Process: Lean UX

“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.”—Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer, Apple

Deciding on the right product-development process for your team can often be a paradox. Maintaining balance amidst a proliferation of inconsistencies in product requirements and development outcomes is challenging for both large and mid-sized organizations —especially when teams lack any metrics to measure their impact on a release.

Friction arises when there is a mismatch between the user’s mental model and product features. When a development team finds itself in an untenable situation, the blame game begins. But as Mad Men’s Don Draper often said, “Move forward.” Read More

In Part 1 of this three-part series, I described some problems with the software-development lifecycle (SDLC). Then, in Part 2, I shared some of the key lessons I’ve learned during my more than 30 years of experience in IT. For the last 25 years, I’ve focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the SDLC, considering the key role UX professionals have to play in making such improvements.

Over the last five years, these learnings have led to a new method that we have been honing at my company Ax-Stream. I believe that this new method is now at the cutting edge of software-engineering methodology. Naturally, this method incorporates all of the key lessons I discussed in Part 2. In doing so, it integrates aspects of Lean, user-centered design (UCD), agile, and waterfall, along with some novel thinking and highly advanced use of our modeling tool of choice, Axure. As Figure 1 shows, this new method comprises just three key stages: Inception, Design and Build. Read More

As UX professionals, we pride ourselves on making software that is human friendly and easy to use. But keeping the right balance between adding features that customers and users need and maintaining a clean, simple user-interface design is often harder than it seems it should be. This is a challenge that most product teams have in common. In this case study, I’ll describe how our team at Bloomfire integrated Lean UX into our product-development process to address this challenge.

How can you distinguish between what the people who purchase and use your products say they want and what they actually need? Luckily, there are some effective ways to reduce the risk that you might design products your customers don’t want or your users can’t use and, instead, to design for their actual needs. Read More