Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business

Designers have long relied on heavy documentation to communicate their vision for products and experiences. As technology has made interactions more complex, those deliverables have grown with them. In this talk at UX Lisbon 2014, Jeff Gothelf, author of the book Lean UX, argues that such deliverables have become bottlenecks in the creation process and the opening move in a negotiation with teammates about what could get built and launched.

Lean UX offers an alternative. It opens up the user experience design process with a collaborative approach that involves the entire team. Design ideas are treated as hypotheses and tested early and often, and along the way the team builds a shared understanding that removes the dependency on heavy documentation and difficult hand-offs.

Gothelf presents Lean UX as an answer to the challenge of integrating UX with Agile development, while noting that it also works in traditional waterfall and hybrid environments.