What is lean UX? Our thoughts on what lean UX is and what it is not

Lean UX is an approach that’s been talked about since around 2011. It still remains a bit of a buzzword, one that more and more of our clients now use too. We’ve been applying Lean principles in delivering UX design projects, measuring our success and improving.
The first thing we learned along the way is that, just like UX, Lean is a term that’s been popularised and used without much understanding. As a result, Lean UX may be a double whammy.

What is Lean UX about?

  • Teams uniting over the same vision and work ethic
  • Lean is about continuous learning & testing
  • Lean is about creating a shared understanding and shared problem space
  • Creating the minimum test required for validating a vision
  • Moving from high uncertainty to certainty

What Lean UX is not:

  • Cheap, underpriced, chaotic, low quality
  • Saying that something is ‘quite lean’ meaning some degree of the above point
  • It’s not for everyone, because some of our clients do need both documentation and certainty

Join us in the our thinking…

While we’re constantly learning and improving on the best way to apply Lean UX principles to some of your projects, we’re certain that Lean UX, as Jeff Gothelf (author of the book, Lean UX) puts it, it is indeed the evolution of product and service design.
Do you have an opinion? We’d love to hear thoughts in the comments below.

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