"It's been four years since I first started talking and writing about a new concept called Lean Startup, and less than a year since I published my book Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Achieve Radically Successful Businesses ("Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Are Using Continuous Innovation to Achieve Radically Successful Businesses") (Crown Business). During that time, I've seen these ideas grow and spread—from industry to industry, sector to sector, function to function. Whenever we broke new ground, we relied on visionary leaders to help translate key principles and develop new processes to implement them.
Lean UX is an important step in this evolution. For the first time, we have an outside view of how Lean Startup principles are applied in a design context. Along the way, the book introduces us to important new tools and techniques that allow us to achieve perfect collaboration, fast product availability, and — most importantly — significantly higher quality." —Eric Rees, from the Foreword.
"Lean UX breaks down the barriers that separated software designers from the real business needs on the one hand and the problems of actual implementation on the other. Lean UX doesn't just consider designers, it invites our business and technology partners to work with us on the best solution along the way. Jeff once had a large pharmaceutical client. He hired the agency Jeff worked for to redesign his online trading platform. The goal was to increase profits by 15 percent. Jeff was the lead interaction designer on the team.
Team members locked themselves in an office for several months and studied the current system, supply chain, competitors, target audience, and contextual use cases. They researched personas and assembled strategic models. Jeff created a new information architecture for the product catalog and invented a completely new shopping and payment experience.
When those months passed and the work was done, the team compiled everything into a PowerPoint presentation. The presentation was quite a bit — as it should be, considering the price tag of $600,000! The team came to the client's office and spent a full eight-hour day explaining every pixel and every word in the presentation. When they finished, the customers gave them a standing ovation (yikes!). Jeff and his team breathed a sigh of relief. The client liked their work. And Jeff's team never opened that presentation again. Six months after meeting with the presentation on the client's website, nothing has changed. The client also never opened that presentation again.
Moral of the story: Creating pixel-perfect specs may be the way to get six-figure consulting fees, but not to significantly improve a real product critical to real users. Designers don't come into this business for specifications, either. We want to create services and products that matter, not write papers." — Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, from the Introduction.
-335x455.webp "Letters from M/M (Paris)")
