Written by Nguyen Le

What we do as designers

Collectively as designers we try to design solutions and experiences that are beautiful and useful using various tools and techniques. But at the core of what we do is the servicing of user needs and delivering on business objectives. Satisfying these 2 pillars are the benchmarks to our success. Creating beautiful and emotive work is a byproduct of these goals and occur through constant discovery, prototyping and iterations.

Design/Product Teams unite people with various skills and disciplines to complement each other towards a shared vision. Illustrators, developers, researchers, product designers, visual designers etc. As mentioned in last weeks article about what UX design represents. This week I wanted to share an actionable framework that can help you with your next project.

Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf

It is a great framework/canvas created by Jeff Gothelf, the author of LEAN UX – Designing great products with agile teams. Digital product design is a messy and iterative process. In my opinion the best work doesn’t occur in silos, where one team comes up with all the thinking, then one team does wires and then we’ll get the visual designers to make it look good. It’s not as clear cut and checklist focused as that.

But more collaborative and scrappy. It appears through a lot of listening, testing, observing, prototyping and getting feedback loops that are both quantitative and qualitative from a live market and from users. The Lean Canvas allows us to focus on, business problems, business outcomes, users & customers, user benefits and how they intertwine with the business problem and developing a lot of different "solutions" to discuss, prototype and test. 

You can download this on Jeffs site.
You can download this on Jeffs site.

At the end of the day your customers don’t care whether you’re agile, lean or practice design thinking. They care about great products and services that solve meaningful problems for them in effective ways. The more you can focus your teams on these things the better their process
will be.

JEFF GOTHELF

Not in your job description

Depending on your experience and organisational structure this workflow might not be in your “job description”. But thinking holistically about a projects approach and what you are trying to solve, builds key skills and mindset shifts that help you create better work. 

Whether you are starting out or just learning the craft side, take a moment to look through this. Or if you are more experienced and am looking for opportunities to improve and tweak your process and approach, this is a great tool to start delving a bit deeper. And becoming the catalyst for getting various team members on board. It’s a great exercise in bringing clarity for our 2 main pillars of success – business objectives and kick ass user experiences. 

See if you can map this Lean UX canvas to a project you are working on.

Once again this is a tool to springboard ideas and bring clarity to a proejct, it is NOT a guarantee to success or a great design. It allows you to sort many ideas and converge and prototype the best ones. I hope this tool serves you well.