R&R
A Lean UX Project
Jalen Battle
Keya Mehta
Natalia Navaroli
Anneli Nurmi
This was a school project for my IAD4000: Interaction Design II class at KSU. This class and more importantly this project focused on learning and implementing the agile design mythology lean UX including topics like scrum and assumptions.
Our team leader Keya Mehta propose the problem space of sustainable shopping and after brainstorming and researching our team came up wiith R&R. A unique platform for students to locally buy and sell used clothing with a mobile application as well as local kiosks around campus.
R&R : resell and reuse is a used clothing platform that allows users to buy and sell used and recycled clothing. This app exist not only to provide a cheap clothing option for students but a more sustainable option for people that just want a few things to wear that they don't have to worry about.
The whole reason behind this product this platform is because if you're a student, a lot of times you start the new year and you want to find a new outfit to wear. The main thing is you want something that's not just a fast fashion trend somthing durable but cheap because if you know students you know we don't have that much money. So the issue that we wanted to solve is a way to incentivize people to buy sustainable clothing whether it be used or recycled that's also cheap and easy to find. Enter our product R&R a used shopping platform with companion kiosks to easily integrate into the busy lives of college students.
Lean UX is a design methodology around design thinking, agile/scrum, and lean startup. The main idea of Lean UX is to bring the true nature of the product to form faster while building a shared understanding of the user and their needs. One of the big things that Lean UX pushes for is continuous learning throughout the entirety of the design process.
Removing waste - removing unnecessary documentation and Note keeping Not building things that don’t have value by focusing on MVP (minimum viable products) (define that here)
Lean UX starts with assumptions (educated guesses you make about the user and product that you will verify and deem accurate throughout the process
Iteration process (No phases) Work in small batches to mitigate risk – Embrace continuous discovery - Permission to fail
So this process starts with us beginning to fill out the Lean UX canvas.To reiterate Lean UX starts on the basis of assumptions that turn into requirements.
Better put by Gothelf & Seiden from Lean UX (3rd edition) “We need to recognize that most requirements are simply assumptions expressed with authority. If we remove the authority, overconfidence, and arrogance from the conversation, we’re left with someone’s best guess about how to best achieve a user goal or solve a business problem.”(Chapter 4) That being said it's our job as designers to put to the table assumptions about the user and the product and then go on to solve those things.
The Lean UX canvas is a series of exercises that allow teams to declare their assumptions about an initiative. It’s designed to facilitate conversations within the team but also with stakeholders, clients, and other colleagues.
Without going into major detail about everything on this canvas the main takeaways from this week were that we as a team filled out first six or so boxes of the UX canvas. This included going over the business problem, solutions to those problems, outcomes of said business solutions, who are users are which included things like proto personas, user outcomes, and finally combined assumptions that unify all the previous statements into a cohesive table.
This week in Sprint one our team focused on completing the last two boxes of the Lean UX canvas including our hypothesis table which is a list of our hypothesis and assumptionsthat we think is most important to solve first. Then finally box 8 our MVPS and experiments. Which in our situation was basically our hypothesis table but with an extra section that explains how we will design and measure our assumptions to see if we are correct or not.
The fun part starts where we actually start getting into the creation of our MVPS, experiments, actual solutions. From this point on communication with our team was basically every day. Our team held two day stand up meetings which went over what we needed to be completed and tests we have completed three times a week meeting online and in person.This week we tested our riskiest and most important assumption, continuous user engagement. The whole backbone of our platform revolved around the idea that users would get a notification on their phone to buy items and then pick up set items at a local kiosk. So our experiment / MVP was a scavenger hunt where we would get a small group of users to participate in a pseudo contest where we would notify them at random point throughout the day that there was a item that they wanted. In this case, a bag of candy located somewhere around campus that they had to go pick up.
This gave us useful insight of how users responded to multiple notifications throughout the day, how many notifications were annoying, if they even looked at them, and were users even willing to roam around campus to fine this item. Just a quick side note with lean UX the MVP doesn't have to be a prototype or high fidelity application. it can be as simple user survey or in our case of scavenger hunt that provides us with feedback on how users will react to systems are our product will what use.
This week is a bit more traditional and thankfully not as chaotic. This week was more of a refinement on the last with a few new things. We created a low fidelity prototype where users would have to navigate a map to find the location of our hypothetical kiosks around campus. While being a more traditional MVP this one still gave us great insight on how users would navigate key features of our application as well as give us a better direction on what users actually wanted out of our idea.This would allow us to become more flexible and pivot a slightly different direction towards the next sprint.
Now remember when I mentioned we were going to start pivoting a bit towards the end of last sprint well here's where we start making a few more pivots and start focusing on a tighter problem.
This week was a bit of refinement more or less on our entire canvas. That's the thing with learn UX everything of it can just change like that because you work in such small batches you can easily drop a week’s worth of work and start in a different direction. Its a part of the process and not that hard to do with this methodology. It's a fundamental reason of why people use it that was stated by Gothelf & Seiden from Lean UX (3rd edition).” Another fundamental from Lean manufacturing is the practice of dividing work into small units or batches… every project begins with assumptions. Large-batch design begins with those untested assumptions and creates a lot of design work on top of them. This means that if we find out that a foundational assumption is wrong, we must throw away a lot of work. By working in smaller batches, we can design and validate our decisions as we go, which reduces the risk of wasted work.”( chapter 2)
Good thing for us this wasn't anything that we didn't already kind of see through the first batch of user testing.It was mainly just reiterating what we're gonna focus on as a group in terms of user benfifts and outcomes. Rearrange the hypothesis table to better focus on the goal for Sprint 2 and adjusting our proto persona with a few minor changes to better reflect who we had been interviewing.Basically the goal of Sprint 2 was to focus on the buyer's experience of buying something on the app as we deemed focusing on the seller wasn't a big priority for many of our users through user testing and wasn't gonna reinvent for the scope of the project.
Week two in the nutshell was testing if our kiosk idea would work or not. Would users be interested in traveling around campus to use a kiosk to pick up items that they bought from a app?
The MVP of this week was our prototype of our kiosk companion application that would run on tablets or bigger screens around campus as well as our user testing in which our group went around campus running user test on the fly. In these user tests we asked students to use our current prototype to order an item and then walk a little bit around campus to a kiosk location where they would then pick up there item.
Personally this was the highlight of this entire project for me. Being able to be on the field and interview users, see their thought process and how they interacted with our design gave us so much insight and information that we couldn't even of predict. Users brought up many questions about general UX struggles which was fine but also external things like security and how the system would physically work. Overall though this week saw lots of user interviews and real world testing that allowed use to really refine our prototype.
Week three was just further UI refinement from last where the main goal of was to get a few more user interviews to really refine changes that we made to our prototype and put together a cohesive final product. The main form of the app with all of its different features really took shape here as well as the kiosk interface and how it would be integrated in. While not as action-packed as the last few weeks the main idea of this was just refinement and revising what we already built upon.
To kind of elaborate on the challenges and how we overcame them communication was KEY. It was hard at times because of external factors and other classes but our group meet every other day, which took a toll on us towards the end of the project. That being said, communicating with your team and being able to be flexible whether that's meeting in person or online to better fit others needs is crucial.
Even though the Lean UX process takes out a lot of the pointless and mundane documentation and note keeping you have to do you still have to be organized in the work and notes you DO take because everything you write down or note down has value. Especially when you have multiple people working on the same canvas or whiteboard, staying organized is extremely important.
Finally one of the big things I learned was to not stay married to an idea even if you shared it with your team and a lot of people liked it. Because a few user interviews later and a few different perspectives later, it could be in the trash. Not because it's a bad idea or anything its just your product naturally goes into another direction based off of user research and interviews or maybe their business restraints that limit scope. Thankfully the Lean UX methodology accounts for this and as long as you stay on top of it the products you get out of it are Top notch!
Lean UX is more involved then other design possess but faster.
Lean UX is nonlinear and a little hard to follow without strong communication
Lean UX more flexible and allows for change in ideas in chaotic markets.
Finally and most importantly Lean UX is another tool for designers including myself to use to better understand users and business needs.
