A few nights ago Todd and myself went to a great talk a short walk from St Pancras station, London. There was one talk, a solid Q&A section, all followed by a prize draw (we didn’t win unfortunately, maybe next time).

Jeff Gothelf was the speaker, who has co-written a book on Lean UX  (I have since ordered this).

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He is also someone I had seen (via YouTube) a little while ago giving a talk which I really enjoyed, However I didn’t realize it was the same person before attending so was very pleased to find this out and knew we were in for a real treat.

Increase shared understanding and communication.

So you may have already heard of agile development but what about agile design? And how would we implement this approach? Back in 2011 Jeff wrote an excellent blog for Smashing Mag that is well worth reading.

A quote from which best sums up Lean UX:

“Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.”

By Increasing the shared understanding and communication within a team, by constantly showing the working out and gaining validation we can move to the next step quickly. Whether that’s making a sketch, heading to the whiteboard, or creating a basic base wireframe we can try out ideas see what works, see what fails and move on.

“What is the smallest thing we can make/do to test our assumptions?”

This way communication is regular, feedback is fast and everyone is kept informed on the decisions made. And from here we can work on iterating on our ideas…

Iteration, iteration, iteration.

From here we can begin to turn our assumptions into solutions. Iterating our ideas, focusing on outcomes not features, getting to a working prototype as quick as possible.

By reducing the effort and time needed to get a “hands on” prototype, we free up time for more ideas, more avenues to follow, more dead ends to sniff out, and ultimately make a better user experience because of it.

We at MobileCaddy love this approach…

So all in all we really enjoyed this talk (and the pint afterwards), cannot wait to read more about Lean UX, and will be keeping an ear to the ground for more talks like this one. Also big thank you toFront Endgineers London for organizing in conjunction with Agile UX Meetup and of course to Jeff Gothelf! Good stuff.