Lean UX- Try it
I have been teaching adults UX, Design Thinking, Wireframing, and Lean UX at a national organization called General Assembly over the last few months. Its been a wonderful experience.
And this experience has made me realize how so focused I’ve been on design thinking methodology and mindsets in K12+ spaces, I failed to really appreciate other UX approaches. I am changing that each day as I want to focus on Lean UX (a great reference to read over) in this posting.
The appeal of design thinking is the intentional approach of making an observation, asking a question, or being presented with a design topic and withholding any assumptions or identification of the problem let alone the solution. The beauty of staying in a beginners mindset is freeing and allows for so many possibilities for outcomes. DT is User-led, User-Designed for, and User-tested, etc. For me design thinking is a way to strengthen one’s empathetic posture to better deal with the complex, diverse, & at times problem-filled world we encounter every day.
When it comes to Lean UX (which I will be simplifying in the following text) is truly a remarkable approach to design as it maintains the User-led intentionality yet allows for faster cycles and natural tendency of people, i.e. You think you see/identified a problem through observation, data, experience, and/or being told by someone, and you immediately come up with solutions.
Think-Make-Test (repeat and stay in constant improvement mode).
Think-state an hypothesis to what the problem is…(skip over creating a POV statement)
Make- a low-res prototype solution to solve the problem..
Test-get immediate, direct feedback by testing with Users…Validation or Rejection of Hypothesis by Users
Repeat- Hypothesis & Validation
The beauty of this process are many:
all ideas are accepted and transferred to action and reaction as Lean UX pushes the teams to get all hypothesis’ communicated and tested. It removes politics, domination, and breakdown of team dynamics because the testing will eliminate the “bad” idea naturally
students, (learners), people generally like to give their opinions, advice, and solutions and Lean UX encourages quicker analysis of the situation (DT encourages the designer to hold-off defining a problem statement until User directed confirmation)
in a school setting where time is a limited and uncontrollable commodity designed for the masses—Lean UX creates a much faster turn around and allows for the designer to stay true to the approach. What I mean by this is design thinking wants the designer to spend a lot of time with “real” users and stay in empathy for really deep ethnography/needfinding. And to be honest, a lot of design thinking that is occurring in K12 spaces is very “lite” in needfinding, empathy driven face-to-face User interaction. And why is that—- time, intentionality, access to real users, ignorance, cutting corners, and control (so much more is needed to be directly spoken around this for another time).
Lean UX rapid hypothesis & validation cycle in a school setting generates multiple flares, focus opportunities and leans into iteration of ideas for students to demonstrate their understanding of the problem and creative confidence of their solutions.
Lean UX is still focused on empathy-design yet allows for room of other aspects to designer mindsets and skills that design thinking might be a little bit ridged on. I have always “preached” that design thinking is part of the umbrella of design and it is not a “blanket”. The more methodologies and approaches to learning a teacher can offer their students, the better they will be encountering and doing outside of their classroom. Lean UX is just one more way to tackle “life” and may just be an easier way to expose your students to empathy-based design…