So what's Agile UX, Design Thinking, and the all other lean stuff?

Agile & Lean Startup: What was the problem with Agile?

Agile was a reaction to the fact that we couldn’t produce software effectively and efficiently. The industry had some hard time addressing the problems with what we called “The waterfall process”.

The problem was clearly that the process of building and producing software was difficult and tedious, and moreover, not successful. And how did we addressed it mainly in Agile? It was simple approach:

• Work iteratively.
• Shorten the feedback cycle.
• Evaluate and repeat. 

And it was a success! Thanks to Agile, the software delivery process has been enhanced, more projects were able to deliver software to market successfully and in more disciplined way.

So? We discovered later that even with successful delivery, more and more software aren’t being used as imagined. We produced and delivered a lot of software, but the users never used it as imagined -or never used it at all.

That was a clear indication for people in industry that it’s not enough to just deliver “Working Software” it’s also important to deliver “Valuable Software”.

To produce something valuable, we needed to know what’s the definition of value for the users, what makes them tick? How can they find their needs addressed in our solutions? How to make sure that users are actually understand our value propositions? These were the types of questions we’re trying to solve by following a “Lean Thinking” process. And we’re going to discover more about lean stuff below.

Are we building the right thing?

The question that lean methodologies try to answer is quite often: Are we building the right thing? 

Lean mindset is about bringing more skepticism to the process of building software, through a human-friendly discovery process. Usually when we’re delivering software, we assume that we’re building the right thing, we understand the user, we know what they want. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.

You need to go outside your backlog frames and find out more about your customers, you need to understand them more, and all of these design activities are brought to Agile development thanks to lean mindset. So, the lean mindset is our way of bringing more of the Product Design practices into the Agile process.

Agile UX?

As we said, Agile was brought into existence to deliver software, but we discovered later that most of the delivered software isn’t the most valuable software. The User eXperience wasn’t that great, and also we knew that UX is complex enough to be different and stand-alone process. So what shall we do?

A bit of discovery every now and then during the feature/software cycle was the form of getting UX specialists in Agile environment. Something like:

Discover a little bit beforehand about the user going to use this feature/software, make sure we understand his motives.

Discover a little bit beforehand about the possible usable solutions we might identify alongside the engineering folks.

Test motivations a little bit before developing anything.

Thinking this way, makes the whole process more “User-Centered” in a way the helps everyone understands what they’re building and why.

Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is another term to describe the “User-Centered” approach we talked about, but in more details and more techniques of how actually use UX in Agile environment. I wrote once about the use of Design Thinking in actual day-to-day activity called “Design Sprint”.

Lean Thinking?

I guess it’s more clear now what this term “Lean” means. It means creating a focus about single event, tackling this event, and evaluate the results to make the next events more optimally tackled.

Lean thinking was a great advance to Agile community to solve the valuable software paradoxy that many teams faced before.

Have a lean time.