Lean UX design process, A smart approach for the startups?

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:

1. Empathize: The first phase is where we conduct the user research to understand the user problem.
2. Define: Here we define the problem by simply writing a problem statement.
3. Ideate: In the 3rd phase of the Design Thinking Process, we quickly come up with ideas of actually what to design.
4. 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.
5. 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: 

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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?

 

1. Faster process: As mentioned earlier, we can remove extra, avoidable, and time-consuming documentation processes to generate quick ideas by following a lean model.
2. Supports Agile methodology: Encourages flexibility, quick iterations, collaborative team efforts, and continuous improvement of the product itself.
3. 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.

6 Important Phases of Design Strategy

Like we do planning in our day-to-day lives for better living, we need to opt for a proper design strategy to create a great product or an application. In this blog, we will learn the various stages to build an appropriate strategy for design. At first, we should recognize what a strategy for design is.

What is a design strategy?

It’s a process of understanding the brand’s business requirements and achieving that with design. It’s necessary to have the design plan first before commencing the actual implementation process.

Why do we need a perfect design strategy first?

Normally, a client approaches a designer or an agency for branding and design requirements. But often, the client comes up with some tangible thought. The designer straight away jumps into the process of converting that thought into visual design. Sometimes it may click but mostly, the result ends up not achieving the desired goal. In turn, the process gets lengthier with lots of iterations. This creates frustration and leaves a negative impression on the client. Now, to achieve every good thing we need to plan a strategy. Likewise, we must have a proper design strategy before we proceed with the design implementation part. Be it UX design or product design, there are a few stages to create a perfect strategy that we cover next.

6 important phases of design strategy:

1. Initial brainstorming session:

Here the client will be asked a few questions as part of requirement gathering:

• What business the does client deal with?
• What’s the environment in which the client runs the business is it fun, flexible, etc.
• Who else would be interacting with the client? In this context, the ‘who’ are users who would be interested in doing business with the brand and also the people who visit the client's website a lot.
• What can they expect from the brand?
• Besides, in this discovery session, it’s also essential to consider the benefits that the brand can offer to the target 

2. Creating user stories:

• Based on the earlier analysis (brainstorming), now the next step in this design thinking process is to develop the user stories. Here it’s important to understand the users’ psychographs. Psychograph includes their interests, hobbies, the way the users behave, their attitude, and personal and social lives.
• Also, the users’ demography should be taken into consideration. For the design thinking strategy their age, sex information, income, etc. are indispensable to be analysed. Creating a ‘User Persona’ can be the ideal solution for this.
• Besides, it’s also necessary to examine the user journey here by finding out their pain points, the services they are looking for, etc. Finally bringing the solution by means followed by the brand to help the users and the benefits they can provide to them.
• Need to understand the reason why the users want to interact with the brand. The thinker must evaluate why the users recommend the brand.

3. Competitive analysis:

While strategising the design process, it’s necessary to analyse the competitors. Subsequently, understand how they are doing their businesses. Furthermore, we should study their approaches, and visit their websites to explore what’s working and what is not doing good for the business. This way industry standards for the business can be figured out.

4. Prioritise goals:

It’s necessary to realise the clients’ revenue generation process. The prioritisation process must cover the areas that demand enhancement to increase revenue. In the process, the design thinker should also understand the channels that the clients have adapted. Social media marketing, content marketing, emails, and websites are the mediums a client can adapt. Again, as a design or user experience strategist, one needs to prioritise the mediums to focus on. Lastly, the designer should figure out how quickly and efficiently the client's expectations can be met.

5. Point down the requirement:

Based on the previous processes, the design analyst should make a requirement list. This list in the course would help to achieve the user requisite.

6. Creating information architecture:

Finally, the strategist needs to come up with the architecture or the wireframe. The next steps are creating prototypes, and screen designs, taking feedback, and if needed repeating the process.

For better strategic thinking in design, you can opt for any online design strategy course available. You can opt for a design degree as well from a reputed institute if you can afford time and money.

Conclusion:

Without a proper strategy, no design can improve the experience of a user by utilizing good usability and accessibility.