that user preferences are unknowable in advance. Recognizing this is truly liberating, eliminating endless arguments between designers and developers—who likely won’t use the system. Teams follow Principle #3 – Assume variability; preserve options to keep design options open as long as possible. And wherever it’s practical and economically feasible, they should implement multiple alternatives for critical user activities. Then they can test those other options with mockups, prototypes, or even full stack implementations. In this latter case, differing versions may be deployed to multiple subsets of users, perhaps sequenced over time and measured via analytics.

In short, measurable results deliver the knowledge teams need to refactor, adjust, redesign—or even pivot to abandon a feature, based solely on objective data and user feedback. Measurement creates a closed-loop Lean UX process that iterates toward a successful outcome, driven by actual evidence of whether a feature fulfills the hypothesis, or not.

Implementing Lean UX in SAFe

Lean UX is different than the traditional, centralized approach to user experience design. The primary difference is how the hypothesis-driven aspects are evaluated by implementing the code, instrumenting where applicable, and gaining the actual user feedback in a staging or production environment. Implementing new designs is primarily the responsibility of the Agile Teams, working in conjunction with Lean UX experts.

Of course, this shift, like so many others with Lean-Agile development, can cause significant changes to the way teams and functions are organized, enabling a continuous flow of value. For more on coordinating and implementing Lean UX —and more specifically how to integrate Lean UX in the PI cycle—read the advanced topic article Lean UX and the Program Increment Lifecycle .

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The Efficient Approach: How to Design a Lean UX MVP

Think. Make. Check. The Lean UX process works well with the MVP process—Prototype, Measure, Learn. Combining Lean UX and MVP allows designers to create valuable products in less time, with less waste.

By Cameron Chapman

Cameron comes from a design background and is the author of two web design books: Color for Web Design and The Smashing Idea Book.

Some designers and laypeople seem to think that Lean UX and Minimum Viable Products are an outcome. Instead, they are processes that when done well, result in the best possible products while saving UX designers time and resources. The end products serve business needs while also being optimal solutions to the problems customers present.

The Lean UX process (or Lean UX Loop, as it’s often called) is not unlike the scientific method—observation, forming a hypothesis, testing and collecting data, analyzing the results, and then accepting or rejecting the hypothesis. In Lean UX, the steps roughly correlate to Ideas (observation and hypothesis), Build and Code ([testing])(https://www.toptal.com/qa/how-to-write-testable-code-and-why-it-matters), Measure and Data (collecting data), and Learn (analyzing results and accepting or rejecting the hypothesis). Sometimes, the Lean UX process is summed up more succinctly as Think, Make, Check .

Like the scientific method, the Lean UX process is a circular one until reaching the desired outcome. Unlike the scientific method, however, designers can start wherever they choose on the Lean UX Loop (most start new projects with either learning or ideas but work on established products that can more easily begin anywhere).

Minimum viable products fit well into the Lean UX methodology. The general MVP methodology is generally summed up as Build (or Prototype), Measure, Learn (and then repeat based on those learnings). It’s easy to see how those steps correlate to the Lean UX loop (especially the succinct version).

Some designers confuse MVPs with proofs of concept or prototypes (the first step of the MVP process is sometimes referred to as prototyping , which could explain that confusion). But MVPs are complete products that are ready for production, and Lean UX MVPs are no different. A Lean UX MVP should be a fully functional product that people can use.

Stop Thinking About the Final Product

When a UX designer looks at a problem, it can be tempting to jump ahead and think about the final product that would potentially solve the issue. Getting to a final, finished product is generally the goal, so why not start there?

The issue with starting with the finished product and working backward is that it stifles innovation and creativity. There might be a dozen different ways to solve a user’s problem. Designers who begin by thinking about the final result might miss the majority of these potential solutions and come up with one that falls short.

When designers let go of any preconceived notions about what solution will best serve the people using their product, they can come up with more innovative ideas. In his book Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience , Jeff Gothelf states that Lean UX “is about bringing the true nature of a product to light faster.” It’s a collaborative process that focuses on “building a shared understanding of the actual product experience being designed.”

That process requires designers to not only understand the needs of the people they’re trying to serve but also the business needs before they start. When embarking on a Lean UX design project, this understanding forms the basis for all of the other steps in the design process.

Focus on User Needs

When a designer approaches a problem, they often think they have a thorough grasp of what that problem is. For example, if the idea is to create a to-do list app, then the designer may assume that users need a solution that lets them add tasks to a list and nothing more. Their initial Lean UX MVP would focus on creating an app that provides that functionality.

But is that the best solution to the actual problem? People don’t use to-do apps solely to add tasks to a list. They use them because they need to keep their lives organized. They don’t want to forget to do something important. They’re afraid if they don’t keep a list, they’ll overlook things.

A list format may not be the best way for people to keep track of what they need to do. But if a designer goes into the project thinking, “I need to create an app for to-do lists,” they may never come across an idea that would better serve the people they’re designing for. By focusing on what the user needs and forgetting their own assumptions, the designer can find a solution that solves the real problem at hand, rather than just adding yet another to-do list app to the other options out there.

Designers should aim to challenge their assumptions about what they think a user needs. People often don’t even know what they need to solve their problems. So how can designers assume they know best before they’ve done user research and sought to understand what customers are struggling with?

One way to think about customer needs is to focus on their pain point. A pain point is the aspect of the problem that causes the most distress to the customer. When designers focus on that, they can get to the root of the issue faster and find unique solutions. For the to-do list app example, the pain point is likely worrying about forgetting something important or having to waste mental energy keeping track of things.

Once a designer has an idea how to solve a problem, it’s essential they test that solution with real people. They shouldn’t waste too much time trying to create a finished product from the get-go. Collecting feedback from people on the initial idea, before investing a ton of time and resources on a polished product, makes changing the details, scope, or even the entire premise much easier.

The first iteration could be something as simple as a slide deck or semi-functional mockup. Something that lets people get a general idea of the experience offered is a useful precursor to creating an actual Lean UX MVP.

These early pre-MVPs can also be useful for mapping out user journeys. Once some initial feedback is gathered, designers can get a better sense of what people really want in a product. That’s invaluable for mapping out how to get them from point A (their problem) to point B (the ideal solution). Designers may find that there are more steps required along that map than they initially thought, or less.

Designers may even find the original problem they were trying to solve wasn’t the actual problem. In the to-do list app, for example, the designer may find that a solution that helps people feel less stressed about the things they need to do is a more valuable end product than something that keeps their tasks organized. Without actively seeking feedback and creating new iterations that aim to solve the real problem, the designer may never discover that solution.

Think About Necessary Features

When a designer begins a new project, they often start with a list of features the product needs to have. A list of possible features to include isn’t a bad place to start. But it should be compared to what people express they actually want from a product.

Most people, however, won’t know what features they want. They’ll focus on the benefits instead. It’s the designer’s job to figure out what features provide those benefits. And there may be multiple ways to provide each benefit.

Writing down a list of all the possible features that address the benefits people seek is a valuable part of the design process. The list should include more than just the “good” ideas, though. Bad ideas can also serve an important purpose—they can lead to good ideas.

Writing down all the ideas that come to mind is especially helpful when a group is brainstorming. One person will throw out a bad idea, and it sparks a better idea for someone else. Even when brainstorming solo, the “bad” ideas can lead designers to travel down different paths and come up with innovative solutions.

Once a designer has this big list of ideas, they can start to narrow it down to which ones are technically feasible given the project resources and best address the customer’s pain points. From there, building an MVP and testing with potential users can begin.

Building an Initial Lean UX MVP

Thinking and coming up with ideas is the first step to creating a Lean UX MVP. But building real products should quickly follow. Both Lean UX and the MVP process emphasize building actual, usable products.

It’s important to try not to stuff every feature possible into this initial build phase. Instead, think about the minimum number of features that will alleviate the user’s most critical pain point. The first design should focus on what the UX designer thinks will be the features with the highest ROI. Whether that turns out to be true or not will be revealed once people start using the product.

Iteration Is Key

Collecting qualitative feedback and quantitative data from people is useless unless the designer acts on the feedback to create better iterations of the product. Remember, Lean UX MVPs are a process, not a result. And one of the most significant parts of that process is creating new, improved iterations of the product to better address people’s needs.

Each iteration of an MVP should be done based on feedback collected from actual users. That means each iteration should be tested , either in a production environment or by a smaller group of people. It makes sense in many cases to test with a small group first and then, based on how those people respond, test on a larger production scale.

With small groups, designers should collect qualitative feedback. Ask people questions about the product to collect information about what works and what doesn’t, as well as ideas for improvements or alternatives.

In a production environment, designers should focus more on quantitative feedback (things like bounce rates, time on page, and cart abandonment in the case of eCommerce sites). This quantitative feedback can tell designers whether the new iteration is moving in the right direction, i.e., are those numbers improving or getting worse?

When Is a Lean UX MVP Done?

When can a Lean UX MVP be considered “done” can be a tricky question for designers who are new to the process (and sometimes even for seasoned pros). It could come after five iterations or 50. It depends on the complexity of the product, the quality of the user testing and feedback collected, and how many iterations show no noticeable improvements. In many cases, there’s never a point where every person using a product is 100% satisfied with the outcome. It’s up to the product team to decide what level of dissatisfaction is acceptable given their business goals.

Designers and stakeholders should come up with criteria for when a project is “done” (or at least ready for a public release without ongoing testing and new iterations). These criteria could include things like:

• A higher customer conversion rate
• More time spent on the site
• A higher quality or satisfaction score from customers
• Fewer customer complaints
• An increase in customers or users
• More newsletter signups

The exact criteria and goals should be discussed at the beginning of the project and reviewed regularly. As iterations change according to customer feedback and user testing, the goals may need to change along with them.

In truth, a product is rarely ever “done.” Even after a final product release, it’s likely that things will change over the following months or years. Customer and business needs change. Design trends and new technologies emerge. Any of these things may prompt a necessary evolution of the design in the future. Designers and product owners should keep these things in mind and be prepared to launch a new Lean UX MVP cycle as necessary.

Lean UX MVPs have a lot of advantages over other product design methods. When UX designers and product owners want to create a product that best serves customers while also making the design cycle more efficient, it’s often the best choice.

The Lean UX MVP process—from ideas to building a functional prototype to measuring and learning from real people—can be implemented over and over again to create an optimal product. The process itself is simple and straightforward, and works well whether a designer is working solo or with a team.

The resulting product will address people’s pain points while also creating a pleasurable experience. Building products using the Lean UX MVP methodology gives designers a clean roadmap for the entire process. From ideation through iterations based on real customer feedback, this method makes design more efficient and less wasteful.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• Ditch MVPs, Adopt Minimum Viable Prototypes (MVPrs)
• Getting Maximum Impact From a Minimum Valuable Product
• The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods
• How to Conduct Effective UX Research: A Guide
• The Value of User Testing With Prototypes

Understanding the basics

What is mvp in ux.

Minimum viable product (MVP) is a process for creating a production-ready product based on collaboration with users that undergoes continuous iterations and improvements until a “final” product is created. MVP design iterations are based on quantitative data and qualitative customer feedback.

What does minimum viable product mean?

Minimum viable product, despite what the name implies, is a process for creating production-ready products. The MVP design process includes three steps: Prototype, Measure, Learn. The first step is coming up with ideas, the second step is building those ideas, and the third step is getting feedback from real users.

What is the difference between an MVP and prototype?

MVP (minimum viable product) design is a process for creating functional, production-ready products that serve user needs. Prototypes are not fully functional, nor are they ready for production. In some cases, minimum viable prototypes are created which are like a hybrid of the two.

What makes a good MVP?

A good MVP is a functional product that includes enough useful features to serve user needs and address their pain points. A good MVP will also go through multiple iterations based on user feedback to continuously improve the product until it’s an optimal solution for the people using it.

What does Lean UX start?

Lean UX is the basis for creating valuable products in a more efficient, less wasteful way. It combines agile development methodology (primarily iteration) with design thinking. It’s a collaborative, cross-functional process that reveals the true nature of a product faster.

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What is lean UX and why does it matter? A complete guide

Lean UX is a collaborative, iterative way of designing and building products – but why is it so important?

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In 2013, Jeff Gothelf published a book called Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams . In doing so, he introduced a revolutionary approach to the way products are designed and built. 

Since then, lean UX has become quite the buzzword, favoured by startups and agile practitioners. But what does it all mean? 

If you’re looking for a no-nonsense, jargon-free guide to lean UX, look no further. We’ll explain:

• What lean UX is
• The difference between lean UX and traditional UX
• The principles of lean UX
• The lean UX process
• What’s so great about lean UX

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

1. What is lean UX?

Lean UX is a collaborative, iterative way of designing and building products. 

It goes hand-in-hand with the agile methodology, which originated in the software industry. The agile methodology breaks a project up into short, rapid cycles in order to get things done quickly, with continuous testing and improvements along the way. Lean UX follows a similar approach, working in a constant loop of thinking, making, and testing. 

The purpose of lean UX is to harness the power of collaboration, to reduce waste (in terms of time, effort and resources), and to experiment and build rapidly in order to get feedback early on. With this feedback, the product can be improved incrementally. 

That’s lean UX in a nutshell. We’ll dive deeper into how lean UX works as we explore the process and principles underlying this increasingly popular approach. 

2. What’s the difference between lean UX and traditional UX?

When following the typical UX design process , designers spend a lot of time understanding their users through user research, figuring out the problem space and defining product requirements before they get to actually designing anything. The focus is on scoping out the project fully and comprehensively enough so that when the product is designed and developed, it has a good shot at meeting the user’s needs and adequately solving their pain-points. 

With lean UX, you’re not looking to get it right (or even close) straight out of the gate. Rather than laying extensive groundwork before you can create something, lean UX has you building a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly and early on. This enables early and continuous feedback so the product can be improved iteratively — with each iteration (or version) bringing you closer to the end goal. This isn’t to say that lean UX does away with user research and testing; they’re just done with a more “quick and dirty” approach. 

It’s often said that lean UX is more collaborative than the traditional UX process. Because lean UX works in short cycles, there’s a constant back and forth between the designers, developers, product managers and other key stakeholders, as opposed to working in silos. Although “classic” UX is still highly collaborative, the sharing and testing of ideas and solutions is not as continuous as it is with lean UX. 

Ultimately, traditional UX favours a more thorough, deliverable and documentation-heavy approach prior to actually designing and building anything, while lean UX puts the emphasis on building early on, getting feedback, making quick decisions and improving along the way.

3. The golden rules and principles of lean UX

Lean UX is based on certain rules and principles. Let’s take a look at some of the most important ones now.

Lean UX requires cross-functional collaboration 

Rather than working in silos (i.e. in isolation), different departments and disciplines work together throughout. With everyone involved at each stage, lean UX helps to ensure a shared understanding of the product, the end users, the problem space and general processes. 

Lean UX prioritises problem-solving and solution-finding

Not dissimilar to traditional UX, lean UX places problem-solving front and centre. The emphasis is not on designing or building features for the sake of an output. Rather, it’s about making sure you’re solving the right problem and empowering everyone to come up with solutions. 

Lean UX seeks to reduce waste

Lean UX encourages you to skip any parts of the process that are time and resource-heavy (like excessive documentation) and to focus instead on creating an MVP (minimum viable product), which you can quickly learn from. The goal is to accelerate progress and, as the name suggests, make the process leaner and more streamlined. 

Lean UX says build early and quickly

As we’ve mentioned, lean UX has you creating an MVP as early as possible. The goal isn’t to create a near-perfect or even great product right away, but rather to build something you can continuously and iteratively improve. 

…and gives you permission to fail

Designing and building in this way encourages experimentation and failure. With lean UX, it’s absolutely fine to get it wrong. You’ll learn soon enough because of the continuous feedback loops – and because you’re building quickly –  you’ll be able to put it right. And, because you haven’t invested too much time and resources in getting it perfect, the fallout of getting it wrong is minimal. 

4. The lean UX process

The lean UX process centres on three key phases: Think , Make  and Check . It’s a cyclical process that keeps repeating, with the product improving each time the cycle begins anew. 

Lean UX phase 1: Think

The process starts with your assumptions about –  and understanding of –  the problem space in question. Assumptions are usually gathered in a workshop or through a group brainstorming session and they basically sum up what you collectively assume or think you know. 

You can gather assumptions about who your users are, what the product you’re designing is used for and when, what the most important functions and features will be and so on. 

Based on your assumptions, you’ll then create a hypothesis (or multiple hypotheses). For example, you might come up with the following hypothesis:

We believe that online shoppers need to be able to place an order without creating a customer account. Providing this option will increase the number of completed orders / reduce the number of “abandoned cart” incidences. We can prove this if we are able to measure an increase in the order completion rate (which currently stands at 15%).

When writing hypotheses, it’s important that you’re able to set a clear and measurable goal for how each hypothesis can be tested. Otherwise, there’s no way to determine if it’s valid or invalid and therefore worthy of pursuing or not.  

Lean UX phase 2: Make

As we know, lean UX is about building early and that’s the focus of the “Make” phase. You’ll now create a minimum viable product (MVP), which is essentially the most basic version you will need in order to test your hypothesis and gather initial learnings and feedback.

The form your MVP takes will depend on your hypothesis and what you want to test. Taking the example of our online shopping hypothesis, the MVP could be an interactive prototype of the proposed new checkout process, featuring the additional option to place an order without having to create an account. 

Otherwise, an MVP might be a very basic wireframe or a website landing page. Anything that can be created quickly and used to test out your hypothesis. 

Lean UX phase 3: Check

With your MVP in place, you have something tangible to test and evaluate. In the “Check” phase, you gather feedback on your MVP in order to invalidate or validate your original hypothesis. You can do this through A/B testing, site analytics and a variety of user and usability testing methods. 

Based on your learnings, you’ll loop back to phase 1 (“Think”) and proceed accordingly. Maybe you need to scrap the initial hypothesis and explore a different problem or perhaps it’s necessary to generate new ideas and angles for the same hypothesis. Either way, you’ll build on the previous cycle and continue to steer the product towards success. 

5. What’s so great about lean UX?

You’ve read this far, so you probably already have a good idea of why lean UX is so popular. 

Compared to traditional UX, lean UX is hailed as a huge time and money saver — and, perhaps most importantly, it keeps designers focused on solving the right user problem at the right time.

With the traditional approach to UX, you might spend months designing a particular feature or solution, investing considerable time and resources along the way, only to find that by the time your designs are developed and tested, requirements have changed. The idea you came up with four months ago is no longer relevant or fitting, sending you right back to the drawing board. 

Now imagine how that changes if you take a lean approach. You would build and test your initial idea early on, making sure you’re solving the right problem before you invest any more time and resources. By working in short cycles with continuous testing and feedback, you’re able to adapt to changing requirements in real-time. 

Lean UX is especially popular with startups and teams who don’t have infinite resources at their disposal. So, if you’re a UX designer with aspirations of working in a startup or a company which follows the agile methodology, it’s important to understand what lean UX is and how it works. 

Hopefully this guide has got you off to a good start! If you’d like to dive deeper into lean UX, we can recommend Jeff Gothelf’s book on the topic . 

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Lean UX Design: Full Guide

Lean UX design bridges the gap between theoretical design principles and practical application, paving the way for products that truly resonate with users.

By marrying elements of lean manufacturing and agile development, this approach emphasizes rapid iteration, user feedback, and a deep focus on the actual experience of the end user.

Lean UX seeks to remove waste from the design process, allowing teams to focus more on building and testing rather than extensive documentation.

It transforms how startups and established companies alike innovate, bringing products to market faster and more efficiently.

Keep reading to learn how to apply the principles of Lean UX to streamline your design process, enhance collaboration, and create more user-centered products.

Introduction to Lean UX

Lean UX, standing at the intersection of lean methodologies and user experience design, revamps traditional UX principles for more agile, feedback-driven environments.

Originating from lean manufacturing principles, Lean UX borrows the focus on value creation and waste elimination, adapting these concepts to the dynamic realm of lean software development and startup company culture.

This methodology emphasizes rapid iteration, close collaboration among team members, and a deep focus on the user to streamline the design process.

As Lean UX has evolved, it has incorporated elements from design thinking, agile development, and lean startup methodologies, making it an increasingly vital approach for companies aiming to enhance user experience while staying adaptable and efficient in their product development endeavors.

What is Lean UX?

Lean UX embodies a mindset shift from traditional, heavyweight design frameworks towards one that is more fluid and user-centered. It prioritizes the rapid validation of design hypotheses through continuous feedback loops with users, thereby aligning closely with the agile methodology’s iterative nature. By centering on the concept of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and integrating user feedback early and often, Lean UX seeks to refine products in real-time, reducing inefficiencies and focussing on delivering real value to users.

The Evolution of Lean UX

Lean UX has grown beyond its initial inspiration from lean manufacturing, incorporating a rich blend of methodologies. This blend includes agile’s flexible, iterative approach and the user-centric nature of design thinking. Coupled with insights from the lean startup movement, which emphasizes quick, learn-as-you-go development, Lean UX has matured into a powerful, adaptable framework. It equips teams to nimbly respond to user needs and market changes, ensuring that the design process remains both efficient and deeply attuned to creating meaningful user experiences.

Principles of Lean UX

Delving into the heart of Lean UX, one must understand its core principles that distinguish it from traditional user experience design paradigms.

These principles hinge on an iterative, collaborative approach that seeks to align closely with the real needs of the user.

Essential to this discourse is contrasting Lean UX with more conventional UX methods.

Doing so illuminates the streamlined, feedback-driven nature of Lean UX, which accelerates product development while embedding a deeper understanding of the user through continuous learning and adaptation.

This section explores these fundamental tenets, shaping the way businesses and designers alike envision and execute user experience efforts.

Core Principles for Success

At the heart of Lean UX lies a strong reliance on a set of core principles designed to maximize success: lean methodology, constant user feedback, and an iterative development process. These foundational elements work together to ensure that every step in the design and development process is aligned with user needs and feedback, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and enabling teams to pivot quickly in response to new insights. By placing the user at the center of the development journey, organizations can streamline their processes, reduce wasted effort, and significantly enhance the overall user experience.

Comparing Lean UX and Traditional UX

In contrast to traditional UX, which often operates within more rigid, sequential project phases, Lean UX champions a much more fluid and flexible approach. This method disrupts the conventional workflow, trading lengthy upfront design and documentation for rapid paper prototyping and user testing. As a result, Lean UX enables teams to adapt swiftly to user feedback and evolving project requirements, significantly reducing time-to-market and enhancing the end product’s alignment with user expectations.

The Lean UX Process: Think, Make, Check

The Lean UX process, distilled into three essential stages—Think, Make, Check—guides teams through a cyclical journey of hypothesis formation, rapid paper prototyping, and target audience validation.

Commencing with the ‘Think’ phase, teams engage in active brainstorming to form solid, user-driven hypotheses, thereby setting a clear direction for product development.

Transitioning into the ‘Make’ phase, the emphasis shifts towards translating these hypotheses into tangible, interactive prototypes, utilizing a range of rapid prototyping techniques to bring concepts to life quickly.

The process culminates in the ‘Check’ phase, where these prototypes serve as tools to validate assumptions with real users, ensuring the product’s features are both desirable and offer a value proposition.

This structured yet flexible approach enables teams to iterate swiftly, aligning closely with user needs while fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

Phase 1: Think – Building the Right Hypotheses

In the ‘Think’ phase, the essence of Lean UX is distilled into the creation of informed hypotheses that guide the future design process: starting with an understanding gleaned from user research, market analysis, qualitative research and the broader goals of the organization, teams embark on formulating educated assumptions. These hypotheses are essentially predictions about what changes or new features might most effectively improve the user experience or meet specific user needs. With a robust hypothesis in place, the team is equipped with a clear direction for the prototyping and testing phases that follow.

Phase 2: Make – Rapid Prototyping Techniques

Once a solid foundation of user-driven hypotheses is laid down in the ‘Think’ phase, Lean UX teams advance to the ‘Make’ stage, where rapid prototyping takes center stage. This critical phase transforms abstract ideas into concrete, interactive prototypes, allowing for swift exploration of design solutions. Utilizing tools and techniques ranging from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity digital mockups, the objective is to quickly produce a working model that reflects the proposed solution, making it ready for real-world user testing and feedback.

Phase 3: Check – Validating Assumptions with Users

In the ‘Check’ phase, Lean UX requires teams to directly engage with users to validate or refute the hypotheses generated earlier. This involves usability testing and gathering qualitative and quantitative data from real interactions, getting insights into user motivation, which then informs the next cycle of iteration. It’s a critical step where user feedback becomes the fulcrum, guiding further refinement of the product to better meet user expectations and needs.

Implementing Lean UX in Agile Environments

Transitioning Lean UX into Agile environments introduces a powerful synergy, enhancing adaptability and focusing on delivering user value through streamlined processes.

This integration necessitates a shift in team dynamics and workflow, embracing Lean UX workshops and collaborative design sessions as central mechanisms for cross-discipline engagement and rapid iteration.

It’s a pathway that bridges the gap between user-centric design philosophies and the iterative, fast-paced nature of Agile development, setting the stage for topics like the integration of Lean UX with agile methodologies, and the vital role of Lean UX workshops in fostering a truly collaborative design process.

Integrating Lean UX with Agile Methodologies

Integrating Lean UX with Agile methodologies creates a symbiotic relationship that enhances the product development process: Agile’s sprint cycles provide the perfect rhythm for Lean UX’s rapid iterations, allowing for a seamless flow of user feedback and design adjustments. This merging rises above traditional barriers, fostering a dynamic environment where cross-functional teams are empowered to collaboratively refine and evolve a product, ensuring that user experience remains at the forefront of the software development process.

Lean UX Workshops and Collaborative Design

Lean UX workshops galvanize the collaborative design effort, serving as a crucible where team members from different disciplines converge to share insights, iterate on prototypes, and collectively refine their approach to product development. Through these workshops, the concept of collaboration transcends mere interaction, transforming into a dynamic, hands-on process where diverse perspectives are leveraged to craft solutions that resonate deeply with user needs.

Case Studies: Success Stories with Lean UX

The journey of Lean UX unfolds vividly in the tales of organizations that embraced its principles, demonstrating the versatility and impact of this approach to improve user experience and enhance the customer service.

From Doodle’s impressive transformation that showcases the power of Lean UX in refining and elevating a product, to the broader application within both sprawling enterprises and nimble teams, these case studies are a testament to the methodology’s ability to foster innovation, enhance user satisfaction, and streamline product development cycles.

Through examining these success stories, we gain insight into the practical application of Lean UX principles and witness firsthand the significant benefits that come from adopting a user-centric, iterative design and development mindset.

Doodle’s Transformation Through Lean UX

Doodle, a popular scheduling platform, embraced Lean UX to dramatically overhaul its user interface and enhance overall customer experience: The SaaS (software as a service) company recognized that its users struggled with an outdated interface, which deterred seamless interaction design. By employing Lean UX principles, Doodle rapidly iterated on its design, relying heavily on user feedback to refine and streamline the experience. This focus on rapid prototyping and testing allowed Doodle to introduce a vastly improved platform that not only met but exceeded user expectations.

Lean UX in Large Enterprises and Small Teams

In adapting Lean UX methods, both large enterprises and small teams find common ground in their pursuit of efficiency and responsiveness. Large organizations dismantle ingrained siloes, fostering a culture of collaboration across departments, while small teams capitalize on their agility to iterate designs swiftly. This approach not only democratizes user experience design but also embeds it as a central strategy for innovation, regardless of company size.

Tools and Techniques for Lean UX Practitioners

Moving deeper into the Lean UX methodology, the focus shifts towards the practical aspects that enable practitioners to put theory into action effectively.

Essential to this practical application are the tools and techniques that facilitate rapid prototyping and the gathering of critical user feedback, as well as the metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that provide quantifiable measures of success.

Selecting the right tools can dramatically streamline the prototyping process, while a clear understanding of relevant metrics can guide teams toward iterative improvements that significantly enhance user experience.

Useful Tools for Prototyping and Feedback

For Lean UX practitioners, selecting agile and responsive tools such as UXPin or Adobe XD proves crucial for prototyping, offering a seamless transition from low to high fidelity models. These platforms enable real-time collaboration and efficient modifications, ensuring that feedback is rapidly integrated into design iterations. Additionally, leveraging Google Analytics during the ‘Check’ phase aids in capturing quantitative feedback, allowing teams to analyze user behavior and validate hypotheses with data-driven insights.

Metrics and KPIs for Measuring Success

In Lean UX, practitioners measure success by closely monitoring Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that directly correlate with user satisfaction and product efficiency. By employing specific metrics such as bounce rate, user retention rate, and task completion time, along with qualitative feedback gathered through user testing, teams can effectively gauge the impact of their design iterations. This quantifiable evidence supports informed decision-making, ensuring that each modification moves the product closer to achieving its ultimate goal — a seamless, engaging user experience.

Challenges and Solutions in Lean UX

While Lean UX presents a dynamic methodology designed to enhance user experience and streamline product development, it is not without its challenges.

Navigating the waters of this innovative approach, practitioners often encounter common pitfalls and resistance within their organizations.

Addressing these issues head-on, this section delves into strategic solutions aimed at overcoming obstacles to Lean UX adoption, fostering a culture that embraces rapid iteration, user-centered design, and cross-functional collaboration.

Here, we will explore actionable insights for sidestepping foreseeable challenges and enhancing the adoption of Lean UX practices efficiently.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

A common pitfall in Lean UX is the siloing of information, where critical user insights fail to be communicated across the team, leading to misaligned design efforts. Teams can circumvent this by nurturing an environment of open communication and integrating regular cross-functional meetings where insights, feedback, and progress can be shared in real time. This encourages a unified vision and ensures that all members, regardless of their role, are aligned with user needs and the iterative direction of the project.

Overcoming Resistance to Lean UX Practices

Overcoming resistance to Lean UX practices begins with educating stakeholders on its value, demonstrating how rapid iterations and user feedback lead directly to improved products and user satisfaction. By highlighting successful case studies and generating small, quick wins within the organization, teams can vividly showcase the tangible benefits of adopting Lean UX. This approach not only clarifies the methodology’s direct impact on project outcomes but also builds confidence across the team, fostering a more receptive and collaborative environment for Lean UX to thrive.

In navigating the intricate terrain of user experience, Lean UX has emerged as a beacon for efficient and user-centric design approaches.

As we edge closer to wrapping up this comprehensive exploration, it’s essential to cast our gaze forward, contemplating the future landscape of this methodology.

Delving into the foreseeable trends and predictions for Lean UX equips practitioners with a lens to anticipate changes and sculpt strategies that evolve in tandem with technology and user expectations.

Meanwhile, distilling the essence of our journey through Lean UX, the final reflections and key takeaways aim to crystallize the knowledge amassed, ensuring that readers emerge with a fortified understanding and actionable insights for applying Lean UX principles to their projects.

Trends and Predictions for Lean UX

As Lean UX positions itself more prominently within the design and development ecosystem, its future is likely to be shaped by deeper integration with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. These advancements promise to automate and refine the collection and analysis of user feedback, enabling more personalized and proactive design adjustments. Furthermore, the rise of remote collaboration tools catalyzes a more distributed, agile approach to Lean UX practices, accommodating global teams and fostering a richer, more diverse user experience dialogue:

• Deeper integration of AI in automating feedback analysis.
• Enhanced personalization of design through machine learning.
• Adoption of advanced remote collaboration tools for global team engagement.

Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways

Embracing Lean UX design fosters a culture of rapid innovation and deep empathy for user needs, fundamentally reshaping the way organizations approach product development. By grounding their work in continuous feedback and iterative learning, teams can genuinely align their efforts with the evolving landscape of user expectations, ensuring that their outcomes not only resonate with users but also drive meaningful business value. This guide underscores the transformative potential of Lean UX, equipping practitioners with the insights and methodologies necessary to navigate the complexities of user experience design with agility and precision.

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Frequently asked questions.

Lean UX approach is a methodology that combines elements of lean manufacturing and agile development with the goal of enhancing user experience design . It focuses on rapid iteration , frequent user feedback , and a close collaboration between cross-functional teams to efficiently create products that meet user needs.

Lean UX focuses primarily on improving the user experience design process with a strong emphasis on rapid iteration , measuring, and learning whereas Agile UX integrates user experience design into Agile software development practices, stressing collaboration and flexibility. Both aim to create better products but approach the task with different methodologies and priorities.

Lean UX (a part of Scrum ), with its focus on rapid prototyping, user feedback , and user interface design , remains highly relevant, particularly in environments that web usability and user-centric products. Its principles of minimizing waste and focusing on actual user needs make it indispensable for a startup company and established companies alike striving for efficiency and impactful user experiences.

Traditional User Experience (UX) design emphasizes a comprehensive understanding and meticulous planning of the user interface and user interaction before the initiation of development , focusing on delivering a fully realized end product . In contrast, Lean UX advocates for a more flexible, iterative approach, emphasizing rapid prototyping, continuous feedback , and adjustments to design based on user research and data , aiming to streamline the design process and more quickly adapt to users’ needs.

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Mar 21, 2024

Creating a research hypothesis: How to formulate and test UX expectations

A research hypothesis helps guide your UX research with focused predictions you can test and learn from. Here’s how to formulate your own hypotheses.

Armin Tanovic

All great products were once just thoughts—the spark of an idea waiting to be turned into something tangible.

A research hypothesis in UX is very similar. It’s the starting point for your user research; the jumping off point for your product development initiatives.

Formulating a UX research hypothesis helps guide your UX research project in the right direction, collect insights, and evaluate not only whether an idea is worth pursuing, but how to go after it.

In this article, we’ll cover what a research hypothesis is, how it's relevant to UX research, and the best formula to create your own hypothesis and put it to the test.

Test your hypothesis with Maze

Maze lets you validate your design and test research hypotheses to move forward with authentic user insights.

What defines a research hypothesis?

A research hypothesis is a statement or prediction that needs testing to be proven or disproven.

Let’s say you’ve got an inkling that making a change to a feature icon will increase the number of users that engage with it—with some minor adjustments, this theory becomes a research hypothesis: “ Adjusting Feature X’s icon will increase daily average users by 20% ”.

A research hypothesis is the starting point that guides user research . It takes your thought and turns it into something you can quantify and evaluate. In this case, you could conduct usability tests and user surveys, and run A/B tests to see if you’re right—or, just as importantly, wrong .

A good research hypothesis has three main features:

• Specificity: A hypothesis should clearly define what variables you’re studying and what you expect an outcome to be, without ambiguity in its wording
• Relevance: A research hypothesis should have significance for your research project by addressing a potential opportunity for improvement
• Testability: Your research hypothesis must be able to be tested in some way such as empirical observation or data collection

What is the difference between a research hypothesis and a research question?

Research questions and research hypotheses are often treated as one and the same, but they’re not quite identical.

A research hypothesis acts as a prediction or educated guess of outcomes , while a research question poses a query on the subject you’re investigating. Put simply, a research hypothesis is a statement, whereas a research question is (you guessed it) a question.

For example, here’s a research hypothesis: “ Implementing a navigation bar on our dashboard will improve customer satisfaction scores by 10%. ”

This statement acts as a testable prediction. It doesn’t pose a question, it’s a prediction. Here’s what the same hypothesis would look like as a research question: “ Will integrating a navigation bar on our dashboard improve customer satisfaction scores? ”

The distinction is minor, and both are focused on uncovering the truth behind the topic, but they’re not quite the same.

Why do you use a research hypothesis in UX?

Research hypotheses in UX are used to establish the direction of a particular study, research project, or test. Formulating a hypothesis and testing it ensures the UX research you conduct is methodical, focused, and actionable. It aids every phase of your research process , acting as a north star that guides your efforts toward successful product development .

Typically, UX researchers will formulate a testable hypothesis to help them fulfill a broader objective, such as improving customer experience or product usability. They’ll then conduct user research to gain insights into their prediction and confirm or reject the hypothesis.

A proven or disproven hypothesis will tell if your prediction is right, and whether you should move forward with your proposed design—or if it's back to the drawing board.

Formulating a hypothesis can be helpful in anything from prototype testing to idea validation, and design iteration. Put simply, it’s one of the first steps in conducting user research.

Whether you’re in the initial stages of product discovery for a new product, a single feature, or conducting ongoing research, a strong hypothesis presents a clear purpose and angle for your research It also helps understand which user research methodology to use to get your answers.

What are the types of research hypotheses?

Not all hypotheses are built the same—there are different types with different objectives. Understanding the different types enables you to formulate a research hypothesis that outlines the angle you need to take to prove or disprove your predictions.

Here are some of the different types of hypotheses to keep in mind.

Null and alternative hypotheses

While a normal research hypothesis predicts that a specific outcome will occur based upon a certain change of variables, a null hypothesis predicts that no difference will occur when you introduce a new condition.

By that reasoning, a null hypothesis would be:

• Adding a new CTA button to the top of our homepage will make no difference in conversions

Null hypotheses are useful because they help outline what your test or research study is trying to dis prove, rather than prove, through a research hypothesis.

An alternative hypothesis states the exact opposite of a null hypothesis. It proposes that a certain change will occur when you introduce a new condition or variable. For example:

• Adding a CTA button to the top of our homepage will cause a difference in conversion rates

Simple hypotheses and complex hypotheses

A simple hypothesis is a prediction that includes only two variables in a cause-and-effect sequence, with one variable dependent on the other. It predicts that you'll achieve a particular outcome based on a certain condition. The outcome is known as the dependent variable and the change causing it is the independent variable .

For example, this is a simple hypothesis:

• Including the search function on our mobile app will increase user retention

The expected outcome of increasing user retention is based on the condition of including a new search function. But, what happens when there are more than two factors at play?

We get what’s called a complex hypothesis. Instead of a simple condition and outcome, complex hypotheses include multiple results. This makes them a perfect research hypothesis type for framing complex studies or tracking multiple KPIs based on a single action.

Building upon our previous example, a complex research hypothesis could be:

• Including the search function on our mobile app will increase user retention and boost conversions

Directional and non-directional hypotheses

Research hypotheses can also differ in the specificity of outcomes. Put simply, any hypothesis that has a specific outcome or direction based on the relationship of its variables is a directional hypothesis . That means that our previous example of a simple hypothesis is also a directional hypothesis.

Non-directional hypotheses don’t specify the outcome or difference the variables will see. They just state that a difference exists. Following our example above, here’s what a non-directional hypothesis would look like:

• Including the search function on our mobile app will make a difference in user retention

In this non-directional hypothesis, the direction of difference (increase/decrease) hasn’t been specified, we’ve just noted that there will be a difference.

The type of hypothesis you write helps guide your research—let’s get into it.

How to write and test your UX research hypothesis

Now we’ve covered the types of research hypothesis examples, it’s time to get practical.

Creating your research hypothesis is the first step in conducting successful user research.

Here are the four steps for writing and testing a UX research hypothesis to help you make informed, data-backed decisions for product design and development.

1. Formulate your hypothesis

Start by writing out your hypothesis in a way that’s specific and relevant to a distinct aspect of your user or product experience. Meaning: your prediction should include a design choice followed by the outcome you’d expect—this is what you’re looking to validate or reject.

Your proposed research hypothesis should also be testable through user research data analysis. There’s little point in a hypothesis you can’t test!

Let’s say your focus is your product’s user interface—and how you can improve it to better meet customer needs. A research hypothesis in this instance might be:

• Adding a settings tab to the navigation bar will improve usability

By writing out a research hypothesis in this way, you’re able to conduct relevant user research to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You can then use the results of your research—and the validation or rejection of your hypothesis—to decide whether or not you need to make changes to your product’s interface.

2. Identify variables and choose your research method

Once you’ve got your hypothesis, you need to map out how exactly you’ll test it. Consider what variables relate to your hypothesis. In our case, the main variable of our outcome is adding a settings tab to the navigation bar.

Once you’ve defined the relevant variables, you’re in a better position to decide on the best UX research method for the job. If you’re after metrics that signal improvement, you’ll want to select a method yielding quantifiable results—like usability testing . If your outcome is geared toward what users feel, then research methods for qualitative user insights, like user interviews , are the way to go.

3. Carry out your study

It’s go time. Now you’ve got your hypothesis, identified the relevant variables, and outlined your method for testing them, you’re ready to run your study. This step involves recruiting participants for your study and reaching out to them through relevant channels like email, live website testing , or social media.

Given our hypothesis, our best bet is to conduct A/B and usability tests with a prototype that includes the additional UI elements, then compare the usability metrics to see whether users find navigation easier with or without the settings button.

We can also follow up with UX surveys to get qualitative insights and ask users how they found the task, what they preferred about each design, and to see what additional customer insights we uncover.

💡 Want more insights from your usability tests? Maze Clips enables you to gather real-time recordings and reactions of users participating in usability tests .

4. Analyze your results and compare them to your hypothesis

By this point, you’ve neatly outlined a hypothesis, chosen a research method, and carried out your study. It’s now time to analyze your findings and evaluate whether they support or reject your hypothesis.

Look at the data you’ve collected and what it means. Given that we conducted usability testing, we’ll want to look to some key usability metrics for an indication of whether the additional settings button improves usability.

For example, with the usability task of ‘ In account settings, find your profile and change your username ’, we can conduct task analysis to compare the times spent on task and misclick rates of the new design, with those same metrics from the old design.

If you also conduct follow-up surveys or interviews, you can ask users directly about their experience and analyze their answers to gather additional qualitative data . Maze AI can handle the analysis automatically, but you can also manually read through responses to get an idea of what users think about the change.

By comparing the findings to your research hypothesis, you can identify whether your research accepts or rejects your hypothesis. If the majority of users struggle with finding the settings page within usability tests, but had a higher success rate with your new prototype, you’ve proved the hypothesis.

However, it's also crucial to acknowledge if the findings refute your hypothesis rather than prove it as true. Ruling something out is just as valuable as confirming a suspicion.

In either case, make sure to draw conclusions based on the relationship between the variables and store findings in your UX research repository . You can conduct deeper analysis with techniques like thematic analysis or affinity mapping .

UX research hypotheses: four best practices to guide your research

Knowing the big steps for formulating and testing a research hypothesis ensures that your next UX research project gives you focused, impactful results and insights. But, that’s only the tip of the research hypothesis iceberg. There are some best practices you’ll want to consider when using a hypothesis to test your UX design ideas.

Here are four research hypothesis best practices to help guide testing and make your UX research systematic and actionable.

Align your hypothesis to broader business and UX goals

Before you begin to formulate your hypothesis, be sure to pause and think about how it connects to broader goals in your UX strategy . This ensures that your efforts and predictions align with your overarching design and development goals.

For example, implementing a brand new navigation menu for current account holders might work for usability, but if the wider team is focused on boosting conversion rates for first-time site viewers, there might be a different research project to prioritize.

Create clear and actionable reports for stakeholders

Once you’ve conducted your testing and proved or disproved your hypothesis, UX reporting and analysis is the next step. You’ll need to present your findings to stakeholders in a way that's clear, concise, and actionable. If your hypothesis insights come in the form of metrics and statistics, then quantitative data visualization tools and reports will help stakeholders understand the significance of your study, while setting the stage for design changes and solutions.

If you went with a research method like user interviews, a narrative UX research report including key themes and findings, proposed solutions, and your original hypothesis will help inform your stakeholders on the best course of action.

Consider different user segments

While getting enough responses is crucial for proving or disproving your hypothesis, you’ll want to consider which users will give you the highest quality and most relevant responses. Remember to consider user personas —e.g. If you’re only introducing a change for premium users, exclude testing with users who are on a free trial of your product.

You can recruit and target specific user demographics with the Maze Panel —which enables you to search for and filter participants that meet your requirements. Doing so allows you to better understand how different users will respond to your hypothesis testing. It also helps you uncover specific needs or issues different users may have.

Involve stakeholders from the start

Before testing or even formulating a research hypothesis by yourself, ensure all your stakeholders are on board. Informing everyone of your plan to formulate and test your hypothesis does three things:

Firstly, it keeps your team in the loop . They’ll be able to inform you of any relevant insights, special considerations, or existing data they already have about your particular design change idea, or KPIs to consider that would benefit the wider team.

Secondly, informing stakeholders ensures seamless collaboration across multiple departments . Together, you’ll be able to fit your testing results into your overall CX strategy , ensuring alignment with business goals and broader objectives.

Finally, getting everyone involved enables them to contribute potential hypotheses to test . You’re not the only one with ideas about what changes could positively impact the user experience, and keeping everyone in the loop brings fresh ideas and perspectives to the table.

Test your UX research hypotheses with Maze

Formulating and testing out a research hypothesis is a great way to define the scope of your UX research project clearly. It helps keep research on track by providing a single statement to come back to and anchor your research in.

Whether you run usability tests or user interviews to assess your hypothesis—Maze's suite of advanced research methods enables you to get the in-depth user and customer insights you need.

Frequently asked questions about research hypothesis

What is the difference between a hypothesis and a problem statement in UX?

A research hypothesis describes the prediction or method of solving that problem. A problem statement, on the other hand, identifies a specific issue in your design that you intend to solve. A problem statement will typically include a user persona, an issue they have, and a desired outcome they need.

How many hypotheses should a UX research problem have?

Technically, there are no limits to the amount of hypotheses you can have for a certain problem or study. However, you should limit it to one hypothesis per specific issue in UX research. This ensures that you can conduct focused testing and reach clear, actionable results.

Want to keep yourself updated on topics like: 1. Digital Transformation 2.Lean Startup 3.Design Sprint

Lean ux: focusing on outcomes.

Change the way you approach work

14 April 2018

In traditional UX design projects, teams were often given requirements and then expected to create deliverables.

In Lean UX, you don’t create deliverables. Instead, you create outcomes.

You don’t start with requirements. Instead, you start with assumptions.

You create and test hypotheses. And at every step, you measure the outcome.

Lean UX radically changes the way you approach your work. It helps you achieve outcome-focused work. And the key tool to achieve it is: hypothesis statement.

A hypothesis statement is the starting point for any project. It is the simplest way of declaring assumptions in a testable format.

Here are the steps you can follow to achieve a more outcome-focused work in any given project:

1) Declare all your assumptions

As a first step, gather all your team members, including those that may belong to other disciplines but are vital to your project. Ask each member to put down his/her assumptions on the white board. It will give you a common starting point.

The motive behind this exercise is to give every member an opportunity to voice his/her opinion on how best to solve a problem. In doing so, you will possibly see a huge divergence in opinions among team members and a broad set of possible solutions. Don’t worry about it.

2) Define your Problem Statement

So far you might have team members focusing on different problems with different solutions; or solving the same problem with different solutions on the white board.

What a problem statement does is that it gives your team a clear focus. It helps you define important constraints that are essential to any group work.

A problem statement consists of three elements:

a) The goal/s of the product.

b) The problem that the business stakeholder wants to solve (and is most likely failing to do so).

c) The demand for a specific improvement in the product.

Here is a template: 
 [Our service/product] was designed to achieve [these goals] . We have observed that the product/service isn’t meeting [these goals] , which is causing [this adverse effect] to our business. How might we improve [service/product] so that our customers are more successful based on [these measurable criteria] ?

It is not necessary that you will have a clear problem statement at the beginning. You revise it as you go further in the process.

But a problem statement is usually filled with assumptions. An important exercise here is to ask your team to strip off all the assumptions using this worksheet.

Remember that you can adapt or tailor these assumptions/questions depending on the stage/type of your project.

3) Prioritize your assumptions

Now you have already got your list of assumptions on the white board. Next step would be to go through them and put them in an order of priority based on their level of risk. Try and think this way: what would happen if this assumption were false? How bad would it be?

The higher the risk, the higher the priority of that assumption should be. So the assumption that poses maximum risk to your project should be tested first. This does not mean that the rest of the assumptions won’t be tested. You will have to maintain a backlog and test them later as per their priority.  

4) State your hypothesis

You can’t simply test your assumptions. First you need to convert them into a format that is easier to test. That’s called a hypothesis statement.

Here’s a template:

We believe that (doing this/building this feature/creating this experience) for (these people/personas) 
 will achieve (this outcome) .


We will know this is true when we see (this market feedback, quantitative measure, or qualitative insight).

In order to fill this template, you would require the following building blocks:

First focus on the problem you are trying to solve. You will see that you already have a few standard, larger outcomes that you want to achieve. Now try and break these into smaller parts.

For instance, let’s say you are looking to get more sign-ups for your service. Now break this broad outcome into something more specific, such as what behaviors will predict greater usage? Would increasing the number of items in your shopping cart help?

Ask your team members to create a list of small, specific outcomes that can help you achieve the larger outcome.

Often designers create personas to define their potential users. But if you don’t have a proper methodology to devise personas, here’s what you can use in the Lean UX process.

Create working-personas

Working-personas are created through guesswork done by team members. You start with your initial impression of users, or who you imagine your users would be. You put down the assumptions of all the team members.

And as your project progresses, you find out how accurate your working-personas are and adjust them to your actual users.

This is perhaps the fastest way to create and test personas. Instead of spending months researching and interviewing people, you simply spend a few hours brainstorming with your team and create working-personas. And as the project progresses and you gather more information, your assumptions will be validated, or not.

Use the following template to create working-personas:

In the first quadrant, you just need to fill out your potential user’s name and role. In the second one, you need to fill out basic demographic information such as age, gender, hobbies etc. The more you focus on information that predicts a certain type of behavior, the better your results would be.

For instance, whether a person owns a television may be more relevant for your product than his/her age.

In the third quadrant, you need to fill out the various frustrations that your user might be dealing with and the pain points that your product tries to address. In the fourth quadrant, you put down the potential solutions for those pain points.

Through this process, you might be able to create multiple working-personas. But eventually you must zero in on four key personas that come closest to your users.

Features are the most concrete way to achieve the outcomes that you have listed above. In the traditional design process, you usually start with features or an idea around a feature and then work backward to try to justify them. But in the Lean UX process, features appear as a result of the needs of the users and businesses.

Start thinking about features only after you have narrowed in on your outcomes and users. Ask your team members to write their ideas of features on the board and have them explain how they think it would drive the user behavior in the desired direction.  

• Gather your material

Once you have gathered all this raw material, you must organize it into a set of testable hypotheses. Use this template to create categories:

You must try and examine what solution is serving which persona. If you find that a single hypothesis drives more than one outcome, then you must split the hypothesis. You want each statement to refer to only one outcome.

The goal of this exercise is to ensure that your ideas are specific enough to carry out meaningful tests.

And once you are done with your list of hypotheses, you are ready to move on to the next step: MVP.

(Reference: Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden )

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About the author: Narjeet works with product leaders and innovation team in helping them take an idea to customer discovery to solution and product-market-fit. He helps companies in Lean experimentation, Design Sprints, Agile product development and Growth Hacking. He is passionate about digital healthcare - because that's where his digital skills can make maximum impact.

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Lean UX Is Taking Over. Here’s Why.

What is Lean UX and how can you use it in your own product development?

Well-functioning, reliable and easy-to-use products are more likely to become commercially successful. Through their design process, product designers aim to create great UX and Lean UX is quickly becoming the favorite technique for many teams.

What Is Lean UX?

In the traditional product design process teams build products based on requirements that are defined up front. The team familiarizes itself with the requirements, ideates a solution, builds a prototype of this solution, and validates it with its users. Design deliverables play a major role in the traditional design process since we use prototypes in product development. The problem with this approach is evident: initial requirements can be fallible and the team risks investing energy creating something that won't bring any value to the user. 

Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup , perfectly summarizes the risk of following a traditional product design approach: “What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?”

Jeff Gothelf introduced the concept of Lean UX in his 2013 book Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams . Instead of specific requirements, a team  practicing Lean UX starts with a problem statement--a description of a problem that users face in real life that should be addressed with a digital product. The team explores the problem space and formulates assumptions. 

An assumption is a statement of something a team thinks is true (based on existing knowledge about the market and target users).

There Are 2 Types of Assumptions

• User assumption is an assumption of what users expect from your product.
• Business assumption is an assumption of what will make your product commercially successful.

Here’s an example: a team wants to create a food delivery app. One of the first key user assumptions will likely be minimizing the time-to-order (since the user wants to receive her meal as fast as possible). The business assumption, in this case, is therefore evident—by reducing the time-to-order, you will increase user satisfaction and overall conversion. 

After you state explicit assumptions, it's time to move on to creating a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an evidenced-based statement that can be validated . For instance, the team formulates a hypothesis that UI should allow ordering food in less than five minutes and validates this hypothesis by building a prototype and testing it with users. During testing, it's vital to measure the conversion rate. If, after the validation, the team sees that it's heading in the wrong direction, they can quickly adjust the course. 

More From Nick Babich 3 Great Ideation Techniques for Your Team

Designing With Users in Mind

Lean UX is a process that embraces agile design methods and encourages a more comprehensive view of the problem space. For example, when team members decide whether or not they want to introduce a new feature in a product, they ask questions like:

Why do we need to release this particular feature? 

What value does it bring to users? 

How is the person supposed to use this feature in their daily life?

This approach provides a team with a better understanding of user pain points and how exactly a feature is supposed to solve them.

What to Consider When Employing Lean UX

Deep understanding of end users.

User research is the core of Lean UX. It's impossible to release a good product without learning the true needs and wants of end-users. Product teams practicing Lean UX take into account not only what users need and want, but they also consider the user's context (the environment in which the product will be used with its limitations). 

Collaborative Design

Design is a team sport. It’s hard (or nearly impossible) to create a good design while working in a silo. Radical transparency is one of the key differences between Lean UX and other design approaches. All teams participating in a  product’s design communicate with each other on a regular basis and address all roadblocks together. 

Lean UX also practices cross-functional activities. For example, designers on product teams create mockups and prototypes while taking an active part in user research and testing. As a result, the team tackles each problem from many different angles, which significantly improves the design process’s outcome. 

Iterative Design

The nature of agile development is to work in rapid build-validate-learn cycles. Lean UX is not about creating an ideal, well-polished prototype right from the first attempt, it's about building the most basic version of the concept as soon as possible and validating it with users.

3 Goals of Iterative Design

• Reduce waste. The team aims to produce the basic design artifacts such as fake doors (i.e. creating a landing page of a non-existent product to measure interest in it) or low fidelity prototypes that allow the team to validate the hypothesis as fast as possible.
• Validate solutions on real business objectives. The team defines key business metrics (such as conversion rate) up front and tests a solution to ensure that it satisfies the expectations.
• Constant experimentation. Constantly experimenting helps the team uncover more information about the problem space to develop a better understanding of users’ pain points and find better solutions. 

The team achieves all three goals by creating minimum viable product (MVP). Eric Riess defines MVP as “a version of a product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learnings about customers with the least effort.” Here is how it works in practice:

The team researches a problem space and learns user needs and wants. The team defines problem A.  

The team assumes that problem A can be solved by creating a solution B (hypothesis).

The team creates an MVP of solution B in order to validate the hypothesis.

The team validates the MVP with users and continues the learning process.

Once the team knows what needs to be improved, it can best decide where to invest effort.

Read More From Our UX and Design Experts Should You Be Focusing on Product Design or Service Design?

Feedback Loop 

Every idea, no matter how good it sounds, should be tested. That's why it's critical to create concepts and validate them as early as possible. As a product designer, you should expect many of your ideas to fail in testing. But that's okay. The key is to obtain feedback early in the design process because it will be easier to adjust the product design direction. As a result, the product design process will be much less expensive. 

Lean UX is both a mindset and a technique that embraces both Agile and Lean methodologies. For Lean UX to become effective, the entire organization needs to adopt the practice. Only then can we create products with exceptional user experience as quickly as possible.

Recent Design + UX Articles

Problem Statements in UX Discovery

August 22, 2021 2021-08-22

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Running discoveries can be challenging. Many teams start discovery research with little direction as to what problem they want to solve. When this happens, discoveries meander and result in dwindling team and stakeholder morale. Worse still, some discoveries begin with investigating solutions, rather than the problems those solutions are intended to solve. (Remember: if you’re investigating only solutions in a discovery, you’re not doing a true discovery! )

To avoid these issues, spend time upfront to identify and frame the problem . If you don’t know the problem, you’re not going to have much luck solving it! The better a problem is articulated, the easier and more effectively it can be solved. One device that help teams to frame a problem is a problem statement.

In This Article:

What’s a problem statement, how to write a problem statement, problem statements don’t need to be negative, how to use problem statements.

Problem statement: A concise description of the problem that needs to be solved.

It’s a helpful scoping device, focusing the team on the problem it needs to explore and subsequently solve. A problem statement makes clear what needs to be done in discovery and what’s out of scope. Problem statements are also great communication tools; well-written ones can be used to gain buy-in from stakeholders on why it’s important to explore and solve the problem.

Here are some examples of problem statements.

• Users of our newspaper app often export content from our app, rather than sharing content through our app. This is a problem because target audiences are less likely to know that the content came from our app, leading to lower conversion rates. This is also a problem for app users, as exporting content is time-consuming and could lead to a decrease in app usage.
• Sales reps spend a long time planning which leads to visit each month. Because planning is done manually — using Excel spreadsheets and printed paper lists — sales reps find it difficult to meet their targets. Many have complained that keeping track of which leads to visit takes away from the time they can spend with them. This is a problem because, when targets are not met, the business risks losing revenue.
• Each year, many applicants call the contact center seeking an update on their application. Applicants often spend a long time waiting to speak to an agent. Because contact-center staff members lack access to case information, they are unable to answer queries from applicants. This situation causes frustration for both applicants and customer-contact staff and represents an avoidable cost to the department.

It's a good idea to write a problem statement as early as possible in your discovery, as it can help set discovery goals and objectives. Many teams will compose their problem statement in a discovery kick-off workshop.

A problem statement should include:

• The background of a problem. Which organization or department has the problem and what is the problem? Why has the problem arisen? Note that in some cases you may not know the exact causes of the problem. This is what discoveries are for: to uncover root causes. (In this case, you may add this aspect once you’ve done your research)
• The people affected by the problem. There could be multiple user groups affected by a specific problem in different ways. In the problem statement, you should call out how the problem affects users. In some cases, internal employees (particularly customer-support staff) can be affected by a problem, as they often bear the brunt of poor user experiences –- for example, by handling disgruntled customers.
• The impact of the problem on the organization. If the problem is not fixed, what will be the effect on the organization? Reputational damage? Paying unavoidable costs? Losing out-of-market share? In some cases, you may want to quantify the impact in order to convince your organization to fix the problem. Your discovery could involve working out how much this problem costs the organization, and this information could end up in your problem statement.

To gather the relevant facts for your problem statement, you can use a simple technique called the 5 Ws , which involves answering the questions below. This activity can be included in a discovery kick - off workshop with your team and stakeholders.

• Who is affected by the problem?
• What is the problem?
• Where does this problem occur?
• When does the problem occur?
• Why does the problem occur? Why is the problem important?

If you don’t have all the answers to the above, don’t panic! While you should know what the problem is, you may not know exactly why it came about. This is what your discovery should tackle. Throughout the discovery process, you can return to your problem statement and add to it.

It’s important that problem statements are written well to serve their purpose. A problem statement should :

• Not be a laundry list of unrelated problems . A discovery effort should have one problem statement, and the problem statement should be focused on one problem. Of course, a single problem could cause further problems, and those related problems can be added to your problem statement. But listing many unrelated problems is a sign that you’re tackling too much.
• Not contain a solution . Leave solutions out of your problem statement. At the beginning of discovery, there are too many unknowns, so the the best solution is not obvious. At the end of your discovery, you’ll be in a good position to confidently put forward solution ideas that address the problem and take into account what you’ve learned.
• Be brief . Problem statements are effective when they’re concise. If you can condense your problem statement down to a few sentences, others will quickly understand what you focus on and why, and what’s out of scope. Spend some time to draft and redraft the problem statement with your team.

The examples I’ve given so far are negative — talking about something that needs fixing. However, problem statements can also capture opportunities (in which case they are sometimes referred to as opportunity statements instead of problem statements, although they are written and used in the same way).

Here’s an example of a problem statement that highlights an opportunity, rather than a problem that needs to be fixed:

The process of purchasing a newly built home can take a long time and requires many offline activities. This means sales often take a long time to close. There’s an opportunity to make home buying quicker and easier, and thus improve customer-satisfaction ratings and sales.

In an opportunity statement, we need to highlight the gap between where we are now (the present state) and where we want to be in the future (the desired state). A good question to ask to highlight this gap is: What do we want to achieve?

Your problem statement can be used as the starting point for structuring your discovery work. For example, if the problem statement was about improving the home-buying process, the goal for the discovery should be to learn about opportunities to make home buying quicker and easier. Once we have a discovery goal, it becomes easier to know what unknowns need research. For example, in this case, we probably want to know things like:

• Which activities do homebuyers perceive as difficult or time-consuming?
• Which activities or use cases can slow down the home-buying process and why?
• What does the end-to-end journey currently look like?

As you begin discovery, you can return to your problem statement and refine it — particularly if you’ve learned root causes or how much a problem costs your organization. Another reason to update your problem statement is if the discovery changes direction — which can happen when new areas of interest are highlighted through exploratory research. Finally, at the end of the discovery process, the problem statement can be communicated alongside your findings and recommendations to provide the full narrative of the discovery process.

A problem statement is a concise description of the problem to be solved. Writing problem statements at the beginning of the discovery process can create alignment and buy-in around the problem to be solved and provide direction in subsequent discovery activities. To construct problem statements, focus on who the problem affects, how it does so, and why it’s important to solve the problem.

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The full guide to Lean UX

Lean UX is all about changing the focus and gaining perspective in the design - but why is it so popular? What does it mean in practice? Read on to find out!

Lean UX unites product development, design and business in a methodology that promotes continued development, constant iteration and validation. By building, measuring and learning, designers are able to get closer to great user experiences sooner rather than later.

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Lean UX techniques can be applied to enhance a traditional UX process and give it a boost in both performance and efficiency. And so, let’s take a closer look at a much discussed but misunderstood methodology: Lean UX.

What is Lean UX?

Benefits of being lean: why design teams do it, the lean ux process, the main tenets of the lean ux methodology, lean startups vs large lean companies, 5 lean design hacks to improve product success, learning lean ux: books and tutorials.

Lean UX is an approach to designing and crafting user experiences. At its heart, Lean UX is about letting the validation of hypotheses guide the work of the design team. This implies that designers never make decisions based on their gut or their preferences – there are only hypotheses here.

A hypothesis might read like this: “I believe that people like persona A have a need for (or a problem doing) XYZ”. This may sound a bit silly at first, but it’s important to frame our theories in the right way so that we encourage a truly lean approach to design. Simply stating what you think isn’t enough. You need something concrete that can be tested and validated, proving the theory right.

So why is validating your hypotheses important in Lean?

Think about this: you’re in a meeting with your other colleagues and you’ve all decided that the one idea that is a definite winner. You and everybody else on your team go to work on this Big Winning Idea. You spend a ton of money, invest a lot of hours, the code goes from rough to ready and eventually, you have a product to release.

What do you do?

You release it. You put your Big Winning Idea out into the world and slowly await the tech write-ups, five-star reviews and the revenue flowing in. But soon, you realize that the Big Winning Idea isn’t so big and it’s definitely not winning.

Hypotheses and validation help us know if we’re making products people want and need. The framework of lean UX is about gradual progress, as opposed to putting all your eggs in one basket. There’s no jumping head-first. It’s all about dipping your toes in the water and making sure you don’t get temperature shock. That’s what makes the method Lean. It provides space to pivot and change as the project unfolds.

You might think that not speaking to your users (or potential users) is a disastrous thing but many companies still fall into the trap of making products people don’t need. The first few stages of the project where the team validates the core features is meant to keep that from happening. Laura Klein writes in her book Lean UX for Startups:

“Instead of thinking of a product as a series of features to be built, Lean UX looks at a product as a set of hypotheses to be validated. In other words, we don’t assume that we know what the user wants.”

Designers have many methodologies to choose from when creating products. It’s true that there’s more ways to approach the creative process of any UX product, from design thinking to Agile. With that said, let’s take a moment to understand why so many design teams out there choose Lean over and over again.

It’s cost-effective

You save money by adopting a Lean methodology. Instead of wasting 3 months precious time into a project that is headed nowhere, the lean method keeps teams focused on what matters. Decisions are validated over and over again, creating a solid base on which a product can be built. It’s true that this in of itself brings many benefits – but it also creates a financially stable project.

Laura Klein, the author of Build Better Products, mentions the company Webvan in her book. They spent $400 million on an automated warehouse system only to discover that people weren’t ready to do their grocery shopping online yet. Think of all the time and money wasted.

There are many projects out there that fail because drastic changes were needed in the last moments, adding a huge strain on the finance of the product. In the world of UX, everybody knows that late changes can break a product design project. It’s all about spending money on decisions that were validated, so change happens quickly and early – while it’s still cheap.

It saves you time

In addition to trimming your budget, Lean UX is also a huge time saver. The lean method is collaborative in nature and doesn’t focus on heavy documentation. This means no more lengthy documents or endless back and forths with developers. Despite the fact that the lean method isn’t exactly linear, it keeps the design team from wasting time.

“Functional software is more important than comprehensive documentation” Jeff Gothelf - Lean UX

Lean UX focuses on quick and rapid solutions instead of months and months of development on a fully designed feature. There’s no investing great deals of time into a huge feature and testing it once it’s completely finished.

Lean is also iterative. Research and design move quickly and don’t require months to be delivered to engineering. Product owners, designers and developers are all involved in the Lean UX process. Everyone has ownership of what they produce, making everything go much quicker than a traditional design development process.

Ultimately, everyone works together and progress is made a little at a time. Think of it like a project that moves in small but sure baby steps.

It’s user-centered

There is a lot of overlap with User-Centered Design (UCD) and Lean UX. UCD is iterative like Lean and are both processes which focus on the user and their needs at each phase of the design process.

That is because both methods give a lot of importance to letting validation show us the way. Both approaches encourage designers to distance themselves from the product, with testing acting as a guiding light.

Much like UCD, the lean way is about creating something that truly fits users like a glove. It’s not just about delivering a sound business project but also creating something that shapes itself to the lives of real people. By validating everything with users, lean design teams can see their hypotheses in action, lowering the chances of poor design making it to the final stages of the project.

It’s data-driven

You can have assumptions in Lean UX but those assumptions will be put to the test. Instead of making guesses about potential new features or designs, Lean UX relies on data to inform any decisions. This helps prevent making that lowers the quality of the product.

“Here is the worst possible way for you to try to figure out if your idea solves somebody’s problem: ask them. The vast majority of entrepreneurs seem to think that explaining their concept in detail to a few people and then asking whether it’s a good idea constitutes validation. It does not.” – Laura Klein, UX for Lean Startups

Perhaps even more importantly, constant testing and validating shine a light on aspects of the product that don’t perform well. Even if something was designed in a way that doesn’t work for users, testing will reveal what went wrong and when.

Hear it from the author: Q&A with Jeff Gothelf

We here at Justinmind were lucky enough to have an interview with one of the men behind the method. In the book, Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience, he and Josh Seiden combine lean ideas with design and strategy. It all works to build processes that are more collaborative, iterative and open. Fast forward a few years, and the entire industry of UX loves the lean approach.

It’s a wonderful way to hear from him exactly how he sees Lean UX, what its impact is and how others can benefit from it. Read the entire thing and discover how Lean UX makes better products .

Lean UX is driven by 3 main concepts: think, make and check. While it may be easier to see these as 3 steps that take place in a straight line, nothing could be further from the truth. Lean UX is a cycle that keeps going around, with the product improving and advancing every time the cycle is completed and started again.

Think refers to creating assumptions about any given problem and what you think you know about that particular area. These assumptions are important because eventually, they provide new knowledge which will be turned into hypotheses that can be tested. Other aspects of the think stage involve:

• Mental models
• Storyboards

Make involves designing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is the bare minimum you need to engage your audience and start an iteration-feedback loop. An MVP might be a landing page to a product that doesn’t exist yet to gauge customer interest. It might be a low-fidelity wireframe of the main features and bare bones.

This stage is highly iterative (that is to say, you make the minimum and continue to build upon it). Here are other ways you can create your own MVP:

• Value propositions
• Landing pages

“Lean UX is where prototyping shines. As with the initial sketches, focusing the prototype on critical components of the experience is essential.” Jeff Gothelf - Smashing Magazine

Check is the last stage in the Lean UX loop. This is where you test your MVP with your audience and validate or invalidate it, taking your newfound knowledge back to the think stage to start over again.

It’s important to consider that you won’t be testing a finished MVP or an entire interactive prototype. Testing starts out humbly, using the part of the product that was created in the previous step. Be it a navigation system or the information architecture, testing happens frequently and tends to focus on every little thing that was decided on previously.

This is a part of why you always need to have a professional prototyping tool at hand. Here you can expect to carry out:

• A/B testing
• Site analytics
• Usability testing
• Feedback system
• Customer meetings

Assumptions

We touched on assumptions earlier but as assumptions play a fundamental role in Lean UX, they deserve to be understood a little better.

The reason that assumptions play a big role in Lean UX is the shift from the traditional requirements/deliverables method. Instead of relying on requirements, the focus is turned towards creating a problem statement.

A problem statement can take this form:

We have observed that [product/service/organization] isn’t meeting [these goals/needs], which is causing [this adverse effect]. How might we improve so that our product/service/team/organization is more successful based on [these measurable criteria]?

This helps you to know when you’ve solved the problem. It’s likely you might have multiple problem statements. It is the team’s job to decide which problem statements are most pertinent to business, prioritizing user goals and pursuing the best route.

From your problem statement, you can start to make assumptions. When creating assumptions, it’s best to have your problem statement in front of you. Now, you need to think about user needs and solutions.

Use statements like these to help guide you as you create assumptions:

• My customer needs to…
• I believe I will acquire the majority of my users through…
• The biggest risk is…
• What features are important?
• What problem does the product solve?

After you write a problem statement, identify and select your main assumptions, the next stage is developing hypotheses. To test an assumption, you simply transform it into a hypothesis. This is useful for identifying any gaps in your thinking.

A hypothesis statement template looks like this:

We believe this [business outcome] will be achieved if [these users] successfully [attain this user outcome] with this [feature].

And this is what it might look like when you’ve created your hypothesis:

We believe that conversions will increase by 25% (business outcome) if new customers (your target audience) successfully identify a larger call to action button (feature).

Once you’ve created a hypothesis statement, it’s time to put it to the test. As you can see from the hypothesis statement, you start with what you expect to happen – in this case, an increase in conversion. From there, you move onto who will help you achieve this (new customers) and how (big, shiny call to action button).

The beauty of creating a hypothesis is that if you ever hear someone say the dreaded “I don’t think this idea will work”, the testing data will show everyone the truth. By putting all hypotheses to the literal test, all disagreements and conflict is avoided. Personal opinions take the back seat, while test results do the driving.

Minimum Viable Product

An MVP is what prevents you from going out and designing a fully fledged social network that nobody asked for. Instead, you design the bare minimum and expand on that, little by little.

By building an MVP, you’re creating a small product that functions. You don’t need flashing lights just yet. Your MVP can be so stripped back that a landing page alone can be sufficient. You just need to have something to satisfy early customers and gain interest. Something that captures the central essence of the entire product – something concrete and tangible.

“As you consider building your own MVP let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.” Eric Ries - The Lean Startup

Part of the beauty of MVPs is that they can take many forms. Depending on the nature of the product, a simple wireframe might do the trick. You want something that symbolizes the soul of the product, so you can validate that core and make sure the product can thrive. It’s about creating a solid base that all else can rest on.

Testing is the backbone of Lean UX. Testing is what gives you answers. It will help you understand why your users interact with your product in the way that they do. It’ll guide your design decisions and offer clarity. Testing doesn’t necessarily have to involve a lot of people either.

Part of the beauty in user testing is that methods and tools are diverse. Depending on what exactly is being tested, the right approach might change. Whatever needs to be validated, though, can be done in a way that suits the time and budget of the project.

Unmoderated testing tends to be lean because it is cheap to carry out, quick to find recruits and can be easily scaled. You can use a variety of artefacts from low-fidelity prototypes, clickable wireframes and just about everything else. You want a wireframe tool that allows for you to build on the MVP, so you can work your way up to a realistic prototype as the project progresses.

Unmoderated testing just means that a user can complete a testing session without needing a UX researcher in the room. This can be done on a service like Userzoom and users can do it from the comfort of their own home.

Why big companies find adopting Lean UX principles difficult

So, all it takes is thinking about problems from a design perspective and a little Lean Startup magic? Why aren’t all companies using this approach? Taking the lean approach isn’t always easy for big companies. Let’s go over why that is.

1) Fear. Fear of failure, specifically. Lean UX embraces failure as a way to learn and improve. One of the main principles of Lean UX is the permission to fail, as well as the idea that failing early and quickly is best.

When we know that there are no repercussions from failure, we’re more prone to take risks and these risks could lead to innovation or even disruption.

Business Administration professor Edward D. Hess agrees. He says that failure is a necessary part of the innovation process because “from failure comes learning, iteration, adaptation, and the building of new conceptual and physical models through an iterative learning process. Almost all innovations are the result of prior learning from failures.”

2) The reason that many large companies shun innovation is that they’re comfortable. Too entrenched in old business models. Large companies tend to have been in business for a while, which could make it difficult to implement such a drastic change in the way things are done.

This is both because there is already a certain way to do things which people are used to, as well as because it can be difficult to change the workflow of several large teams. Be it as it may, it’s no secret that getting large amounts of people to change their ways can be challenging. This is even more true when you’re trying to change the very way they think about design.

3) Old school management tactics can prevent companies from adopting the Lean UX principles. When thinking of a big company, try to see it as a huge institution. It has its own set of rules, which have been in place for a long time.

Of course, there are ambitious managers who want to push their organizations and try to innovate. However, it’s common to see that traditional management practices push them underground, forcing them to hide that side of who they are in order to maintain the current way things are approached.

Consider a manager who does embrace the lean method. It’s easy to imagine that many middle managers won’t appreciate the change in workflow, putting them in an unfamiliar situation. When trying to implement Lean UX, it can be tough to make an institution adopt a new path.

How big companies can learn to stop worrying and love Lean UX principles

These roadblocks can stifle innovation at companies and make managers feel as though they’re simply functionaries instead of genuine innovators. Not all is lost, however. There’s many creative ways in which companies can hop on the Lean train.

Create small cross-functional pilot teams

Gather some like-minded colleagues and try and tackle some problems together. Keep the team small (but still, if possible, cross-functional). The problem doesn’t have to be large either, just complex enough to maintain motivation and to help everyone understand what can be achieved in a short amount of time.

“You want these folks to get to know each other, to build trust, a shared language and rapport, and through that simple spending of time together they start to look at different ways of working and respect each other’s opinions more. They start to think of themselves as a unit that wins or loses together” Jeff Gothelf explains.

Then show the results to your managers. It’s important to highlight how you solved the problem quickly and prove the power of silo-busting. These small victories over time can result in a bigger, dramatic shift in thinking and greater acceptance of Lean principles in the enterprise.

Open communication for everyone (including your customers)

Breaking out of the silo mentality won’t happen overnight. It’s a good thing to make sure the communication channels between you and your manager are always open. That means explaining what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, the challenges you’re experiencing and how much it all costs. It helps here to drive home the benefit to the company to really bolster your arguments.

Communication conventions may have to adapt to this new way of thinking. Thankfully, tools like Slack make this transition easier. The entire team will need the right equipment to maintain good communication as you introduce Lean into the enterprise.

Open communication should spill over to your customers too. Not just between you and the rest of your team.

Jeff explains that “the best thing you can do is to start engaging with customers as regularly and consistently as possible, and bring as many people as you can to the conversation.” Jeff believes that by opening the communication with our customers as soon as possible, we’ll mitigate any resistance to Lean UX in the enterprise.

In brief, to overcome the hurdles at your organization here’s what you can do to introduce Lean UX principles:

• Find like-minded colleagues to escape silo prison
• Speak to your customer early and often
• Go stealthy to drive innovation
• Ask for forgiveness instead of permission
• Nurture clear channels of communication with your managers
• Highlight the benefits to the organization

Create your own Meetup group

Meetups are valuable for a variety of reasons. They give you direct access to people who are already interested in your product. You know that, because they’ll have signed up to attend. It’ll be confirmed when they actually arrive and you see them in person.

Already you can begin to get some early validation for your ideas. But aside from being a useful tool to get validation, you can create a community of early adopters who can evangelize on your behalf.

If you have a dedicated Meetup with a group of loyal people, you can use them to spread the word for your product. Plus, you can talk directly with them about what you’re thinking. It’s a great way to Get Out of the Building.

Another use is testing out your MVP. Creating an MVP is vital if you want to understand where your product fits in the market and, crucially, if people want it. You might discover through your Meetup group that what you’re working on actually isn’t what people want. This gives you the chance to:

Discard your idea and pivot in another direction

Tweak your idea into something that your customers actually want. Pivoting might sound scary, especially if you’re wedded to a particular idea. But if you’re not getting validation, the lean way gives you plenty of margin to change direction. There’s nothing wrong with cutting your losses and moving on to other hypotheses.

Design personas

Advocating for the user is the mantra of many UX designers. Thankfully, Lean advocates for them too. User personas are an opportunity to create empathy. Empathy makes better products because you’re putting yourself in the shoes of your user. That means understanding their pain points and what makes them tick.

Personas are excellent for their utility; they are a tool which can mitigate the need for expensive research studies and the best ones only need one page. Better to spend a few hours crafting decent personas than spend thousands of dollars you don’t have interviewing people.

You could take a few people from your Meetup and transform them into personas. When you have more information as a result of ongoing research, you can adapt your personas by seeing which guesses were right and which were wrong, then adapt accordingly.

It’s true that each design team will create user personas in their own way. Some of them are in-depth and look into motivations, problems and goals. Others focus on the simple things, like the face and profession of the user. Either way, it’s important to have user personas at the disposal of your team so they can refer back to it when need be. You can find some very practical user persona templates to speed things up.

Take advantage of heuristics

Heuristics are rules of thumb. They’re not set in stone but can be used as a set of useful guidelines when navigating uncharted territory. If you’re making a product for the first time, heuristics can give you pointers on what to do and what not to do.

Standards, like the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design , help anchor us to reality. The principles have been tried and tested countless times so we can guarantee that they’re a safer bet than that unfounded hypothesis you just whipped out of thin air.

Don’t tie yourself too tightly to these heuristics. Even though those particular heuristics by Jakob Nielsen have been going strong since the mid-nineties, it’s worth remembering that they’re still broad guidelines and not specific usability guidelines. Rather, they set a certain bar when it comes to usability and it’s up to the team to live up to them or not.

You will need to find out the specifics of any given problem through user research on your own. But at least by using heuristics, you’re on good footing. They’re a starting point. Using them will save you time and money because you don’t have to investigate whether or not error prevention is a good thing.

Use an MVP design canvas

Designing an MVP is easier said than done. But they’re valuable for speeding up learning, decreasing waste and encouraging iterations. All too often, though, when we’re in a Lean cycle, we’re prone to losing focus or forgetting the bigger picture.

You have many options available to make your own MVP, from Justinmind to Unbounce. Where the MVP Canvas Template enters into the process is at the very beginning. It can be used to give your MVP creation focus and clarity.

The MVP Canvas is a tool to help you clarify your product strategy and key assumptions. Amy Jo Kim, the startup coach, created the MVP Canvas. She found that the one-page canvas helped to articulate the strategy across the whole team.

The canvas has 7 sections:

• Early customers
• Unmet needs
• Value proposition
• Your solution
• Unfair advantage
• Early Metrics
• Key assumptions

Here you write down your initial thoughts. You can use the canvas as your assumptions get tested and evolve. It’s a great tool to stay strategically aligned with your team.

Tell people what you’re doing

Yes, building and creating a successful product is hard work. Very hard work. Who has time for other people when you’re trying to change the world one user experience at a time?

Why not let people know how hard it is? Using social media platforms like Twitter gives you access to an audience who you can share your thoughts, anxieties, fears and desires with. You can build meaningful relationships with other like-minded people as well as form potential business connections.

Then there’s blogging. You can use blogging not only for your SEO efforts but to explain your process behind why you took certain actions or what test worked or didn’t work.

This type of content humanizes you and people will be able to empathize with that. When they can empathize with you and your struggles, they’ll be able to relate and, maybe one day, turn into customers of your product.

Start putting your product updates on a website like Product Hunt to get more visibility. It shows the community what exactly you’re up to and they can follow you to stay in the know.

Getting out of the building is important when practicing Lean. Speaking to real people in the real world is valuable. But so is creating that sort of community online by finding out where your customers hang out and talking to them. Slack groups, Twitter chats and online communities are all ripe for these sort of connections.

1. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

What is there to say about the book that started it all? Brought to us by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, this is the book that allowed for Lean UX to grow in popularity and use. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams has been read by countless people by now, earning a place amongst the top UX design books in general.

It covers everything, from the theory of how lean works to more concrete details on what makes a minimum viable product. It’s a classic for any UX designer to have at hand!

2. UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design

UX for lean startups is brought to us by legendary Laura Klein, whose design books are beloved all around the globe. We love this book here at Justinmind. It’s essence is all about working to find the right way to test design decisions, as well as to using data to draw conclusions.

The book aims to cover not just the theory of user testing, but aspects that are much more detailed and concrete. Both newbies and veteran designers will, without a doubt, learn a thing or two from this book. It’s just about learning how to user test things. It’s about learning to test better.

3. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

Lean Analytics : Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster is another wonderfully practical book for anyone interested in UX design. This book by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz covers everything related to analytics in UX design.

We love that this book goes beyond the classic question of “how do I test a design idea?” and ventures much further. The book threads carefully between the world of UX and the world of business, working to show how analytics can align the two and create a truly powerful product. It’s great stuff, especially for business analysts venturing into design or vice-versa.

4. Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business

This is a wonderful way to get more familiar with a key aspect of Lean UX design. With the lean approach, deliverables all take a back seat so that the time and effort of the designers is prioritized in the product. However, for those of us coming from a more classic way of designing, it can be hard to let go of deliverables.

That’s why Getting out of the deliverables business works so well. The talk, given by none other than Jeff Gothelf himself, focuses on trimming the extra fat from these documents and focusing on actually creating things. Wonderful!

5. Learn Lean UX with Jeff Gothelf

Learn Lean UX is basically an overview of the entire lean process and lean principles. Also given by Jeff with Mural, this presentation covers everything in the lean approach. We get it – sometimes, you’d rather hear than read it. That’s why we included this 1 hour long presentation that could work to introduce people to the lean way of doing things.

The wrap up on Lean UX design

Lean UX is a paradigm shift. It focuses on creating efficiency and removing any waste unlike other common design methodologies. By reducing the reliance on deliverables and focusing on small wins over time, products can get to market faster with the knowledge that your customer really wants what you have to sell them.

Any design-driven product team can benefit from the Lean method to boost their workflow. Even in large companies, there’s power to be found in the Lean way of doing things!

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Lean UX: definition, process, and a detailed case study

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has spent the past 30 years making fun of inefficiency in business—including our efforts to reduce inefficiency.

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The truth is, it’s hard to get everyone on the same page in any organization, big or small. That’s why  Doodle , a Software as a Service (SaaS) company with just over 50 employees and 250 million active users, turned to Lean UX to improve its products in an efficient, evidence-based, customer-centric way. In other words,  Lean UX principles help Doodle’s product teams make the changes their customers want in a smart, efficient way, so they can grow faster and boost their bottom line .

I recently sat down with   Jack Berglund, Chief Product Officer at Doodle , to talk about his product development strategy. He was very transparent, so if you’re looking for a real-life example of how to use Lean UX for digital product design, you’ve come to the right place.

Table of contents

Lean ux case study: what is doodle and who is jack berglund, what is lean ux, 3 phases of lean ux: think, make, check, lean ux development process at doodle, lean ux: a simple roadmap to get started.

Doodle is an online tool that helps people schedule meetings more efficiently. It syncs with all the major calendaring systems (Google, Outlook, Apple’s iCal, etc.), and it lets users poll meeting invitees to find a time that works for everyone.

Founded in 2007, Doodle is headquartered in Zurich with offices in Berlin, Tel Aviv, Israel, and Belgrade. Today, more than 250 million people use Doodle each year, and it’s available in more than 25 languages.

As Doodle’s Chief Product Officer, Jack Berglund uses Lean UX to guide agile, cross-functional teams to develop products that customers love.

Does that sound a little too jargon-heavy? Don’t worry, I’ll unpack it all for you… and I promise it won’t sound so much like a Dilbert cartoon by the time we’re done.

Lean User Experience (UX) Design is a user-centered design process that embraces Lean and Agile development methodology to reduce waste and build products centered around the users. Lean user experience design relies on a collaborative approach and rapid experimentation/prototyping, to get user feedback by exposing a minimum viable product (MVP) to users as early as possible.

The Lean UX process grew out of earlier  process management  systems like  Lean Manufacturing , which has been used by major companies (such as Intel, Nike, Toyota, and Ford) to eliminate waste in production. Lean UX took principles that were originally designed for physical products and adapted them for software development.

LEAN UX TAKES ITS ROOTS IN LEAN MANUFACTURING, WHICH IS USED BY MAJOR COMPANIES ACROSS THE WORLD.

What makes software production different? For one thing, you don’t have to follow the old “measure twice, cut once” idea. Instead, your Agile product teams (which are composed of experts from different departments) can come up with ideas, test them out quickly, and revise them based on customer responses and usability.

As Jeff Gothelf puts it in  Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams , “You can measure once, cut once, measure once, cut once, measure once, cut once, forever.”  That’s the luxury that SaaS and e-commerce product design teams have. Since they work in a virtual space, they just don’t have the same physical restrictions to user experience design as Toyota or Nike.

How so? If you’re Toyota, you can’t try out five different steering wheels in one month to see which one  improves the customer experience . But if you’re Doodle, you can add a new checkbox to the 'Make a Poll' product, see if it gets any use, and tweak it accordingly.

Lean UX in action:  Doodle saw a 54% increase in the number of free trial signups by changing the language on their homepage to focus on business use-cases, which was a greater increase than expected.

In the Lean UX model, product teams are usually made up of members from different departments (e.g., engineers, product managers, UX designers). Each team works to improve a specific product by focusing on improving processes that cycle through three phases: Think, Make, and Check.

THE LEAN UX MODEL FOLLOWS A THREE-PHASE CYCLE: THINK, MAKE, AND CHECK.

Teams brainstorm possible areas for improvement based on  customer feedback , customer research, competitor comparisons, and observing their product in use. They develop a problem statement, then decide which areas they want to improve.

Designers and developers build a new feature that will (hopefully) solve a problem and/or improve the product.

Product teams test the new feature, using tools like  UX surveys  and  A/B testing , to figure out whether their hypothesis was correct. If customers respond well to the new feature, it becomes part of the new design. If it doesn’t improve the customer experience, they return to the Think phase and try something new.

The Doodle team uses Lean UX to anticipate their users’ needs. This design-thinking approach allows them to build cutting-edge products their customers will gladly pay for, and keeps them one step ahead of the competition.

They have five product teams, and each team is usually composed of at least one  product manager , one product designer, and a collection of engineers—possibly including data scientists or data engineers, as needed.

A TYPICAL PRODUCT TEAM AT DOODLE INCLUDES A PRODUCT MANAGER, A PRODUCT DESIGNER, A DATA SCIENTIST, AND MULTIPLE ENGINEERS.

The idea is to create a cross-functional team (meaning, teams from different departments) who come together to work on specific product improvements (such as Doodle’s 'MeetMe' product, Polls, etc.). Each team has a slightly different makeup depending on the product they manage.

Lean UX in action:  Doodle tested out a new calendar invite feature that put the agreed-upon meeting time in all attendees’ calendars, and 40% of their customers used the first version of this feature. This demonstrated how strong the demand was for the feature, and gave the team a clear sense of where to go next because there was already plenty of room for improvement on that initial version.

What does the lean UX process begin with? Here’s how Doodle approaches their Think, Make, Check phases:

Step 1: the thinking phase at Doodle

Doodle uses  Airtable  to maintain their 'idea bank,' which is a collection of all ideas submitted for improvement and, at the time we talked, contained 175 ideas.

DOODLE USES AIRTABLE TO COLLECT IDEAS AND PRIORITIZE THEM.

“We use the idea bank to capture all ideas, wherever they come from. Even if we think they're terrible ideas, we still write them down, and that serves two purposes. One, we want the person who made the suggestion to know that it's been captured and it's up for consideration. Two, we do this because what might not be a great idea now, for whatever reason, might become a great idea in the future.”

Of course, ideas don’t come out of thin air! The product teams at Doodle use the following tools to gather  qualitative research  from their customers and capture ideas for product improvement.

3 lean UX tools Doodle uses to find areas for improvement

Google Analytics : “Google Analytics is a good source for us in terms of user behavior within the product,” says Jack. Doodle uses Google Analytics for cohort analysis , which is all about breaking users down into groups (cohorts) and studying the behavior of each group. For example, Doodle can tell whether a user who connected through their Calendar Connect product is retained better than those who have not. They have their own data warehouse to complement this information.

Desk.com: Desk.com , a Salesforce product, allows Customer Success (CS) to tag different types of issues that arise. “For obvious bugs,” Jack says, “it’s a bit easier: if something isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, it’s pretty obvious that you need to fix it. Where it becomes more complicated is when you receive input, either from research or CS, that speaks to something that isn’t so black and white, like a feature we could add down the line. At that point, it goes from an engineering/problem-solving matter to a question of prioritizing and using your judgment,” he says. In the next section, I’ll talk about how Doodle prioritizes projects like these.

Hotjar : Doodle uses Hotjar Feedback to have users rate their level of satisfaction and describe their experience using website feedback . If the customers provide an email address, someone responds. “However,” Jack says, “even the anonymous feedback can be helpful.”

Doodle collects feedback from different types of users, segmenting the data according to each group. In particular, they want to know which product the respondents are using (e.g., MeetMe, Polls), whether they are the ones who created the poll or simply participated in it, and whether they’re using the paid version of the product.

DOODLE USES HOTJAR FEEDBACK TO COLLECT FEEDBACK FROM USERS AT SCALE AND IN CONTEXT.

Product managers and product designers read the replies and look for patterns, but at the moment they don’t have a formal system in place to review this data.

Where Doodle did take a more organized approach to Voice-of-the-Customer feedback was when they redesigned their website in 2017. This was a complete redesign, going from a late-90s style to something much more modern, and they used Hotjar Feedback to figure out what their users liked, disliked, and needed.

Categorizing projects according to goals

Once they submit ideas, Doodle’s project teams categorize each one based on the goals they want to achieve, and those goals are grouped into Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). OKRs, in short, describe big-picture objectives, such as “convert more users after the trial ends.” To learn more about organizing by OKRs, take a look at  this article   by   Jeff Gothelf  (the author of  Lean UX , mentioned above).

DOODLE USES OBJECTIVES AND KEY RESULTS (OKRS) TO MEASURE THEIR PROJECTS.

Doodle uses OKRs to identify their larger goals. Then they break their OKRs down by Objectives and Key Results, which identify the smaller goals that will hopefully help them achieve their Objectives. For example, the “convert more users after the trial period ends” Objective might be achieved by encouraging users to create more polls since Doodle’s research shows that users who create polls are more likely to convert.

Therefore, “get users to create a poll during the trial period” could become a Key Result, and that KR would fall under the “convert more users” Objective.

AN EXAMPLE OF AN OBJECTIVE (CONVERT MORE USERS) AND KEY RESULTS ATTACHED TO IT.

As the team captures more ideas, they tag them according to the appropriate OKR. Then, when they discuss plans for reaching those goals, they can use Airtable to filter the results, only showing those that relate to certain Objectives and Key Results.

Idea generation and problem-solving: a tale of two meetings

In the beginning, the product teams would brainstorm new ideas  and  discuss the progress they’d made on current projects at one meeting, but that got confusing.

These days, they have two separate meetings: one for brainstorming and generating new ideas (monthly), and the other. for discussing their progress on current projects (weekly).

“To get a balance there, we have two different versions of the same meeting. One is weekly, where we go through the stuff we're working on, making sure that it's progressing. And then there’s a separate meeting where we generate ideas and talk about what we want to do next.”

Step 2: the make phase at Doodle

In the make phase, a team of designers and developers builds a new feature to address previously highlighted problems and/or improve the product. But when ideas abound, as is likely to be the case, a crucial step is choosing  what  to build first.

How Doodle prioritizes projects

During the monthly meetings, whoever owns or champions an idea gives a 60-second talk about the idea, the data related to it, and how they might approach it as an improvement project. After the team reviews all new ideas they take a vote, pick the two or three most promising ideas, set deliverables, and really dive into them. The best ideas get added to the list of active projects.

The ICE framework

Doodle uses a system called ICE, designed by Sean Ellis. ICE stands for Impact, Certainty, and Effort, and potential projects are evaluated on these qualities. Here’s what the ideal project would look like in the ICE model:

Impact (on User Experience) : High

Certainty (whether it will work) : High

Effort (what it would take to make the change and test it) : Low

Of course, most projects aren’t so straightforward.  Jack says, “There are ones where you say, ‘Look, the effort is significant. We think the impact is high, but we're not completely sure.’ In that case, before we spend that full effort, we see if there’s something simpler we can work on.”

Jack stressed that they don’t take anything for granted when they assess certainty. If the idea’s champion thinks it’s a great project to work on, that counts for .01 on a certainty scale of 0 to 10. If the stakeholders love the idea and think it’s brilliant, that might bump you up another 0.1, but you’re still a long way from a 1, much less a 10.

THE DOODLE TEAM PRIORITIZES IDEAS USING THE ICE FRAMEWORK.

“What I really like about this approach,” he concludes, “is that it pushes us to do the necessary things to validate our ideas.” Whether it’s asking very specific questions to customers, bringing out specific data, or doing more A/B tests (see below), this framework allows Jack and his teams to save a lot of time down the line and make sure that all the work they are doing counts. That said, the ICE model isn’t a rigid scoring system. It’s a simple tool that gives you a rough idea of what to prioritize.

Curious to see how Hotjar prioritizes projects? Check out  Mastering the art of prioritization: how Hotjar decides what to work on next .

Step 3: the check phase at Doodle

Lean UX doesn’t rely on gut feel to decide whether a change has been successful, and neither does Jack Berglund. The teams at Doodle test their changes to see how users respond and later refine their approach accordingly.

If you have a lot of traffic to your website,  A/B tests (or split tests)  are a great way to validate your hypotheses scientifically and determine if the changes you made are working. Once you’ve got that result, you can go ahead and implement the changes confidently.

“We have a good amount of traffic, so we can do a lot of A/B testing. And if we're smart about the tests we run, we can save ourselves a lot of time by not implementing things that are basically low confidence,” says Jack.

Example #1: An 800% increase in the use of a feature

Sometimes the results can be surprising—like, “an eight-fold increase in feature use” surprising. When users create a poll, which they send to meeting invitees to determine which date works best for everyone, they can add a “Yes, if need be” option. This allows invitees to select their preferred date (the green checkmark) along with any dates that are less-than-ideal but would still work (the yellow checkmark).

Originally, this was an advanced option, meaning that it didn’t pop up in the 'Make a Poll' wizard that the average user sees. The product team assumed most users wouldn’t be interested in that feature, but they questioned their assumptions and tested it out by adding it to the wizard as a checkbox.

The result? They saw an 800% increase in the use of that feature. Who knew?

Example #2: The fake door that got them nowhere

Jack shared this with me as a cautionary tale—the story of a time they set out to study a problem with A/B testing but ended up studying the wrong thing. They didn’t get the information they needed to move to the next steps, but they learned a valuable lesson.

Doodle wanted to see whether having a 'Poll Deadline' button, which allowed poll creators to set a deadline for respondents to reply, would get any traction. They set up a  fake door , which is a button that offers a feature that isn’t actually available, so the UX team can see whether people will use it before spending the time and money to develop it. When users click on a fake door, they receive a message telling them: “Sorry! This feature is not yet available.”

Doodle showed the fake door to a portion of their users, and people clicked, but the team soon realized they had no way of knowing  how  useful the feature would be to their clients. Sure, they got plenty of clicks… but was the button valuable enough to influence buying behavior? Would it increase conversions? They couldn't tell from this A/B test.

To answer that question, Doodle went back to the drawing board. They’re currently planning to run a test that measures how likely this feature is to influence a user’s decision to start a free trial, which is a more complicated and business-focused question than whether or not a user will click.

“The core lesson is that we need to measure behavior change that demonstrates real value to the user.”

By designing smart, strategic A/B tests that answer basic questions about buying behavior, the teams at Doodle can prioritize their tasks and focus on those that offer a greater return.

Starbucks tests

It’s not always practical to do A/B testing, even when you have a ton of traffic, because sometimes you need to move quickly to see if an idea is worth looking into at all. You can always do more structured testing later if an idea shows promise after ‘guerilla testing’ it (an idea that Jeff Gothelf introduces in  Lean UX ).

Guerilla tests are ‘quick and dirty’ user tests that give you a sense of how your ideal users  might  respond. Much like focus groups, which advertising agencies have been using for more than 70 years, guerilla testing gives you quick feedback when you need it.

Since Doodle has 250 million users (that’s the population of Indonesia, by the way), and since many of these users are similar to people the Doodle team members rub shoulders with at their local Starbucks, they like to use Starbucks for guerilla testing new features. They go down to the Starbucks near their office and offer people a voucher for a free cup of coffee to test out new features.

“If you ever want to try to get a Starbucks voucher for a free cup of coffee, just hang out at the Starbucks near the Doodle office in Zurich. You never know!”

Starbucks testing is just one form of anecdotal feedback they use. Doodle also goes to customers, employees (including marketers), and product management stakeholders to get their input.

The guerrilla testing approach of Lean UX works better for SaaS and eCommerce than it does for companies that build physical products because, again, you can make changes quickly and reverse them if they don’t work. And in many ways, that points to the basic difference between Lean Manufacturing and Lean UX.

Lean UX is all about agility, experimentation, testing, and reassessing in a continuous cycle. It has allowed companies like Doodle to scale to 250 million active users—and it’s helped them thrive in a competitive market.

Lean UX in Action:  Doodle had the 'Settings' page automatically appear as the third step in their poll creation wizard, which increased the number of free trial signups by 25%, boosted the use of their 'Ask Attendees for Contact Information' option by 300%, and increased the use of the 'Hidden Polls' feature (which allows the creator to keep poll results hidden) by 400%.

If you were inspired by Jack's story or simply want to give Lean UX a try in your own business, here is a simple 3-step roadmap to get started:

Step 1: think phase

Gather customer feedback using tools like Feedback from Hotjar and reviewing insights from your Customer Success or sales team.

Process this info in an idea bank using a simple spreadsheet or a tool like Airtable.

Step 2: make phase

3.  Set up a meeting to prioritize projects according to their Impact, Certainty, and Effort  (keeping in mind that certainty is determined by facts, not stakeholder opinions).

Step 3: check phase

4.  Use guerilla testing  to get quick feedback where appropriate.

5.  Use A/B testing , if your traffic is large enough, to get scientifically valid results.

FAQs about lean UX

What is agile and lean ux.

Agile and lean UX involves applying the principles of these methodologies to the sphere of UX. Agile and lean both focus on creating quick iterations of products and features, testing them with users, and creating a tight feedback loop between users and product teams as they iterate in the future.

What are the benefits of lean UX?

Applying the lean methodology to UX creates a user-centered approach that forces product teams to rapidly generate and test ideas in the real-world to find what works. This prototyping model speeds up the  UX design  process, minimizes waste, and grounds it in the perspectives and experiences of real users.

What is an example of lean UX?

Online scheduling tool Doodle uses the lean UX approach to generate a backlog of ideas for new features or improvements. It then prioritizes the ideas that are estimated to have the most impact, and then conducts sprints where product & design teams create iterations that are A/B tested with users. During these prototyping tests, the product team observes how users interact with the new features and determines which ones they actually use and find helpful. They then repeat this process indefinitely to continuously improve the product.

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What is the Lean UX process?

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At its core, the Lean User Experience approach is about putting users first. It's an iterative design process emphasizing feedback, collaboration, and waste minimization so that products or services cater to users' needs.

Below, we'll dissect the methodology by exploring key components such as continuous discovery , shared understanding, and valuing every team member. You'll also learn how to implement lean UX design in your organization to shorten the iteration period and develop customer-centric products .

Lean UX, or lean user experience, is a design methodology grounded in the principles of the Lean and Agile development processes. Jeff Gothelf first introduced the process in his book, Lean UX .

Lean UX focuses on delivering innovative user experience improvements as efficiently as possible. It emphasizes iterative design and continuous customer feedback, making it adaptable and responsive to changing user needs. Working through cycles of brainstorming concepts, creating prototypes, testing, and learning, organizations employ the Lean UX process to rapidly innovate and improve their products.

Let's say a software company is introducing a new feature in its application. With Lean UX, the team wouldn't spend months designing and developing the full feature. Instead, they'd create a simple version or minimum viable product (MVP) and release it to a subset of their users. Then, they'd collect problem statements and customer feedback to learn what works and what doesn't. They'd continue iterating improvements even after the product has been released. 

How the Lean UX process works

The exact steps may vary depending on your organization's objectives, but generally, the Lean UX design process involves three major steps.

The Think phase is the foundation for the rest of the Lean UX process. It's about understanding and defining the problem that needs to be solved based on your user's feedback. In this phase, your design teams should already have a well of customer data relevant to the outcome you want to accomplish.

Your team brainstorms a hypothesis using this data to guide the design process . Then, you synthesize all data into user personas, which help designers empathize with users and create solutions tailored to their needs. 

Suppose a lean startup wants to introduce a new feature on its mobile app that allows users to customize their app interface. In the Think phase, the team might come up with the following hypothesis: By allowing users to customize the app interface, user engagement will increase by 20%. They'd also define success metrics, such as the optimal number of users using the customization feature, the amount of time spent on the app, and user satisfaction scores.

Ideas start to take shape at this stage of the Lean UX process. Your team quickly transforms hypotheses into tangible prototypes you can test with real users. The goal isn't to create a perfect product at this stage but to learn as much as possible about user needs and preferences for future iterations.

Teams can use various tools and techniques, such as wireframing and prototyping, to create low-fidelity versions of their solutions. This could be a simple paper sketch of an app interface or a clickable MVP created with software like Sketch or Figma.

After you've created your prototype, you'll use it to perform a small set of user tests. You'll collect data on real users and analyze the results to validate or refute your initial hypothesis. 

During the check phase, it's common to use usability testing sessions, surveys, and interviews to gather qualitative and quantitative data on how the users interact with the prototype. Pay close attention to whether users can complete tasks efficiently if they understand how the product works, and how satisfied they are with the overall experience.

By analyzing the data from these tests and surveys, you can assess whether your design has achieved your desired outcomes. If the results are positive and there's minimal feedback for improvement, the feature may be ready for full-scale development and release. If not, you take the learnings back into the think phase, refining your hypothesis and starting the cycle again.

The 12 principles guiding Lean UX

There's much to customize during the Lean UX process, but you can go in with structure. Here are the key guiding principles to effectively approach Lean UX in your organization.

1. Small, dedicated teams

The idea behind this first principle is that a small group of people fully dedicated to a project can work more efficiently and effectively than a larger team of individuals juggling multiple projects. Small teams are more agile, able to make decisions faster, pivot when necessary, and focus strongly on the user experience.

In the context of Lean UX, the ideal team size is typically anywhere from five to nine employees. All stakeholders working on the project should be focused on achieving the same goal. Additionally, your team is likely to be more productive and effective if they're all in the same location, where they can directly communicate. 

2. Cross-functional teams

This concept involves bringing together individuals with different skill sets and expertise to form a single team handling various aspects of the project. Cross-functional teams eliminate the silos that often exist in traditional organizational structures.

For instance, you might find product managers, content strategists, data analysts, designers, and developers in a single cross-functional team. Each member brings a unique perspective to the table, ensuring a more holistic approach to problem-solving. Also, this multidisciplinary setup allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the project.

3. Progress as outcomes

In the Lean UX process, outcomes, not output, measure progress. This principle shifts the focus from producing a high quantity of work (output) to achieving meaningful results (outcomes) that align with your goals and meet user needs.

In traditional methods, you might measure success by the number of added features or tasks completed. However, in Lean UX, what's more important is whether additions lead to improvements in user experience, such as higher conversion rates or customer satisfaction. 

4. Problem-focused teams

As you monitor outcomes, your team needs to be vigilant in addressing the problems your users are having with your product or service. By keeping user problems at the forefront, your team will be ready to prioritize development improvements that address the core pain points of your audience.

Teams should regularly ask themselves: What are we trying to solve? How can we make the experience better for our users? What existing problems do users want fixed before we develop new features? By focusing on the problem first, you can make sure every feature you design serves a clear purpose and adds real value for the people using your app or website.

5. Waste reduction

When it comes to Lean UX, waste refers to any activity that does not contribute to the final user experience or deliver value to the customer. The goal is to streamline the design process, making it as efficient and effective as possible. This could involve eliminating unnecessary meetings, reducing documentation, and avoiding over-engineering solutions.

Reducing waste not only speeds up the design process but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement. It encourages teams to constantly evaluate and refine their processes, always seeking ways to work smarter, not harder.

6. Small batch sizes

Breaking down work into smaller, more manageable parts means you can deliver results rapidly and get quicker feedback. Working in small batches allows teams to test and validate their ideas sooner, which reduces the risk of spending too many resources on features or improvements that don't meet users' needs.

Consider a company designing a new e-commerce website. Instead of building the entire site at once, the team could break the project down into smaller batches, focusing on core features like landing pages or the shopping cart. 

7. Continuous discovery

With continuous discovery , your team gains insights through ongoing learning and exploration across the product development cycle. Rather than treating user research as a one-time activity at the beginning of the project, continuous discovery encourages teams to constantly gather and integrate user feedback to inform the entire process. This could involve conducting interviews, surveys, usability tests, or other forms of user research on an ongoing basis. 

The continuous discovery approach ensures that the product remains user-centric throughout its development. It also allows teams to catch potential issues early when they are easier and cheaper to fix.

8. Shared understanding

Shared understanding, often fostered through collaboration between teams, is a key principle in the Lean UX process. This principle suggests that for a product to be truly user-centric, all team members should be on the same page about users' needs, project goals, and the rationale behind design decisions. Many teams opt to incorporate the Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe , which integrates principles form lean thinking, agile development, and DevOps to optimize efficiency and collaboration across teams. 

Open communication and close collaboration are two key tenets to creating a shared understanding within all departments. Rather than operating in silos, team members should work together, share insights, discuss ideas, and make decisions collectively. 

9. Get out of the building (GOOB)

GOOB emphasizes the importance of direct interaction with users and the real-world context of a product. Instead of getting lost in internal debates or assumptions, you should seek out firsthand insights and feedback from users.

While not every team member may need direct contact with users, they should at least be aware of feedback and results from user interviews , field studies, usability tests, and other primary research methods. The goal is to gain a deep, empathetic understanding of the people's needs, behaviors, and contexts, which can then inform design decisions.

10. Value for every team member

Instead of praising the work of one individual who acts as an example for others to follow, Lean UX is about valuing every team member involved. The small team sizes and intense effort required to make adaptive changes means every member has a significant impact on the outcome.

Making every team member feel valued promotes a shared sense of ownership and accountability. It fosters a culture of respect where employees care about the work they deliver and invest more effort into achieving success.

11. Learning over growth

The idea behind this principle is not to get caught up in perfecting your product. Instead, prioritize what changes need to happen today to get immediate customer feedback. In other words: Build the right thing first, then scale.

By committing to learning over growth, your team prevents itself from getting bogged down in features or improvements that don't add value to the user experience. Instead, teams concentrate on adapting their product to meet the needs of their users, even if it means starting small and gradually growing over time.

13. Embracing failure 

To move at the speed required for Lean UX, teams must embrace failure, not shy away from it. Failure isn't only inevitable — it's also a valuable learning opportunity for your team. In Lean UX, failures are a source of insights that can inform future decisions and improvements. The idea is to fail fast and fail often so you can learn and make rapid progress.

Encourage teams to take risks, experiment, and keep striving for better. Create a safe environment where team members feel comfortable making mistakes.

The impact and benefits of a Lean UX process

Many organizations waste time laboring over traditional UX processes, trying to create the best product available without listening to actual users. The Lean UX process shifts the focus from creating a perfect product to continually improving it based on real-world feedback . Teams create a hypothesis to test, build prototypes, and collect user data as quickly as possible to speed up the iteration process. Consider using Lean UX if you want a user-centric development process that streamlines workflows.

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The complete guide to Lean UX

Lean UX is an efficient alternative to traditional UX design. Discover how to incorporate the best Lean UX practices to improve your workflow.

• Development →

People want outstanding digital products — and they want them now. Lean user experience (UX) design is a practical way to minimize wasted time and quickly deliver high-quality designs.

Many UX designers go straight from ideation to implementation, moving through each phase of the design process at breakneck speed to meet deadlines. However, without regular rounds of feedback, designers may discover too late that the requirements have changed or project stakeholders are dissatisfied with the outcome. When this happens, not only does work have to be scrapped, but lost work also costs the designer money and resources.

Lean UX aims to eliminate that lost work. UX designers who use Lean UX check in at multiple touchpoints during the design process to ensure continuous improvement and quick feedback. The process reduces unnecessary deliverables and emphasizes creating the best possible user experience.

Interested in implementing Lean UX in your design process? Let’s explore the ins and outs of Lean UX and compare it to traditional UX design.

What is Lean UX?

Lean UX is a design process that's based on two pre-existing workflow methods: Lean manufacturing and Agile development.

• Lean manufacturing is a method based on increasing productivity while reducing waste during manufacturing. It removes redundant steps in the production process that don't directly benefit the customers.
• Agile development allows for a more adaptive approach to project management in software development by focusing on collaboration. Agile practices aim to provide value to clients quickly and with few difficulties by maintaining regular contact with the client and delivering multiple prototypes throughout the design process to collect feedback. For example, an Agile UX team works in smaller increments rather than delivering the entire project in one go.

Lean UX combines a lean and agile approach with a user-centered design methodology that reduces wasted time and resources. It assumes the first prototype will receive critical feedback and needs modifications, so it focuses on creating a minimum viable product (which we'll discuss later). 

The Lean UX approach uses repeated, rapid cycles of brainstorming and improvement to learn what to correct in each project iteration. The goal is to identify problems in batches and constantly work toward solutions through client feedback. It’s a simple, practical, and effective way to practice UX design that focuses on the resulting user experience over the project’s specific deliverables and parameters.

Lean UX vs UX

Lean UX focuses on refining a product as it develops to ensure the end result is the best possible web application in the here and now, focusing on dynamic goals rather than concrete checkpoints. Traditional UX , on the other hand, emphasizes specific deliverables based on testing completed at the beginning of a project.

Instead of waiting for the final product to reach the client before making the required adjustments, designers using Lean UX ask for feedback during the design process and make tweaks along the way. 

Traditional UX is slower and more detail-oriented, while Lean design focuses on trimming unnecessary elements and increasing efficiency and client satisfaction throughout development. It’s also a more collaborative process in which the entire team and client identify problems and outline assumptions together rather than receiving rigid specifications from the client to meet in the design process. The result is a fast and practical process well-suited to designers looking to work more efficiently. 

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The Lean UX process

The Lean UX approach is an expansive design process, but we’ve narrowed it down to a four-step cycle that’s easy to understand and implement in future projects.

1. Using assumptions and hypotheses to map possible outcomes

Lean UX analyzes which web application features are effective (and which aren’t) through an “assumption and hypothesis” approach. And it all begins with a brainstorming session.

Consider what problems your design will overcome. Do you intend to increase conversions? Improve ease-of-use? Create a more intuitive navigation? After examining existing roadblocks to your desired outcome, you and your team can formulate a problem statement, which is an actionable summary of your web application visitors, their goals, and what you must accomplish to meet those goals.

Once you have a problem statement, create a list of assumptions. As a designer, your assumptions are behaviors and preferences you believe are accurate based on knowledge of the target audience. Questions to consider when building your assumptions include:

• Why might someone seek this product?
• What are visitors looking to gain from this product?
• What is the product’s most important function?
• What currently interferes with product quality?

After coming up with a final list of assumptions, you must formulate a hypothesis (or hypotheses) to test these assumptions. If the hypothesis is correct, you’re moving in the right direction. If not, you know the team must change the approach to get back on track.

Let’s consider a subscription-based cooking blog looking to improve customer retention. The problem statement could be: “The number of active subscriptions from individuals looking to purchase high-quality recipes is decreasing, so we must improve the gap in visitor satisfaction.” An assumption could be: “Active subscriptions are decreasing because subscribers forget their passwords and cannot recover them.” An appropriate hypothesis would be: “By changing the ‘Forgot Password’ support to use a backup email to reset account passwords rather than relying on complicated security questions, user retention will increase by 10%.”

2. Designing the product

After forming a hypothesis, design solutions to test the hypothesis. 

Let’s circle back to that subscription-based cooking blog. To test the user retention hypothesis, a UX design team would implement the necessary changes to support a backup email function for password recovery. Then the team would collect visitor feedback and client retention data to compare real-world results to their estimated 10% improvement.

It’s important to note that Lean UX demands collaborative design. You must incorporate feedback at every stage, so it’s crucial to have all hands on deck at every stage.

Teams from various departments must collaborate to draw wireframes , create prototypes , and test user interfaces to determine the product's efficacy. Every team member should provide their input. Multiple perspectives provide more assumptions, allowing you to test more hypotheses and collect better results.

Cross-functional teams form a shared understanding that contributes to every design decision, leading to improved dialogue, smoother workflows, and better designs.

3. Creating an MVP

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a minimalist product created with only the features absolutely necessary for user testing. It's the most basic representation of a product, stripped down to the bare essentials.

But why would a design team launch such a product? The objective is to release the most simplified version of a product to see how the target audience responds to it. As a Lean UX team, the question  is always, “What's the maximum amount of information you can obtain with the least effort possible?”

You can create MVPs using several methods, including:

• Wireframes: 2D, low-fidelity designs of the product
• Mockups: 3D, high-quality versions of the product. Mockups are more realistic than wireframes and have colors, icons, and typography
• Prototypes: Simplified versions of the final product, although functionality is limited and not full-scale

MVPs are essential to test hypotheses. And, by putting in less work than creating a finished product, you have more time and resources to create multiple products for various tests. Focus on the product areas you need to improve and leave superfluous elements for later.

4. Improving through feedback

The fourth and final step of the process is all about proof of concept. Is your team moving in the right direction? Does the product meet your customer's needs? Is it broadly accessible to those using web readers and other accessibility supports? 

Lean UX relies on continuous and collaborative learning. Each step of the process must involve qualitative and quantitative data to establish what’s working and what isn’t. The objective is to gain insights quickly and take action accordingly. 

When the team is in the design phase, continuously source feedback from the client and other team members. Once the product has launched — even in beta form — involve visitors in this process. Source feedback through forums, interviews, or surveys. Use your improved knowledge and understanding with each design iteration to build on the MVP. Repeat this circular process as many times as necessary until you have a product that meets client and visitor expectations. The interactions you create with visitors will support or disprove your hypotheses and ultimately lead to a more satisfying user experience.

Further your UX journey

Lean UX is just one approach to UX design in an expanding UI/UX industry. To grow as a designer, you must have a basic understanding of various web design practices.

Webflow has an extensive library of articles, courses, and tutorials to teach you all about Lean UX, web design, and more. We condense complex information into easy-to-understand bites that cater to everyone from beginners to experienced design professionals.

Like Lean UX, it’s important to learn and grow continuously. Get started with our UX design resources and take your skillset to the next level.

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