UX For Lean Startups

Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, youll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something theyll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.

No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If youre an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.

• Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it
• Listen to your customers throughout the products lifecycle
• Understand why you should design a test before you design a product
• Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product
• Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves
• Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions
• Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices
• Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality

• Introduction
• What Is Lean UX, Anyway?
• Lean UX Is About Validating Hypotheses
• Lean UX Is User Centered
• Lean UX Is Agile
• Lean UX Is Data Driven
• Lean UX Is Fast and Cheap (Sometimes)
• Lean UX Is Iterative (Always)

1. Validation
1. Early Validation
• A Market, a Problem, and a Product Walk into a Bar
• Validating the Problem
• Validating the Market
• Validating the Product
• Some Tools for Early Validation
• Ethnographic Studies (or, You Know, Listening to Your Users)
• How you can do it right now
• Landing-Page Tests
• How you can do it right now
• Prototype Tests
• How you can do it right now
• Early Validation Isn’t the End
• Loosely Related Rant: Pain-Driven Design
• What Is Pain-Driven Design?
• Is there a clever analogy?
• Does it work before I have a product?
• What if I already have a product?
• What if my product is disruptive?
• What if my customers try to tell me how to fix their problems?
• How will Pain-Driven Design be misinterpreted?
• Go Do This Now!
2. The Right Sort of Research at the Right Time
• Competitor Testing
• Even Your Competitors Make Mistakes
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Five-Second Tests
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Clickable Prototype Testing
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Guerilla User Tests
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Loosely Related Rant: Shut the Hell Up and Other Tips for Getting Feedback
• Shut the Hell Up
• Don’t Give a Guided Tour
• Ask Open-Ended Questions
• Follow Up
• Let the User Fail
• Go Do This Now!
3. Faster User Research
• Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Stay in the Building
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Unmoderated Testing
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• When to Survey
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Loosely Related Rant: Stupid Reasons for Not Doing Research
• Excuse 1: It’s a Design Standard
• Excuse 2: Company X Does It This Way
• Excuse 3: We Don’t Have Time or Money
• Excuse 4: We’re New; We’ll Fix It Later
• Excuse 5: It’s My Vision; Users Will Just Screw It Up
• Excuse 6: It’s Just a Prototype to Get Funding
• Out of Excuses?
• Go Do This Now!
4. Qualitative Research Is Great…Except When It’s Terrible
• A One-Variable Change
• A Multivariable or Flow Change
• Deciding What to Build Next
• Qualitative Approaches
• Quantitative Approaches
• Still Don’t Know Which Approach to Take?
• Loosely Related Rant: If You Build It, Will They Buy It?
• If I Build It, Will They Buy?
• What Questions Can Qualitative Research Answer Well?
• What’s the Best Way to Answer This Question?
• Are There Other Questions You Can’t Answer Qualitatively?
• Go Do This Now!
2.  Design
5. Designing for Validation
• Tool 1: Truly Understand the Problem
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 2: Design the Test First
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 3: Write Some Stories
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 4: Talk About Possible Solutions with the Team
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 5: Make a Decision
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 6: (In)Validate the Approach
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 7: Sketch a Few Approaches
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 8: Create Interactive Prototypes
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Tool 9: Test and Iterate
• When Is It Safe to Skip This?
• Loosely Related Rant: Give the Users What They Really Want
• Ooh! An Example!
• Why this matters
• Go Do This Now!
6. Just Enough Design
• Design the Necessary, Not the Neat
• What You Should Do Instead
• Here’s Another Example
• What They Should Have Done
• Build a Feature Stub
• What Does This Have to Do with Design?
• Build a Wizard of Oz Feature
• Solve Only the Important Problems
• How You Can Do It Right Now
• Loosely Related Rant: Stop Worrying About the Cup Holders
• Visual Design
• Retention Features
• Animations
• Your Feature Here
• Go Do This Now!
7. Design Hacks
• Design Patterns
• Competitive Research
• User Testing the Competition
• Consistency
• Frameworks
• There’s Probably a Plug-in for That
• Don’t Design It at All
• Getting Some Professional Help
• Loosely Related Rant: The Art of the UX Steal
• They May Not Want Exactly What You Want
• They Don’t Do Exactly What You Do
• They Can Get Away with It
• The Right Way to Steal
• Trust but Verify
• Go Do This Now!
8. Diagrams, Sketches, Wireframes, and Prototypes
• Why Diagram?
• What’s It Good For?
• How Can You Make One?
• When Do You Sketch?
• What’s It Good For?
• How Can You Make One?
• What’s a Wireframe, and Why Do You Care?
• What’s It Good For?
• How Can You Make One?
• Do You Have to Make an Interactive Prototype?
• What’s It Good For?
• How Can You Make One?
• So Which Should You Build?
• Should You Make It Pretty?
• Loosely Related Rant: Why I Hate Paper Prototypes
• Screen versus Paper
• Animations and interactions
• Testing exploration
• OK, there are exceptions
• Go Do This Now!
9. An MVP Is Both M & V
• The Landing Page
• The First Iteration
• You’re Not Done Yet
• One More Time!
• Loosely Related Rant: Limited Products versus Crappy Products
• Go Do This Now!
10. The Right Amount of Visual Design
• Why Is Visual Design Important in UX?
• Visuals Enhance Information Design
• Reinforcing Desired User Actions
• Visuals Set the Tone
• Why I Put Off Visual Design
• How Much Visual Design Do YOU Need?
• Using Visual Design to Enhance Usability
• The Smartest Visual Design You Can Do
• What You Should Do Instead
• Why you should do this
• Loosely Related Rant: The Best Visual Design in the World
• Go Do This Now!
3. Product
11. Measure It!
• What Does Measuring Design Entail, Anyway?
• Why Measure Design?
• Several Stupid Reasons for Not A/B Testing (and a Couple of Good Ones)
• It Takes Away the Need for Design
• It’s Useful Only for Small Changes
• It Leads to Local Maxima
• It Leads to a Confused Mess of an Interface
• Design Isn’t About Metrics
• When to A/B Test and When to Research
• What A/B Testing Does Well
• What It Does Poorly
• A Bad Solution
• What Qualitative Testing Does Well
• Find the Best of All Worlds
• Find Out Why Users Are Leaving
• Save Engineering Time and Iterate Faster
• How Do They Work Together?
• Qualitative Testing Narrows Down What You Need to A/B Test
• Qualitative Testing Generates New Ideas for Features and Designs
• A/B Testing Creates a Feedback Loop for Researchers
• Not Sold Yet?
• Which Metrics Equal Happy Users
• Retention
• Revenue
• NPS (Net Promoter Score)
• Conversion to Paying
• Engagement
• Registration
• Customer Service Contacts
• So Which Is It?
• Loosely Related Rant: Stupid Mistakes People Make When Analyzing Data
• Statistical Significance
• The fix
• Short-Term versus Long-Term Effects
• The fix
• Forgetting the Goal of the Metrics
• The fix
• Combining Data from Multiple Tests
• The fix
• Understanding the Significance of Changes
• The fix
• Go Do This Now!
12. Go Faster!
• Work as a Cross-Functional Team
• The Waterfall
• The Cross-Functional Team
• Combine Product and UX Roles
• Avoid Engineering When Possible
• Loosely Related Rant: Ship It Already! Just Not to Everyone at Once
• The Interactive Prototype
• The Opt In
• The Opt Out
• The n% Rollout
• The New User Rollout
• Go Do This Now!
13. The Big Finish

A book that tells you to listen to your customers and make some mockups?

Pretty worthless.