About Part II

In the previous part, we looked at the ideas behind Lean UX—the principles that drive the work. In this section, we’ll get very practical and describe in detail the process of doing Lean UX.

We’ve organized this section around a new tool that we’ve been using for the last few years: the Lean UX Canvas. The Lean UX Canvas is a way to orchestrate your Lean UX process. It offers a single-page “at-a-glance” way of framing your work on a feature, an epic or initiative, or even an entire product.

This single-page tool collects all of the key tools, methods, processes, and techniques of Lean UX into a single document with a unified structure. It’s a tool that you can use to get from the earliest part of the design process—your initial problem framing—through design, prototyping, and research.

Although you don’t have to use the canvas to do Lean UX, we’ve found that the canvas is a great way to explain the process, so we’ve chosen to present the Lean UX process to you by using the canvas.

The Lean UX Canvas

Chapter 4, The Lean UX Canvas, provides an overview of the Lean UX Canvas. You’ll learn why Lean UX is skeptical of requirements, why it embraces assumptions instead, and how the Lean UX Canvas is a vehicle that you can use to capture and test your assumptions. This chapter also introduces some ideas about facilitating the process of working with the canvas.

Chapter 5, Box 1: Business Problem, covers the technique you’ll use to define the problem you and your team are trying to solve from the business’s POV.

Chapter 6, Box 2: Business Outcomes, covers how you define success for your project. This box is all about understanding what outcomes you’re trying to achieve for your business, organization, or clients.

Chapter 7, Box 3: Users, covers the section of the canvas that defines your users (and customers). This section describes the proto-persona technique and how to use it.

Chapter 8, Box 4: User Outcomes and Benefits, is all about user goals. What are your users (and customers) trying to do? What will define success for them?

Chapter 9, Box 5: Solutions, is where we begin to define what we’ll be making (or doing) in order to solve the problems we’ve defined.

Chapter 10, Box 6: Hypotheses, Chapter 11, Box 7: What’s the Most Important Thing We Need to Learn First?, and Chapter 12, Box 8: MVPs and Experiments, cover the bottom third of the canvas, which drives the conversation to find out if we’re right about everything else in the canvas.

Let’s dig into each box and see exactly how each part of this conversation plays out, how to facilitate it successfully, and what to watch out for in each box as you go through the exercises and declare your assumptions.