Lean UX Workshop

Hey, my name is Raghavendra Reddy and I am a Software Engineer at Kaplan. I would like to share my experience about a Lean UX workshop held at Kaplan on 1/13/2014 - 1/17/2014, by Jeff Gothelf and Jeff Patton (http://www.leanuxbook.com/).

There were total 11 different teams that participated in this workshop. It was a great learning experience to collaborate, interact with real users, work in cross functional teams, and come up with a shared understanding for working together.

Kaplan adopted Agile methodologies very early, and this workshop helped to make our methodologies even better. Often we build products/applications by making assumptions that these products will solve user problems, and we spend a lot of time and resources in building these applications. This workshop changed the paradigm of how we build the application/products for the current fast changing world.

These are the core ideas behind Lean UX:

1. Empathize: finding the problem statements and new ideas. We do this by observing users using the product, getting their feedback, understanding their pain points, and creating personas.

2. Define: once a problem statement is identified, it's important to define it and have a shared understanding across all the stakeholders. Talk to the personas (real users) and validate your hypotheses.

3. Ideate: at this stage, we know the problem statement and we work on a solution for the problem.

4. Prototype: build a quick prototype.

5. Test: test the prototype with real users.

Testing our assumptions in every step and iterating based on what we learn helped us focus on creating the highest value features for users. By doing this, we reduce the time for getting user feedback, and come up with MVPs (Minimum Viable Product) in the least time and resource usage possible.

"Fail early" is the key for success. Feedback in every step of lifecycle will save significant time and resources.

From the traditional way of building applications, to agile, and then to Lean UX, we are changing a part of our organization culture. I can see the tremendous improvement in the way products are built and tested at Kaplan. People from product, technology, content and design teams were at the table, thinking through the hypothesis and personas, talking to real users, prototyping, and designing. This was a great experience.

Here are few more pictures from the workshop.

I would like to thank everyone for making this event successful. Overall, the Lean UX workshop was a very productive 5 days with many great ideas prototyped, built, and tested.

Reference Books: http://www.leanuxbook.com/

-Raghavendra Reddy Software Engineer