Designers have long relied on heavy documentation to communicate their
vision for products and experiences. As technology has evolved to
offer more complex and intricate interactions, the deliverables we’ve
been creating have followed suit. Ultimately though, these
deliverables have come to serve as bottlenecks to the creation process
and as the beginning of the negotiation process with our team mates —
a starting point for conversation on what could get built and
launched.
Lean UX aims to open up the user experience design process with a
collaborative approach that involves the entire team. It’s a
hypothesis-based design approach that tests design ideas early and
often and, along the way, builds a shared understanding with our team
mates that eliminates the dependencies on heavy documentation and
challenging communications. Lean UX is a solution for the challenge of
Agile and UX integration while it also works effectively in
traditional waterfall and other hybrid environments.