From time to time, we revive our in-house book club to catch up on new themes, practices, or ideas out there in the design world. This month, we're reading Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience, written by Jeff Gothelf and ex-Cooperista Josh Seiden. Inspired by Eric Ries's The Lean Startup, Lean UX takes aim at waterfall design and development processes and outlines a set of ways that UX designers can more deeply and helpfully engage in product development. The intent is to foster more open, collaborative, and iterative processes, and to break through the organizational red tape that can stifle creativity. The end goals: More trust, more clarity, more fun, and better products delivered quickly by a highly-functioning team. Managing Director Doug LeMoine caught up with Jeff and Josh to discuss the ways in which lean practices can superpower our (and your) UX work.

Doug: UX, as it is commonly practiced, is all about establishing a coherent vision for a product or service. Oftentimes, in striving for coherence, designers can slam the brakes on development, since no one wants to waste effort in developing something that's not part of that coherent vision. What is to be done with this state of affairs? How does Lean UX help here?

Josh: I do think establishing a vision up front is important. But I think that we often mistake how much work we need to do to establish and articulate that vision. If you’re working in deep collaboration with a cross-functional team, you can establish, test, and validate a vision very quickly. So, instead of “slamming the brakes on developers,” we advocating including them and other team members in the visioning activities early in the project.

The risk with design-centric early “vision” activities is that the work done in the vision phase frequently goes beyond “vision.” Sometimes, in order to communicate a vision to outsiders, you need to articulate the vision with a level of detail that can create problems, because those details, while important to the communication, are not actually important to the vision. The risk is that these explanatory details get misunderstood later--and they start to cross over into requirement and specification. That’s risky, because as you start to elaborate on the vision, you need to continue to validate those elaborations--but too often we build up a backlog of untested decisions.

The Lean UX approach is well articulated by our colleague Giff Contstable, who says, “Lead with vision, then test ruthlessly.”

Jeff: One of the myths Lean UX helps dispel is that only designers have vision. In fact, every member of your product development team has something to contribute to the problem being solved. Including everyone from the beginning builds their points of view into the process. In addition, the feelings of inclusion and buy-in gained by including everyone translate into a much healthier and productive team environment.

Doug: This makes sense to me. You want to communicate a vision with enough detail to give it shape, but not so much that the detail distracts from the big picture ideas. So let me ask what may sound like the same question in a different way: How should designers contribute to a product vision? And how will they know when they've arrived at enough detail?

Josh: I think you need to step back and consider the point of the vision work. Who needs to share the vision? Why? In general, I’ve moved to collaborative “visioning” in which the designer facilitates the vision from the team and stakeholders. The designer can still form and express the vision, but it needs to represent a shared concept. In terms of detail, um... 42? I think you’re sensing for evidence of alignment across the team and stakeholders.

Doug: Josh, you have a design background. How do Lean UX methods or techniques help you achieve your objectives as a designer?

Josh: I want my work to create a change in the world. A bad outcome for me is to create a deliverable filled with wonderful ideas that sits on a client shelf for 5 years. A good outcome is when my work helps create a product that achieves a goal for my client. Lean UX uses a variety of tactics to orient design work around outcomes. We recommend that teams consider not just the outputs they create (the deliverables, web pages, apps, and other things we make) but the outcomes of the work: the new user behaviors the work enables and the results those behaviors have on the business or organization that hired you.

Jeff: Designers should facilitate the team’s journey towards realizing the vision. By bringing concepts familiar to designers, like brainstorming, empathy for the user and basic sketching exercises, to the non-designers on the team, designers are steering the team through multiple validation loops for their visions. In the process they are creating empathy not just for their customers but for the design practice as well.

Doug: Have you had success with any specific mechanisms for achieving this shift in focus from output to outcomes? I'm not asking after a magic bullet, but more wondering about techniques you've used that help you capture the right level of design, facilitate a focus on perhaps less spreadsheetable things, and remove the crutch of milestone deliverables.

Josh: This is certainly easier to do for internal teams than for consultants, where the contractual relationship is typically defined around deliverables. The basic mechanism for shifting this: "time and materials" to "contracts and trust."

Doug: Jeff talked about “getting out of the deliverables business” in his Smashing Magazine article. So … What business are you getting into with Lean UX? Is there a buzzy way to encapsulate that?

Jeff: We focus the teams we work with on a specific, measurable key performance indicator (KPI) they’d like to move. This KPI can be an indicator of a greater impact on the whole eco-system but we don’t task the teams with affecting that higher-level impact. For example, we may ask a team to focus on reducing shopping cart abandon rates. This is a specific outcome that can be measured. It happens to affect revenue -- but it’s not the only KPI that does that so we don’t task the team with impacting revenue. We want their work to be directly measurable so the team can react to these changes.

I suppose that if you’re getting out of the deliverables business (and we all should be) then yes, we should be getting into the outcomes business.

Doug: How do you ensure that you’re not throwing out the good stuff that (hopefully) gets baked into those deliverables – ie, the vision, the forest-level thinking?

Josh: First of all, the deliverable is not the thinking. It’s a record of the thinking and an attempt to share that thinking. But the best way to share the thinking is to do it together with another human in the first place. So our first recommendation is always to create collaborations that allow teams to create shared understanding.

We don’t advocate throwing away deliverables entirely though. Our friend Lane Halley (another former Cooperista) talks about the difference between leading documentation and trailing documentation. Leading documentation tells people what to do. It’s a spec, a requirements book. We try to get rid of those, and replace them with conversation and collaboration. Trailing documentation is a record of what you’ve done and decided. It helps the team go back and recall what you’ve done and why. We advocate in favor of these documents because they help the team keep a record of their decisions.

Jeff: We advise the teams we work with to come up with a hypothesis backlog instead of a product roadmap. A hypothesis backlog is a prioritized list of ideas the team has come up with and wants to validate. Prioritization is often done using risk as the primary delineator and, as each idea is proven or disproven, the team moves its way through the backlog of untested ideas. This way, none of the good thinking is thrown out or forgotten.

Doug: Are there simple steps to begin implementing lean techniques within an in-house product team?

Josh: What we’ve observed is that the grass-roots approach can work if you start small and build on your wins. Start by reducing the formality of your deliverables and instead have more frequent collaborations. Grab a colleague and sketch together. Work with stakeholders to reframe your projects around outcomes. Set up weekly user test sessions. And get our book, which is filled with very practical descriptions of tactics you can use to get started.

Jeff Gothelf has spent a 14 year career as an interaction designer, Agile practitioner, user experience team leader and blogger. He is one of the leading voices on the topic of Agile UX and Lean UX. Jeff is a Managing Director in the New York City office of Neo.

Josh Seiden has been creating great technology products for more than 20 years. As a designer and leader, Josh has worked in hardware and software, consumer and enterprise, mobile, web, and desktop. He is currently a Managing Director in Neo’s NYC office. Earlier, he was head of product design at Wall Street innovator Liquidnet, and lead pioneering interaction design teams at Cooper. He is a founder and past President of the Interaction Design Association.

The Cooper Parlor is a gathering of designers and design-minded people to exchange ideas around a specific topic. We aim to cultivate conversation that instigates, surprises, entertains, and most importantly, broadens our community’s collective knowledge and perspective about the potential for design.

Upcoming Salon: WTF, Evolution? Designing for Unnatural Selection

Moderator: Zak Brazen, Creative Strategist, Brazenworks
Cost: $10
When: Thursday, May 23rd from 6:30-8:30 (doors open at 6)
Where: Cooper Offices, 85 2nd St, 8th Floor, San Francisco, CA
Get your tickets here.

Like it or not, the sixth wave of extinction is upon us. By the end of the century nearly 50% of all species on the planet will be gone. Most will perish simply because they do not have enough time to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. But what if there were gadgets (or services) that would help plants and animals transcend time and make the evolutionary leap? What if there was a Whole Earth Catalog for the non- human among us (eat your heart out, Stewart Brand)?

In this seriously tongue-in-cheek Parlor, Creative Strategist Zak Brazen, of Brazenworks Design and Ingenuity Lab, will explore design opportunities for the near future, when plants and animals are your clients. Parlor participants will imagine, prototype and design tools, gadgets and services that give plants and animals the resources they need to cope with climate change in real time.

Disruptive? To say the least.

Save your spot now, before these seats become extinct.

Related Reading

• Curious what the Parlor is like? Check out this video of  "What Good is a Screen?" A workshop and talk about designing no UI solutions with Don Norman and Golden Krishna.
• Stay in touch about future Parlors, sign up here.

According to popular belief, radio is dead.

It’s not; it’s just taking a different form. Instead of families gathering around a radio to hear the nightly news, people are staying informed by listening to the “All Things Considered” podcast or following Fareed Zakaria on Twitter.

So how does a radio program make the transition from on-air to online and define their role as journalists in the digital age? And how can designers influence how radio content is generated, shared, and consumed?

In the June UX Boot Camp, through experimentation and exploration, participants will redesign how listeners interact with radio content. They’ll conduct this examination through a radio program you may have heard on your local public radio station: Marketplace Money.

American Public Media’s Marketplace Money is a weekly public radio program airing locally on KQED that looks at matters of personal finance with wit and wisdom. UX Boot Camp participants will use this show as a case study to transform the experience of radio by giving listeners and broadcasters new tools and interactive roles to explore a topic that touches everyone – money.

Sound like a challenge you want to solve? Save your spot now.

About the UX Boot Camp

The UX Boot Camp is an opportunity for designers, developers, and project managers with some interaction design experience to take their skills to the next level. Guided by industry experts, you’ll gain the toolkit for solving interaction design challenges while working on a real-world project for a non-profit. Curious about what the UX Boot Camp is really like? Don't take our word for it – hear what the students had to say about it themselves.

Inside Cooper's UX Boot Camp from Cooper on Vimeo.

Over the course of four days, you’ll take a deep dive into Cooper’s approach to design. You’ll learn to understand the problem through observations and questioning, and create design solutions that delight users. By immersing yourself in design, you’ll learn how to approach and solve problems like a designer, instead of applying methods by rote. Learn more about the Cooper teaching method in this article by UX Boot Camp creator Kendra Shimmell.

What’s in it for you:

• Revolutionize the way a public radio show interacts with its listeners.
• Build your interaction design toolkit with new methods and techniques.
• Beef up your portfolio.
• Meet and work with an international group of designers, developers and product managers.
• Immerse yourself in interaction design working on a real world problem.

Want to design the future of radio?

Join us in San Francisco, June 11-14 for the UX Boot Camp: Marketplace Money. Register now.

Radio Vintage photo via Flickr

“Is that really going to be enough people?”

When the topic of user research comes up with a new client, they're often surprised by the small number of users we want to speak to. It’s important that designers and others involved in the design process understand research methodologies and can articulate the value we get from speaking to a small number of users.

Quantitative research involves large sample sizes of participants (think thousands) and is concerned with answering questions about how much, how often, and how many. Quantitative studies can be used to understand how often people spend doing certain activity, the size of a potential market, typical demographics, and user preferences. This research usually takes the form of surveys, web analytics, and other machine-gathered information. Quantitative research is good at helping us understand more about what we already think we know. Quantitative research isn't good at uncovering motivations, goals, or getting a high-level understanding of the people that will use a product or service.

User research at a call center.

Qualitative research on the other hand usually involves a small sample size (think dozens) and is concerned with understanding how people behave, how they think about certain activities, and what factors affect their behavior and thought patterns. This research takes the form of individual interviews in the context or setting where the product would be used (e.g. at the desk, in the car, etc.). The context or setting is important so we can observe what people do instead of what they say they do. Qualitative research is really good at helping us understand things we don’t already know.

At Cooper, we make use of both kinds of research. Most of our projects start with qualitative user research in order to build empathy and gain insight into the context in which the product or service will be used. This is particularly important when we're designing for unfamiliar and complex domains, but is useful for consumer products as well. This is very different from usability or user testing, which typically takes place after design in order to observe people using the product.

We do qualitative design research because qualitative techniques are better at revealing information that designers need: the how and why behind people's behaviors. These high-level insights help us frame design solutions around what really matters to our users and enables us to think of new and novel ways to address problems that may not be explicitly defined. Since qualitative research relies on small sample sizes, research can be performed and synthesized in a relatively short period of time at lower cost. Qualitative techniques also allow design researchers (at Cooper: interaction and visual designers) to be nimble and change the approach to get the information they need. After qualitative research we develop personas that can be used to vet our design ideas and solutions.

Throughout the workday, we are immersed in a chorus of snaps, taps, squeaks, dribbles, drops and pops. These ambient sounds (and not so ambient from the guy who blasts death metal all day) play an important role in our design practice. Sound can be a muse or a distraction, but it’s always an influencer—of your mood, your process, and your outcomes.

Have you ever thought about the sounds that surround you at work? Ever wondered what story your workplace tells about you and your culture? Share the story of your design studio by recording the little (and not so little) sounds that make up your design practice, and help us create an artifact that tells the larger story of design. Each recording we receive will be uploaded onto the Sounds of Design audio stream adding to the first soundscape of design.

Here’s how you can get started:

1. Find the subject you want to record
2. Open up your smartphone or tablet's home screen
3. Find and Open Voice Memos app (should be available on iPhone 4S, 5 and Android Galaxy III)
   • If you don’t already have a voice memos app, you can download any of the following for free on Android (Voice Recorder) or on iPhone or iPad for $.99 (Audio Memos)
4. In Voice Memos (or other recording app) press red recording button to start recording
5. Record your desired sound for up to 30 seconds. Hit the stop button to end recording
6. On the same screen, tap 3 lined “listen” button to hear your recording

For iOS users

1. Highlight your track and tap the blue share button
2. Select email and send the track to sound@cooper.com
3. Please include your name, audio subject, company and location in the body of the email

For Android users

1. Exit the voice memos application and open email app
2. Tap add attachment, then audio, and then select your track
3. Send your track to sound@cooper.com
4. Please include your name, subject of recording, company and location in the body of the email

Your contribution might bring you to Cooper! Each submission will enter you in drawing to win a seat at the next Cooper UX Boot Camp, partnering with public radio’s Marketplace Money.

Learn more about the UX Boot Camp: Marketplace Money, which focuses on designing the future of public radio

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Fair Trade USA enables sustainable development and community empowerment by cultivating a more equitable global trade model through certifying and promoting Fair Trade products. Their work benefits everyone from farmers and workers to consumers, industry and the environment, and yet only 20-30 percent of Americans even know what Fair Trade means. Why? The issues are complex, but as students dug into this problem they identified key factors behind this disconnect, including a lack of brand awareness of the business case for Fair Trade, low brand adoption, and limited Fair Trade product presence in stores.

From those explorations, the following goals emerged:

• Motivate and inspire brands to adopt and evangelize Fair Trade practices.
• Put more Fair Trade products in front of consumers.
• Build “pop culture” awareness of Fair Trade to get more brands to buy into the movement.

To get there, student teams went beyond the initial concept of a website redesign and took on the bigger questions that lead to business transformation. For a look behind the scenes as the teams approached this challenge, check out the following video filmed during the Fair Trade USA Boot Camp, and read more to take a look at the Fair Trade USA ecosystem model and what the students came up with in the pitch decks that follow.

The Fair Trade USA Ecosystem

Student Pitches at the Fair Trade USA Boot Camp

Team Money Talks

Heather Samarin, Jiazhen Wang, Kurtis Beavers, Luis Altuna Azpeitia, Virginia Steiner, Anna Smalley

This assessment tool for business leaders helps them project how use of Fair Trade certified products would impact long-term viability of their particular supply chain and, ultimately, their bottom line.  This concept includes the ability to download a custom presentation that helps them make the business case for Fair Trade back in their organizations.

Team Media Matters

David Elgas, Edward Chong, Mary McDonald, Marina Primakina, Jamie Viviano, Paula Wegman

This Media Resource Center turns Fair Trade USA into an invaluable resource to media, helping them spread the Fair Trade movement on the organization’s behalf. The tool would provide up-to-date information, point-of-view pieces, and data on Human Rights issues, as well as direct access to people impacted by social issues (e.g.: farmers) for interviews.

Team McSheep

Grant Baker, Kate Chadd, Brian McGee, Chinmay Panchal, Priya Premkumar, Amy Tsao

This tool provides business users with a customized roadmap for sustainable growth and positions Fair Trade USA as a valued partner in that process. Once business users identify brands that have successfully scaled through Fair Trade certification that they would like to model their growth after, they receive a roadmap based on that success story and a Fair-Trade sponsored advisor to provide them with personalized assistance along the way.

Team Brandaid

Deb Dennis, Daniel Kalick, Rabia Karatela, John Situ, Nate Smith

This virtual “Farmers Market” highlights Fair Trade USA’s expertise across many industries (coffee, cocoa, tea, etc.) by offering an interactive, exploratory way to learn about specific product categories. Retailers, for example, can visit the market to learn the story of a particular coffee bean: the growing process, the effects of that process on flavor, and even the family that runs a particular farm.

Team Ransak

Rachel Duprey, Shandin Harper, Ariel Morejon, Ander Arizaleta Roa, Nathan Sinsabaugh, Kathleen Watson

This Fair Trade USA Mentorship Program connects businesses with a network of people that have industry-specific expertise (e.g. coffee supply chain) and experience becoming a Fair Trade USA certified business. These mentors offer guidance and share ways that Fair Trade USA can be a useful business resource while building their own personal brands within the business community.

Thank you Students and Fair Trade USA!

Interested in participating in the next UX Boot Camp?

Join us in San Francisco June 11-14 to explore and design the future of radio. More details here.

The digital master of process

From Lean UX to continuous integration, our processes for generating new ideas are increasingly driven by analytics and usage stats. What allows us to navigate the murky waters of uncertain custom resonance is the intangible skill of vision making; visions that exist only in pixels. Rather than capturing value through physical objects, we're gaining premium prices for services, and, increasingly, experiences. But there's also a dark-side to the disruption spurred by the collusion of design and technology.

Working "lean, quick, and dirty" is increasingly expected from the design team. The popular philosophy of the moment sounds like: fast to market, faster to fail, faster to learn. Design needs to adapt to the speed of software. Here, Ross Snyder lead us through the process of continuous deployment that Etsy uses to push new changes live every day. What that means for designers is a need to work within these types of  agile processes, and as we heard at SXSW, that means Lean UX.

We've got to provide visions that last beyond the next device, and understand goals that span technological boundaries. In design, we sit in the middle of two powerful forces for building visions: user research and new technology. Astro Teller spoke about the "moon-shot thinking" applied at Google X. Counter to the quick market launch philosophy of Lean UX, Teller encourages us to push our expectations of what's possible. The space elevator, the automated car, google glass -- these are visions, only some of which get implemented. Vision-making and perspective-shifting should be part of our vernacular as designers.

With business models abounding, the value of design is increasingly realized through services. In software, we've seen a move from client-based software sold by the unit, to server/web-based platforms sold by the seat, to an AppStore model of software of free-to-play-with paid upgrades. Importantly, we no longer sell software, we sell experiences facilitated in part by software. Physical objects will become a cheap and readily available part of that experience. The amount of swag I walked away from at SXSW made me wonder whether the internet will end up subsidizing all our material belongings.

The PC is dead; people are nursing their smartphones, and now glass is likely to disrupt our habits once again. The most stimulating talk of the week was by science fiction author and veteran of SXSW: Bruce Sterling. His musings on disruption challenged the notion that technology is putting us in a better place. As such he encouraged us to own up to and embrace the destruction that comes in the wake of technological change. The age of making a great product, then selling it with continuing minor upgrades, is nearing an end.

To kill and eat it is vicious but honorable.
–Bruce Sterling, SXSW, 2013

Sterling tells us that those who live by disruption die by disruption. We must accept that our hands are not clean, acknowledge that, yes, we're killing the past. Rather than claim that design and technology are constantly making the world better, we must accept the outcome of well-designed products. If we automate bank deposits, people at your local branch will lose their jobs. If we make online flight transactions cheap and delightful, those folks at the travel agency will lose their business. As people read shorter form text on their glass, authors of novels, like Sterling, will suffer. Our technological solutionism has casualties.

Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody … You don't recognize its tragic dimension. We're not surrounded by betterness. Better isn't a measurable quantity like mass or velocity. Google doesn't have an evilometer. You are living an illusion: No true badness or goodness. Trying to get reality emerge from the shadows of futurity.
–Bruce Sterling, SXSW, 2013

After SXSW I'm now convinced that the digital representations of our physical spaces, our behavior, and our processes are more true than their real-world counterparts. Our experience of the city is mediated by our iPhone apps. Our loyalty programs know us better than we know ourselves. The processes that guide our work are either driven by data metrics or live only in the imagination of the digital world.

In essence, our master record of reality used to be physical but is now its digital, and that changes things. Consider this: the next app you design might be printed in plastic, the next intern you have might be an AI, and your next design brief may emerge from a collection of algorithms. With this future before us, I'm sure it won't be long before our cities – and not a few minds – flip like Austin did in SXSW.

In January, Angel Anderson, Mikkel Michelsen, Robb Stevenson, Lou Lenzi, Donald Chestnut, and I poked and prodded at these topics during the Interaction 13 conference. About 500 people attended the debate, and they threw their own perspectives into the mix in the latter part of the conversation. Have a listen in the video below.

(And thanks to SapientNitro for the opportunity to meet such interesting people, expand my own perspective, and make use of what I learned on my high school debate team. Ha!)