Part III. Collaboration
It’s Tuesday, and Rick, Mark, Olga, and Arti are standing at the whiteboard, looking at a wireframe that they’ve drawn. Arti, the designer, has a marker in her hand, but she’s not drawing. “Rick, I don’t understand what you’re driving at. Can you explain the problem?” she asks.
Rick takes the marker, wipes clear a section of the board, and explains the regulation, again. The team is designing an app for stock traders, and the app must obey a strict set of regulations. Rick, the business analyst, is responsible for making sure that the team’s designs support the rules.
After a while, the team is nodding, and Arti takes the marker again. She suggests a change to the wireframe design of the app on the board, and the team nods again. They all take out their iPhones, take photos of the board, and agree to reconvene the next day. They’re confident that what they’ve agreed on will be ready for user testing on Thursday.
Arti goes back to her desk to begin detailing out the design they’ve sketched. Mark, the frontend developer, begins building the page—he uses components from the Design System the team has built, so he doesn’t need to wait for Arti before getting the basic pieces in place. Rick opens the project’s wiki page and begins to document the decisions the team has made about the application’s behavior. He’ll review these choices with the product owner later in the day. And Olga, the QA tester, begins the process of writing tests for the new section of the app.
This is the day-to-day rhythm of Lean UX: a team working collaboratively, iteratively, and in parallel, with few handoffs, minimal deliverables, and a focus on working software and market feedback. In this section, you’ll see how it’s done.
About Part III
In the previous part, we looked at the ideas behind Lean UX—the principles that drive the work. In this section, we get very practical and describe in detail the process of doing Lean UX.
The Lean UX Process
Chapter 14, Collaborative Design, is about one of the major elements of Lean UX—the way it encourages cross-functional collaboration. It encourages designers to work with their nondesign colleagues to create the best possible products. This chapter will talk about some of the most important ways that we do that.
Chapter 15, Feedback and Research, is about how Lean UX advocates continuous research and collaborative research. This can feel like a change for a lot of teams, so we discuss some of the key things you’ll need to know here.
Chapter 16, Integrating Lean UX and Agile, is all about how Lean UX and Agile methods work together. Agile is one of the foundational pillars of Lean UX. Lean UX was born from a need to work with Agile software development teams—a struggle many designers face on a daily basis. This chapter will help you navigate.