What is Lean UX?

Make your routine more agile and create consistent, collaborative and user-focused experiences

4 min readJan 24, 2022

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Inspired by Lean and Agile, this is a different way to understand UX routine, transforming it in a faster and assertiveness process, where all deliverables are focused on improve user experience and deliver the right value to final user.

Make it Lean! How create a faster UX process?

Create just what is necessary and increase team collaboration from the beginning. Simplifying all deliverables, reduce time for updating excess documentation and you’ll have more time to focus on what you do best: the experience!

Collaboration is definitely one of the highlights of this methodology. This collaboration starts with the digital solution triad (UX + Dev + PO) and necessary stakeholders in addition, who when involved from the beginning will reduce the risk of impediments and generate greater alignment. As I explained in this article: “WTF is Design Critique?”, the ideal for implementing a consistent solution is that we have people with different backgrounds, with different perspectives and expectations.

And guess what? This is exactly the Lean UX proposal, which, through an interdisciplinary team, can be applied either in the first steps of an MVP or even in more advanced stages, when speed is needed to solve or improve usability issues.

In this process, some key questions will be answered:

Who are our users?
What is the value of the solution perceived by the user?
At what moment will the solution be used by the user?
What will be the most important feature?
What is the biggest risk for putting this solution live?

Having these points aligned between all stakeholders it’s possible to deal with changes easier and faster. With the hypotheses validated and all necessary alignment made, it’s time to structure, assemble and validate the MVP, which is the main output of Lean UX.

*Author/Copyright holder: Jussi Pasanen. With acknowledgements to Aarron Walter, Ben Tollady, Ben Rowe, Lexi Thorn and Senthil Kugalur. Copyright terms and license: All rights reserved*

An important point about the concept of MVP: it shouldn’t just be functional. That is, an MVP must deliver all the core values needed to have a solid foundation in delivering the core solution’s values to the end user.

Lean UX is not Lazy UX!

The main idea of Lean UX is not to skip steps, but to review the quantity and quality of the deliverables that are produced in the UX process, removing the “fat” and keeping only what is really necessary for the process of structuring the solution, which will allow your team to have greater speed to pivot if necessary.

*Diagram of the iterative design and critique process. Warfel, Todd Zaki. 2009. Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. New York: Rosenfeld Media*

More experienced you are as a UX Designer, easier and more natural Lean UX is. All responsibility for directing the implementing needs, relying team’s collaboration and user feedback, choosing the tools that best suit and are really needed belongs to the designer.

Design Thinking + Lean UX + Agile in everyday life:

To better understand how Lean fits into the solution, the image below makes it clear how we can incorporate Design Thinking, Lean UX and Agile UX.

Starting with Design Thinking you will understand what are the pain points, needs, explore initial data, explore hypotheses and potential solutions.

In Lean UX you’ll focus on building the MVP, with a collaborative vision, validating hypotheses, evaluating user feedback and using metrics to refine ideas during the evolution of the solution.

In the blue dot, we see Agile UX where we work more with an agile mindset, promoting some important points such as:

Team collaboration
Focus on the solution rather than extensive and complex documentation
Be centered on the user’s needs and feedback
Be flexible knowing how to adapt to changes and needs that may arise along the way to always have a solution that delivers perceived value to the user

Lean is the next mainstream word?

Maybe!

The basic thinking of making processes more concise, targeted and collaborative is something necessary for us to implement improvements, services and products in a society that is increasingly ephemeral.

We have to keep in mind that what we put on the air is always outdated and with opportunities for improvement, having “lean” processes makes our response speed much faster and having more collaborative processes makes with the solution being much more assertive.

This article is about some points of Lean UX. If you want to know more, I suggest the links below:

Thanks for reading!

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