Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience 1st Edition

Been waiting for this one. I could not believe it took so long to be released - a good solid year after I first heard about it at South By Southwest. Seemed ironic that a book about "Lean" would take so long to release!I ate this book up. It came along at a great time, my UX team is reevaluating our process, and I am navigating my relationship with a born again "agile" development team.Years back, I moved upstream from front-end development and started a career in usability and UI design, and I much of the credit to Steve Krug's classic, "Don't Make Me Think". I see parallels here I believe will propel "Lean UX" a into a must-own classic. It is concise, well written and easy to read in an afternoon (or a "long plane ride", if you will!). It is full of current, yet time-tested thinking that spells out an easy to implement process that you can get up and running in short order.Lean UX is a common sense approach, with a focus on collaboration, iteration & proving out ideas by getting design ideas quickly into the field. This book will likely inspire you reconsider your existing product development process.I'm recommending this book to everyone on my team, and to colleagues across other functions as well.Now, stop reading reviews and order this book already.

I liked the book because it was easy to read and understand

This book introduces Lean UX, an emerging approach to digital product development that, for the first time, places user experience in its rightful place as the beating heart of Agile and Lean Startup. Grounded in deep cross-functional collaboration and rigorous experimentation, Lean UX is both a mindset and a collection of working practices with the potential to dramatically increase the effectiveness of user experience practitioners and transform teams and organizations everywhere.In Lean UX, authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden challenge designers to drop our "hero" stance, and instead position ourselves as shepherds of the team's collective creative process. To this end, Gothelf and Seiden provide a wealth of practical tools, advice, and case studies--complete with worksheets and detailed instruction--that promise to empower any motivated team to get started with Lean UX and realize immediate results.Given the mainstream adoption of Agile and the extraordinary interest in Lean Startup, I believe the Lean UX methods described in this book are quickly on their way to becoming mainstream. Lean UX is a practical, powerful resource for designers, software developers, product managers, entrepreneurs and anyone interested in mastering Lean UX to begin delivering increasingly successful digital products and services.

The book is well organized and an easy read. I would say even if you are not focused on say Lean startup techniques, yet interested in removing waste as in the traditional Lean practices, then this is an essential read for Product Managers and Development team. I am highly recommending this to Product Owners and team members of Scrum teams as the Lean approach points to how one can get teams focused.The book could have done with better proof reading as errors in terminology may put folks off yet there are excellent elements of such as having a hypotheses and essentially taking a Scientific approach in testing the hypotheses. So sure the four Agile values are incorrectly stated as principles, and no doubt in the abstract one can confuse values and/or principles. In fact they could have provided some treatment to the twelve Agile principles [...] in order to introduce a narrower set of principles as there are some overlapping principles. As someone already mentioned the 15 or so principles would have been better presented in a simpler form that is memorable.The main thrust of the book is that early on in Software industry development was undertaken at the behest of someones best guess. Now, software development is no longer the new kid on the block and fortunately we now have tools and techniques learnt as a result of the past that pushes teams to be more deliberate with the choices they make versus a choice made in some ivory tower. Sure a higher level choice is made through company and product strategy. This hasn't trickled down as easily as one would imagine and Lean UX shows a way in how one can focus on flow of ideas all the way to customer realizing value based on customer feedback and frequent learning that teams engage in.

If you are a:UX person AND have read Lean Startup - skip this book. It will be largely redundant.UX person and haven't read Lean Startup - Read Lean Startup instead. How to apply UX should be a fairly obvious extension of Eric's ideas.Not a UX person but are interested in learning about Lean UX - by all means, this is a good start to appreciate what is needed.Unfortunately, I found most of the ideas very much surface thinking. I am sure these guys made a conscious choice to stay at the surface to appeal to a wider audience, but I wanted deeper understanding of the tradeoffs and obstacles companies will face.Also, I thought their Design Studio concept a pretty average representation of one way to design/innovate. 10 minutes to sketch out six ideas on the spot? There are a lot of ways to generate diverge/converge cycles of ideation and just throwing one out there made it feel as if this was the Lean way.A least they captured their ideas in a book that could be read in one sitting.