The core User Experience Design process is time-consuming. It is costly too. As a result, companies, especially product-based startups, often try to skip this and straight away jump into product design without considering the actual users' needs. They start creating the product based on certain biases. Hence, most of the time, they fail to generate the desired result and quality user experiences.
In User Experience Design, there are different popular frameworks or processes that a design team can choose to launch the final product starting from creating the initial idea. Choosing the right design framework is extremely essential for the success of the product development process.
Unlike other frameworks where a lot of time is spent from research to the final design, a Lean UX design process focuses more on the quick outcome of a product.
Lean UX, a solution for user experience design for startups?
As mentioned earlier, Lean UX is a popular design framework. This is an iterative process where the designers prioritize producing a quick, practical product and receiving feedback as promptly as possible. Here, all the team members like researchers, product managers, designers, and developers work in collaboration to come up with solutions.
This process is based on both the ‘Lean model’ and ‘Agile methodology’. Designers continue to iterate the designs based on the feedback gathered, until and unless the stakeholders, and potential users find the product, useful, usable, equitable, enjoyable, and accessible. The main aim is to generate results fast by removing extra, avoidable, and time-consuming elements.
Before we start digging more into this process, let’s quickly understand what a ‘Design Thinking Process’ is. A DTP probably is the most popular UX design framework till date. It’s a ‘user-centric’ design process where the designers and researchers put the actual end users and their requirements front and center.
There are 5 steps or stages of the Design Thinking Process that UX designers need to follow:
- Empathize: The first phase is where we conduct the user research to understand the user problem.
- Define: Here we define the problem by simply writing a problem statement.
- Ideate: In the 3rd phase of the Design Thinking Process, we quickly come up with ideas of actually what to design.
- Prototype: Here, we come up with sketches, wireframes (both paper/digital), design mockups, and finally create ‘Low-fidelity (lo-fi)’ and ‘High-fidelity (hi-fi)’ prototypes.
- Test: As the term itself suggests, it’s time to test the prototype that we create in the 4th phase of the DTP. Testing can be done for wireframes and mockups as well.
Though the process is very popular, a lot of companies can’t afford this because of both time and money constraints. Now, in Lean UX, to have a quicker outcome, the process is divided into three categories.
3 stages of the Lean User Experience (UX) design framework:
- Think: In this starting phase, all the research work is conducted by means of interviews, surveys, competitive analysis, etc. in order to get the idea of what the users actually need and how the desired product can make their experience and lives better.
- Make/Create: In the 2nd phase of Lean UX, the designers actually start creating the designs. Here, they convert their ideas about the product that they generate via research work to testable designs. They create wireframes (can be quick paperwork or digital wireframes), design mockups/layouts, and functional lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes. It’s important to know that here we create a ‘Minimum Viable Product (MVP)' where we can create basic design prototypes and test those with the end users.
- Test: In the last phase of this process the team let the users, and stakeholders, test their designs by methods like A/B testing, usability analysis, etc. The main target here is to gather as much feedback as possible in a quicker manner so that the designers have a better idea about the improvements that need to be incorporated into the designs. Iteration is the key here.
What are the basic benefits of the Lean UX process?
- Faster process: As mentioned earlier, we can remove extra, avoidable, and time-consuming documentation processes to generate quick ideas by following a lean model.
- Supports Agile methodology: Encourages flexibility, quick iterations, collaborative team efforts, and continuous improvement of the product itself.
- Better user experience: This is a complete iterative process. The team keeps on improving the product till the user feels happy.
To sum up:
Building a product while ignoring the users, and their pain points will never bring any success. To restrict the budget and time, end numbers of companies make this mistake. As a result, they often fail to deliver the desired result and cannot sustain themselves in this competitive world.
The Lean UX framework or methodology helps the companies overcome this problem. Here, they get a chance to practice core UX techniques to improve the overall user experience. At the same time, they also manage to make the design process more economical and practical by eliminating unwanted extra elements that can’t be done in other design frameworks.
