UX for Lean Startups Book Summary - UX for Lean Startups Book explained in key points

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UX for Lean Startups summary

Name: UX for Lean Startups
Rating: 4.5 (139 reviews)
Author: Laura Klein

Laura Klein

Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design

4.5 (139 ratings)

24 mins

Brief summary

UX for Lean Startups by Laura Klein is a practical guide on user experience design for startups. It offers tips and tricks on how to create user-friendly products that serve customers' needs and lead to business success.

Topics

Work Culture Design Thinking Strategy Start-Ups

Table of Contents

UX for Lean Startups
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn how to create a great user experience without breaking the bank.

If you’re working for a start-up or thinking about founding one yourself, chances are you believe that you have a good idea. But just about every other start-up that’s ever existed had a good idea too, and the majority of them failed.

Why? Well, the difference between success and failure often comes down to providing your customers with a great user experience, or UX, for short. Think of the last time you were drawn to a website by its ease of navigation. Now, think of the last time you clicked away from one because it was such a pain to use. That’s the difference between good and bad UX.

Unfortunately, getting your UX right often requires a lot of time and money, both of which can be in short supply for start-ups. That’s where Lean UX comes in. It’s an approach to UX research and design that’s focused on developing new products, services, and features as quickly and efficiently as possible.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how a landing page can help you peer into the future;
what the Wizard of Oz can teach you about testing your ideas; and
why the traditional approach to UX gets almost everything wrong.

Lean UX focuses on formulating and validating hypotheses to inform decision-making.

Imagine you work for an e-commerce company that sells gadgets online. One day, during a meeting, someone suggests adding a comment section under each product on the website. This way, customers can leave feedback.

Everyone thinks this sounds like a great idea, so they get to work on it. The product manager writes some specs. The designers come up with a design. The engineers figure out the code.

Two months later, the feature is finally released, and it looks great. But there’s one little problem: none of your customers actually want to use it. All that work was for nothing. So what went wrong?

The key message here is: Lean UX focuses on formulating and validating hypotheses to inform decision-making.

This way of working highlights one of the core differences between Lean UX and the traditional approach to designing new features, products, and services. It all comes down to the distinction between an assumption and a hypothesis.

To see the difference, let’s go back to that ill-fated comment section. How would you use Lean UX to approach this idea instead? To begin with, you’d come up with a hypothesis, perhaps something like: “Based on our preliminary research, we believe that adding a comments section to our website will improve our sales by increasing customer engagement.”

Notice how this hypothesis turns your idea into a testable proposition. Customer engagement and sales are things you can measure. If the numbers go up, your hypothesis is correct. If they don’t, it’s wrong.

Your task is then to simply figure out which it is. In the language of Lean UX, this process is called validation, since you’re trying to validate – or invalidate – your beliefs about your new product, service, or feature.

The weaker alternative is the more traditional approach where you plow ahead with your idea and hope for the best. In doing this, you’re making a series of unfounded assumptions about your idea. In the case of the comment section idea, you’re assuming that it’ll increase your customer engagement, and hopefully your sales, without any real evidence. That’s a risky bet to make. After all, if your assumptions are incorrect, the result could be months of wasted time and money.

Lean UX is all about avoiding this fate. How? By invalidating bad ideas as soon as possible.

Validate your ideas for products, services, and features before you even design them.

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.

Test out your idea before you build it into a final product, service, or feature.

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.

Validate your ideas using qualitative research.

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.

Quantitative research helps validate ideas in different ways than qualitative research.

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?

Make sure your idea is a good enough solution to a bad enough problem that enough people will buy it.

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?

Understand your customers’ pains and design a product, service, or feature that alleviates them.

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.

Lean UX takes an iterative approach to design, focusing on producing a minimum viable product.

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.

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What is UX for Lean Startups about?

UX for Lean Startups (2013) provides an innovative, cost-effective approach to researching and designing products and services. Geared toward start-ups and companies that want to act like them, it shows that you can provide your customers with an excellent user experience while keeping your time and money expenditures as lean as possible.

Who should read UX for Lean Startups?

Entrepreneurs
Product designers, managers, and engineers
Start-up workers and founders

About the Author

Laura Klein has been an engineer, UX designer, product manager, and consultant for more than two decades, working in Silicon Valley with both small start-ups and large companies. She has a popular blog called Users Know, and she’s the cohost of two podcasts: What Is Wrong With UX and Engsplaining. She’s written one other book, Build Better Products.

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