Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 13]

It’s day 13 of the #30dayUXchallenge and, so far, we basically covered the importance of involving our teams in our process early and often, making sure we understand the problem we are working on and, last but not least, to understand our users and to make sure we are designing for them.

We are just about to jump into our 3rd. week, where we put our hands on and start working on designs (in that hypothetical UX cycle), so it’s important to take a step back and reflect on what Lean UX means and how to approach our deliverables from now on.

A few years ago, I used to spend at least one week, every month, documenting designs and making sure every margin and padding was documented so our developers could happily recreate what we are working on.

Nowadays, I am absolutely grateful to say that our development teams can quickly jump into our Invision prototypes, inspect the elements (or consult our design systems, if our teams are that mature) and quickly pair with us to go through the details & scenarios. It’s way more about collaboration and no longer about heavy documentation. And at the end of the month, I get an extra week to work on actual problems and details don’t get lost in translation as often as it used to back in the days.

Ok… So, what is Lean UX?

The IT world has been talking a lot about Agile development and Lean UX is an alternative approach to the traditional UX design process which main goal is to align with Agile environments.

So, first things first… What is Agile Development?

Agile development is, basically, a method to design and implement rapid (and small) solutions that can be tested quickly and improved over time. In my humble and simple words, it’s about being slightly less precious about fully-fleshed products and being essentially user-driven whenever it comes to which experiences we will focus on. It’s also about testing fewer wireframes and testing more real products. If you ever tried to test a search experience with a prototype, you know what I am talking about. There is only “this far” that our prototypes can go to give us reliable findings.

So Lean UX is an alternative approach that also aligns better with Agile Development.

That leads me to talk a bit about MVP.

MVP is a jargon that is just part of the UX world. Sometimes I even “cook” MVP. Or I want to buy a MVP house. Or I want to go on a MVP trip. All of these examples don’t make sense at all, but they exemplify how important this concept is in our UX routine.

It means Minimum Viable Product. Whenever we talk about MVP, we are talking about starting with the least we need to launch and improving over time. That makes us smarter about how to improve the product and way more flexible about what will be improved. But, better than that, it gives us more opportunities to test the live product with users, so we can improve it based on our user’s feedback. It’s simply a win/win situation.

However, it’s often a tricky situation for designers. As UXers, we are entitled to negotiate with Business and Development which features are the most valuable ones from our user’s perspectives, so that they can be prioritized and developed.

The graph below perfectly represents the balance we should be aiming for between “feasible” and “usable”:

We can clearly see that the product on the example above (a transportation solution) doesn’t need to be as robust as a car (5), but still needs to do the job and address our user needs. Summing it up, our skateboard can be as useful as our car, as long as it takes our users from A to B.

Another analogy well used in the industry is the “cupcake” one:

Our product doesn’t need to be as “robust” as a wedding cake, but as yummy as a cupcake. From that, we can easily evolve until we are mature enough to bake a proper wedding cake.

But, don’t get me wrong: the skateboard needs to be as fun as the car, and the cupcake needs to be as tasty as the wedding cake!

Tools that can help us

I don’t know if I could live without my trio “Trello, Sketch App & Invision” (or any other similar software).

Trello because it helps to keep the team on the same source of truth, and it makes it really, really easy to quickly identify what is a Must Have, a Should Have and a Could Have in that “feature”. Must, Should and Could haves are an important chunk of MVP, as it literally defines what makes that feature basically functional (must have), efficient (should have) & delightful (could have).
Sketch App & Invision because they both help us designing efficiently. The amount of plugins for Sketch that helps us being efficient and saving time are e-n-d-l-e-s-s. My favorite one is Craft, a plugin that syncs with Invision (and is powered by Invision) that empowers the development team to inspect our designs and get the CSS info straight from our prototypes. Pretty handy, easy to implement and easy to collaborate.
If we want to go further to this topic, Design Systems are the new hot topic in the industry. We will talk about it in more detail in a few days, but it is basically a living style guide that also empowers designers and developers to collaborate efficiently. Basically, designers don’t need to design detailed flows as long as the developers have a great understanding of our components. Component driven design can be compared to Lego pieces, that can be quickly put together to form the entire piece. But, again, that’s definitely a topic for another day!

Summing up…

Lean UX is way all about:

Collaboration. More cross-functional team collaborating, running workshops, aligning over which problem we are solving, why we are solving and how we are solving it.
Quick & rapid solutions instead of months of development on a full-designed feature (Agile vs. Waterfall approach)
Testing on wireframes & live products instead of intensily testing prototypes
More pairing and less handing-off designs and heavy documentation to the development team
Quick retrospectives to reflect on what we learned, what we can do better and how can we improve!

And that’s it.

What does Lean UX mean for you and your team?

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Gabi Braga — UX Designer at Envato Elements, freelancer at Toptal & beer enthusiast in her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Lean UX. Going small and growing quick. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lean UX. Going small and growing quick.

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