UX for Lean Startups summary

But wait a minute – you’re not a soothsayer. So how can you know if your idea is good or bad? How do you know if you haven’t turned it into reality and seen how your customers react? 

Fortunately, you don’t need a crystal ball. You just need some clever approaches to hypothesis validation. You will need to test your new product, service, or feature before you’ve even designed it, let alone produced it. And that might sound near impossible, but it’s really just about putting the Lean UX philosophy into action.

Do you remember the Wizard of Oz? Not the classic film, but rather the “wizard” character it was named after. As a refresher, this character was a bit of a charlatan. He used a bunch of ingenious magic tricks to make it appear as if he had actual magical powers. In reality, he was just a man behind a curtain.

You can pull off a similar illusion with something called a Wizard of Oz Feature. This is another way to see if your idea is on the right track without investing lots of time and money designing it. And that’s because it allows you to see if your idea works with people without having to actually build the whole thing.

Let’s say you’ve created an interactive prototype of your product. Great – but now what? What do you do with it?

Well, there’s no point in creating an interactive prototype if no one interacts with it. And there’s no point to anyone interacting with it if you don’t talk to them about their interactions. Remember, the objective here is to find out what your potential customers think about your idea. The prototype is just a way of giving them a tangible way of seeing your idea in action. Now you’ve got to find out what they think about it.

When talking about different ways of getting information, we usually split them into two broad categories: qualitative and quantitative research. We’ve already seen what qualitative research looks like in the context of UX design – things like observing and interviewing people during usability tests.

But what about quantitative research – research that deals with numerical data?

At this point, you hopefully have a good idea of how validation works and what it looks like in practice. There are many other ways of going about it, and the details can vary a great deal depending on the product, service, or feature you’re testing – but we’ll leave it at that.

Let’s now zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Why validate in the first place? What are you trying to find out by doing all of this work? And how do you know you’ve hit the mark? 

Want an easy way of remembering the Lean UX approach to design and research? Here’s one: think of yourself as a doctor. Why? Well, the people you want to turn into customers have something in their lives that’s causing them pain, and the question is this: Does your idea provide a cure? And is the pain bad enough and the cure good enough for people to pay money for it?

The author calls this way of thinking Pain-Driven Design, or PDD. It’s a useful metaphor for describing the Lean UX approach to designing new products, services, and features. And that brings us to our next topic: design. Assuming you’ve validated your idea and found it to be a good one, the next step is to start designing the thing you want to build.

When you think of UX design, what comes to mind? Maybe it’s the incredibly complex but somehow still functional layout of Amazon’s online store. Or perhaps it’s the elegant minimalism of the Google search page.

It’s probably not something like the makeshift solution we explored before: a spinning wheel that encourages your website users to be more patient when they’re experiencing lag. But great things are designed and created by adding one new improvement at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your product or service won’t be either.