Design is a marketing tool. The best marketing tool you can have is a well-designed product.
Annie Wang

How do you create a well-designed product? By focusing on solving the right problems and delivering value to your customers. A Lean UX Design process gives you the tools and system for developing a well-designed product.

In Designing with Lean UX, Kate Kutter describes UX as

• a mindset
• focused on delivering value
• inspiring the right kind of ideas
• guides your decisions

What is Lean UX?

In A Lean Design Process for Creating Awesome UX, Annie Wang described Lean UX as a repeatable process that is goal-driven and outcome-focused. Your team has a designer, developer and product manager. Most startups are going to have small teams. They focus on the following principles:

• Rapid cycles: think, make, check
• Generate many options and decide quickly which ones to develop
• Focus on solving the right problems
• Recognize hypothesis and validate with user feedback
• Research with users as the best source of information and inspiration

What does a Lean UX Design process look like?

A typical UX Design Process may incorporate the following:

• Discovery
• Wireframe
• Prototypes
• Validate Internally
• Summarize
• Iterate

In Lean UX, Lean doesn’t equal Skinny. Less is more.  You want to build a product that is simple and clear with less features and more details. You want to go through cycles of Think, Make and Check. The key is user feedback and to reduce cycle time, not your build time. Not every product needs to follow the same UX Design Process.

As we develop our own UX Design process, we want to focus on thinking, making and checking. User feedback is key to making products that are simple, clear and easy to use.

Have you created your own UX Design Process?