This weekend, I attended Lean UX Week.
The workshop covered the following topics: Customer Development, Value Proposition, Actionable Metrics, Purpose and Pivots.
Here are the main points from the workshop and the things I learned:
What is Lean Startup?
– Not wasting money: it doesn’t mean it is cheap
– Always moving forward
– Lean startup can work for any business and any industry.
– Lean startup is am approach for building companies that are creating products and services in situations of extreme uncertainty.
– Create rapid prototypes that test market assumptions and uses customer feedback in an effort to evolve the design faster and reduce waste.
– Lean startup advocates experiments and learning.
– Ideas -> Build -> Product -> Measure -> Data -> Learn.
– Think -> Make -> Check
Method
– List your assumptions
– Understand your customers
– Experiment
– Adjust direction based on evidence
Here is a list of books to look at if you’re building a product: Business Model Generation, Lean Startup, The Startup Owner Manual.
Your thoughts are not enough to build your company. Get out of the building and test your assumptions.
Customer Development
Ask yourself the following questions:
– Who is this for?
– What can [user name] do that wasn’t possible before?
– What features does [user name] need to do that?
– How do they fit together?
Once you’ve answered those questions, sketch it and build it.
Before fit:
– Is there a high value problem?
– Who will pay for it?
– Who are the market shareholders?
– How does money flow?
Figuring this out can take a long time.
Product market fit: if customers would be sad if your product went away, you have a product market fit.
Method: no surveys, but instead: interviews, metrics, usability
User experience is a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product service or system. There is a human implied in UX.
Users -> Needs -> Uses -> Features -> Prototypes, User Stories, Themed Releases
Customer interviews
1) Identify who you want to talk to
2) Articulate your hypotheses
3) Craft a topic map for the session
4) Jot down conversation prompts
5) Have the conversation
6) Debrief
Conversation prompts
– Have you ever had […] experience?
– Can you tell me a story about that?
– And then what happened?
– Why or how did you do that?
– What did you love or hate about that?
– If you could wave a magic wand, what would it be like?
Group interviews are only interesting for group behavior. Unless you’re trying to understand couple or coworker behavior then go for individual interviews.
Keep all your user personas. Put date on them. Your user personas are never finished.
Make a habit of doing weekly or monthly interviews to put in place a culture of learning.
After 4-5 interviews see the trend and do a debrief.
Can we interview people we know? It’s not recommended because it’s really hard. Friends of friends is much better. But in certain cultures it may be better to do group interviews to make people feel comfortable (eg Japan, South Korea)
Minimum Viable Product
Write down functions and features that you’d like to see in your product and then ask each member of the team to pick one out of their list. Here you have your Minimum Viable Product.
Metrics
The more specific the metric, the better. For example, “number of minutes spent on the app per session per user” is better than “average time spent on the app”
Here are some metrics startups should look at: conversion metrics, cohort metrics, instrumentation, vanity metrics, KPIs, A/B testing, metrics for pirates.
Personal conclusions
I think this event was really good — I’ve read a lot about UX in the past but it’s definitely not the same thing when you start applying the principles and doing it yourself. I think everyone should try and go to one of those events if they have a chance. It makes you realize you need to constantly test your assumptions, ask your users’ opinions, build, test, change.
To finish, here is a good diagram from @andersramsay
