Lean UX for Startups (Book Review)

I recently received a review copy of another book in Eric Reis's Lean series, UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design. In this book, with a lively, if somewhat irreverent, tone, Laura Klein guides you through the process of using UX as a gateway into finding a market and eventually, success. This book has pragmatic advice on what to do and how to do it now, and more importantly, what not to spend time on. Not just a concept book, this book discusses tools and detailed approaches. Klein addresses many of the concerns people might have about "skipping steps" in order to be lean, and explains the both the challenges and benefits of a lean approach to UX design. The author discusses how UX fits into an agile startup environment.

This book shares some of the irreverant tone of another book geared to people starting a business: The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field. The author's tone takes a bit of getting used to, but the advice is good, and actionable, and the style of the writing emphasizes the "just do it" theme of the book.

UX For Lean Startups has a slightly different audience than the earlier, similarly titled book Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience. Looking at the books, it's a bit unclear which one to read. As it happens, Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience is more about how to apply Lean Principles to UX design, with an eye toward migrating from a non-iterative UX process to a more iterative, lean, agile process. That book seemed to be geared more towards UX professionals, though anyone who touches UX could benefit from it. Lean UX for Startups addresses the needs of entrepreneurs and members of a startup who want to have a good UX, but can't waste a lot of time and effors on it. I'd reccommend that either individual get both books. But if you are building a startup, this one will give you the most actionable advice quickly.

You can benefit from reading both books. If you want to read one on UX, you might get more out of the Lean UX book. And Maybe read Lean Startup or perhaps the Pumpkin Plan. This book will add information so it is worth a read. The 4 books I mentioned would be a good addition to the library of anyone who is starting a business and wants to deliver value quickly.

Lean User Experience: Using UX on an Agile Project

User Experience is a discipline that has a strange relationship with Agile. On the one hand, traditional UX work involves research, testing, and other steps that seem inconsistent with working in the context of an agile project. It also seems to be a discipline where practitioner often seem to be committed to a Big Design Up Front approach, which is inconsistent with Agile. On the other hand, getting the user experience right seems like an essential part of delivering value. The book Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience explains how UX work integrates with agile.

The book combines the themes of The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (including MVP: Minimum Viable Product) with those of user experience and agile methods like Scrum, in a concise, book that can serve both as a quick overview of the concepts which you can read in one or two sittings, as well as a reference for how to apply the process on your team.

This book has stories, templates, guidelines to help you both use User Experience Design in an agile team as well as to use User Experience to help your agile team do a better job of building the right thing. Much of what you'll read will strike you as "common sense," which, sadly, does not translate to common practice in many organizations.

This is a rare book that is information dense, yet which does not allow that information density to compromise readability. The viability of the book as a reference compensates for the one flaw I see in it's presentation of the principles of Lean UX: there are too many principles.

The book starts with a list of 15 (related) principles of Lean UX, which is far more than most people can keep in their head, making it harder to both sell and internalize the ideas. I understand that there is a lot to do to implement Lean UX, but I can't help think there must be a way to distill the 15 principles into 5-7 key ones which incorporate the spirit of the whole set. This may sound like a petty detail, but I suspect that it would be hard for someone not as versed in the concepts as the authors to sell the concept based on those 15. If you can't sell an idea, it is that much harder to break down opposition to it.
The concrete, concise way the authors describe how to implement Lean UX in various environments compensates for this, but since the book started out with an overview of principles, I was initially concerned about how the rest of the book would go. It is worth pushing past the principles section to learn the value of Lean UX, and techniques to use it effectively.

The book will be useful to managers, UX designers and developers and anyone wondering how UX can work in an agile environment. Since user experience is such a central part of the product definition it will also be useful to anyone who simply wants a better understanding of agile product development.

(Note: This review was based on a review copy of the book.)