[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”3.19.12″ custom_padding=”0px|0px|2px|0px|false|false” next_background_color=”#000000″ inner_width=”auto” inner_max_width=”1080px”][et_pb_fullwidth_post_title meta=”off” featured_placement=”background” _builder_version=”3.19.12″ title_font=”Montserrat|700|||||||” title_text_align=”left” title_text_color=”#ffffff” title_font_size=”80px” title_font_size_tablet=”55px” title_font_size_phone=”25px” title_font_size_last_edited=”on|phone” background_color=”#707070″ custom_css_main_element=”background-blend-mode: multiply!important;” custom_css_post_title=”max-width: 70%” \/][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ custom_padding_last_edited=”on|phone” _builder_version=”3.15″ custom_margin_phone=”|||||true” custom_margin_last_edited=”on|phone” custom_padding=”20px|||30px|false|false” custom_padding_tablet=”|0px||0px||true” custom_padding_phone=”|0px||0px||true” prev_background_color=”#000000″ next_background_color=”#ff4c09″ inner_width=”auto” inner_max_width=”1080px”][et_pb_row use_custom_width=”on” custom_width_px=”1220px” use_custom_gutter=”on” gutter_width=”1″ custom_padding=”0|0px|0|0px|false|false” custom_padding_last_edited=”on|phone” _builder_version=”3.19.12″ custom_margin_last_edited=”on|phone” width=”80%” max_width=”1220px”][et_pb_column type=”3_4″ module_id=”blog-post-main-content” custom_padding__hover=”|||” custom_padding=”|||”][et_pb_text admin_label=”Blog Post Author” module_class=”blog-post-author” _builder_version=”3.19.12″ text_font=”Montserrat||||||||” header_3_font=”Roboto|700||on|||||” header_3_text_color=”#f3653b” header_3_font_size=”18px” max_width=”800px” module_alignment=”center” custom_margin=”||0px|” custom_padding=”50px|||” text_orientation=”left”]<\/p>\n
By Mona Patel<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Main Blog Post Content: Sec 1″ module_class=”blog-post-main-content” _builder_version=”3.19.12″ text_font=”Muli|300|||||||” text_font_size=”18px” text_line_height=”30px” header_2_font=”Lato|700|||||||” header_2_font_size=”27px” max_width=”800px” module_alignment=”center” text_orientation=”left”]<\/p>\n This article was originally published on October 21, 2013 at uxmatters.com<\/a><\/span>. The original article can be found\u00a0here<\/a><\/span>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Recently, in managing a small user experience and design agency, I\u2019ve discovered that there are some common misconceptions about Lean UX. Many companies have told me that they think being\u00a0<\/span>lean<\/em>\u00a0just means spending less money. Agencies cost money, so these companies think that keeping UX work in house is lean. Some of our clients have asked us to skip research, avoid creating deliverables, and complete our work based\u00a0<\/span>only<\/em>\u00a0on assumptions. They\u2019ve asked us to participate in daily meetings, with the goal of working more collaboratively, but often this just slows us down.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n <\/span><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Look, at my agency, we are huge fans of being Lean. Many great ideas and smarter processes have come from our thinking about Lean UX\u2014from replacing the traditional waterfall model of product development with Lean and agile models [1]; to creating a single product team that encompasses design, management, and development [2]; to meeting customer demands by building new businesses and products more quickly and effectively [3]; as well as the Pain-Driven Design (PDD) methodology that Laura Klein introduced in\u00a0<\/span>UX for Lean Startups<\/em>. [4]<\/span><\/p>\n Product teams can implement solutions faster\u2014by adhering to short, iterative, low-fidelity development cycles; seek feedback early and often\u2014which anyone who has been in the field of user experience for more than a year knows is the best way to go; and fully integrate UX professionals\u2014so rather than fighting with product and development people, we\u2019re collaborating with them.<\/p>\n However, two years ago, Jeff Gothelf surmised that being\u00a0Lean<\/em>\u00a0would be difficult for a UX agency:<\/p>\n \u201cFor internal software\/design organizations, the transition to Lean UX is well within reach. You are in the problem-solving business, and\u00a0you don\u2019t solve problems with design documentation. You solve them with elegant, efficient, and sophisticated software. \u2026 Interactive agencies have it a bit tougher because\u00a0they are in the deliverables business. They get paid for their documentation and spend a\u00a0lot\u00a0of time creating it. A specialist creates each document, and they charge for that time. Reducing those efforts means reducing revenue.\u201d [5]<\/em><\/p>\n As I thought two years ago and still think today, Jeff seems to believe that agencies are inherently averse to Lean and prone to focusing on extraneous, costly details. In his recent book,\u00a0Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience<\/em>, Jeff states:<\/p>\n \u201cTo make Lean UX work in an agency, everyone involved in an engagement must focus on maximizing two factors: increasing collaboration between client and agency, and working to change the focus from outputs to outcomes.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cSome agencies attempt to focus on outcomes by experimenting with a move away from fixed-scope and deliverable-based contracts. Instead, their engagements are based on simple time-and-materials agreements, or more radically, on outcome-based contracts. In either case, the team is freed to spend their time iterating toward a specific goal, not just a deliverable.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n As an agency, we completely agree with the philosophy of breaking down walls and working with<\/em>\u00a0clients,\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0for them. Involving clients early and often promises the same sorts of benefits as involving users early and often\u2014it makes us smarter and faster. Collaborating with clients helps us move from being outsiders to being insiders and provides us a better understanding of the business need and the problem they\u2019re asking us to address.<\/p>\n We also agree that, in many cases, you\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0just start by designing. Sometimes, no research is necessary. We\u2019ve done many kickoff meetings where sketches were our deliverables\u2014simply because we hit on an appropriate strategy for navigation or interaction right away. I\u2019ve\u00a0never\u00a0<\/em>wasted time doing user research just for the sake of doing it. My goal in doing research has always been to get clients answers for their burning questions\u2014and ultimately, to solve their problems.<\/p>\n But, what we do isn\u2019t just about solving challenging problems. It\u2019s about creating new, more meaningful experiences\u2014and that may come with a new set of challenges. Companies often bring in agencies to come up with better ideas. I\u2019m not saying that\u2019s right or that all agencies can do this, but there\u2019s a reason why agencies exist and have been experiencing growth over the past few years.<\/p>\n While being\u00a0Lean<\/em>\u00a0is awesome, being\u00a0innovative<\/em>\u00a0means that spending time and money on smart research and devoting ample time to thinking through the problem space can sometimes mean the difference between a good design and a great design. Our focus is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0just on making something usable, but on creating value for a business and really impacting people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yes, agencies typically end engagements with deliverables. But, we don’t charge our clients\u00a0<\/span>just<\/em>\u00a0for the deliverables. We charge them for the value that we provide and the objective insights, fresh perspectives, and innovative solutions that we offer. We provide an innovative vision for an exceptional user experience in the form of an artifact, or deliverable. The presentation of our insights and recommendations in a solid deliverable can often be\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0<\/em>tipping point for organizations seeking to change their product or experience for the better.<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes, we create deliverables that comprise only a few slides\u2014which actually takes longer to produce than a 50-slide presentation that offers data, but\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0insights. Creating these shorter, more impactful deliverables is time intensive, but also worthwhile. We\u2019ve often seen our clients embed them into their own presentations to help the larger organization understand and socialize our research findings and design solutions.<\/p>\n We\u00a0don\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0create deliverables just to show that we\u2019ve thought about a problem in great detail. Obviously, we do think about design problems a lot, but we don\u2019t need to prove this through deliverables. Rather, we need to prove this by producing a beautiful, elegant, fully thought\u2013out design solution. (It\u2019s not about output, it\u2019s about outcomes, as Gothelf notes.) [5]<\/p>\n In the case I described earlier, we knew that doing a legitimate round of research\u2014not just GOOBing it\u2014would help inform our design strategy with actual data from users on what they needed. We were able to convince the client to follow our recommendations, and our ethnographic study revealed a solution that was completely different from what the team had originally conceived. Prior to our conducting this research, the internal design team had been thinking about a mobile-friendly intranet from which field workers could access information. However, our study exposed an opportunity to redefine the\u00a0intranet<\/em>\u00a0as a texting solution that would allow field employees to quickly and easily ask questions about benefits, processes, and tools, using their phones.<\/p>\n Other ideas that our research inspired include FAQs that people could access on wearable, smart devices and embedding smarter technology in the products themselves, so there would be less burden on the field team. We subsequently did concept testing and usability testing to validate that our design solution solved the client\u2019s process problems.<\/p>\n When using our design solution, the field team had fewer unanswered questions and were quickly able to get answers to the questions that they did have. Our design solution also fulfilled the softer goal of making the field team feel more integrated into the company\u2019s culture and persuading them that the corporation really cared about taking care of them. In 15 years as a consultant, I haven\u2019t seen\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0intranet excite employees as much as this solution did.<\/p>\n Sure, doing the research cost the company money, but that money was well spent. If we had\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0conducted the research, they would have gone down a totally different and\u00a0erroneous<\/em>\u00a0path. The deliverables from each phase of our research were also valuable, in that they helped the larger team understand\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0we were investing in this audience and to get on board with our solution. The criteria for being Lean are to get to the best answer in a way that\u2019s faster and smarter. In this case, without a serious dive into the needs of these users through research, reaching the design solution would have been faster, but\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0smarter or better.<\/p>\n\n
A Super-Truncated History of Lean UX<\/h2>\n
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Deliverables Are\u00a0Not<\/em>\u00a0the Ogre in This Tale About Agencies<\/h2>\n