Another chatty post from the coal face. Rather serendipitously I came across this blog post whilst looking for the very famous tree swing problem. Which is a great internet meme/illustration of how your deliverables go wrong.

Anyway the article was actually about lean UX. I’m not sure how many of you are aware of lean development processes but its like the little brother of agile. So its something web development shops such as made by many talk alot about. I don’t know alot about lean and I probably need to learn a bit more. But according to wikipedia one of its strands is ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Well thats what we are trying to do.

Also as I have been in almost continous workshops since this project started I can’t tell you what fun it is and how constructive it is to chew ideas over. How we manage to talk so little during the regular seren design day is amazing.

The workshops have been really flat and level (no hierarchy) with every one contributing. Which isn’t difficult as the clients know so much more than we do. So I was thinking it was going to be all flows and wire frames. But its been much more its looking like the sketches of wire frames/pages/ideas/blueprints which areannotated as we try and document our thoughts. This feels more like sketchboards. So as the wire frames take shape its becoming really important to break out notes for the key sections and annotate key experiences in the design. I think in classic wire framing you try and do examples of all the iterations. Here a few words may save a thousand pictures.

Also the flows and the swim lanes have pretty much lost all their rigid structure and become really fluid. So the flows are becoming more customer journey centered and any technology is going to be sorted out. Which is funny because all the people advocating this are product managers who only know about the technology. Hopefully we are beginning to understand the customer journeys. I’m reminded alot of a post I saw a while ago by some chap called Jason Furnell on collaborative design workshops. He also references this adaptive path sketchboards thing.

Still the way I think this might be working is that everything is being considered in the round. Its sharing ownership of the UX. Seren isn’t leading it. We have just prompted the client a bit and all this ux common sense has poured out of them. So it feels like we are all sharing ownership of UX.

So anyway I notice that made by many also have a post on their blog about lean UX so maybe theres a bit of a trend developing on the web. But this is the presentation that got me thinking in the first place.

What I really like about it was the slide about reducing deliverables. Because hopefully at the end of this we’ll deliver the client twelve wireframes and six key flows with some notes, and some lovely mock ups of the design.

When we started not every one had the same level of knowledge. But now they do. So all the designer contribute equally that builds up quicker iterations. So you build momentum. Which is very important.

So last time I worried about being Mr Bumpy but I think its working like Mr Rush (bit too quickly) but hopefully delivering like Mr Skinny (lean).