“A world community can only exist with world communication, which means something more than extensive facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas and common ideals.”

- Robert Hutchins

I attended the UX Immersion – Agile & Mobile Design Conference in Portland last week, where I had amazing learning sessions (workshops and talks) on Agile and Mobile design.

One workshop I especially liked was Jeff Gothelf’s ‘Lean UX: A Seasoned Approach to Designing in Agile’.

What is Lean UX? Lean UX is inspired by Lean Startup and Agile development theories. It’s about reducing waste: Light faster, collaboration, cross functional, less emphasis on deliverables and more focus on the actual user experience. The more shared understanding we have, the thinner the spec is.

So in essence, our designs are hypotheses; let’s validate or invalidate those hypotheses as quickly as possible so that we can spend time going down the right path and less time going down the wrong paths.

Lean UX brings usability testing to every sprint to validate design hypotheses with customers, and data is used to settle subjective issues.

According to Jeff, when we have the designers, the developers, and the business owners all in the same room sort of working on solving a problem collaboratively, suddenly all that subtly and nuance as to what design is about becomes transparent. The value of the designer becomes even more evident when the collaboration is working at the highest levels. The expertise and the different disciplines that all go into software design and user experience design start to emerge and become very obvious to the team.

I recommend watching this 5 min video where Jeff talks about ‘How to do Lean UX in 5 easy steps’. Or check out his Lean UX presentation on SlideShare.

When it comes to tracking productivity in UX design, the focus should always be on the outcomes, quality and hitting key milestones, and not on day-to-day activity. I don’t think there is a “perfect” UX design process (just as there is no perfect software development process) each project is going to have different timeliness and needs. One project may be heavy on detailed design documentation, and is easier to “track” than one that is focused on user research and foundational understanding.

But even with a project that is “documentation-heavy”, you have to be careful not to fall into the “to do list trap” of just crossing off things. Here’s why: You can get all your design work done in a timely matter, but if the design sucks, who benefits? Certainly not the user, and definitely not your company. Yes, you will “look good” in the short term, in that management sees you are “hitting your dates”… but you will be burned later if the design was rushed and ill-concieved. Trust me, I’ve been there (a few many times).

But how do we, designers, measure our own productivity? There are many different techniques I have seen and tried. But in the end, I think UX design isn’t about “productivity” it’s more about problem solving, and making a difference for users. So I look at satisfaction (and conversion rates) as a more important personal metric around my design work than the number of UI “pieces” I can crank out in a week.

In addition to the above, we need to make sure that we have time to refine, iterate, and fail. Yes, fail. We learn a lot by piloting early designs with users and finding out what doesn’t work. We need to Identify key milestones, follow the process that we are comfortable with, and focus on quality. Keeping in mind, of course, that deadlines are absolutely necessary as a motivator and a way to “focus the brain.”

I always try to have this view of the world that everybody has access to the same resources I do and if these people can do it, I can do it, too.

This past weekend, I came across this video from the PBS special about Steve Jobs after he passed away that resonated with me a lot:

“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”