We’ve all been there. Those times where we realise that we’ve been sitting around arguing for hours over the small stuff, because we’ve forgotten about the bigger, more important stuff. Or to bring it into the realm of digital products: whether that interface should still have an accordion menu or should we change it to a set of tabs. But we’ve already shipped, and customers are used to it being this way! We can’t it change now… can we? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something that helped us steer away from these arguments while there was still time? The dark side of Lean UX As Lean UX becomes more mainstream in the practice of product design and build, more and more teams are coming up against an interesting problem: by focussing so much on results not deliverables, and shipping small and often, the product itself can be in danger of feeling like a loose collection of features added over time, rather than a cohesive, robust, well-considered experience. Joel Marsh over at The Hipper Element puts it bluntly: The result of that is that you only make incremental changes in your product, because you’re not ‘allowed’ to make game-changing improvements. It ends up being a pile of little ideas that add up to nothing… The other danger that our teams inside Atlassian always have our antennae up for is driving consensus for its own sake. It’s true that good Lean practice will encourage collaboration and shared understanding, but sometimes in the haste of wanting to ship, there’s the risk of pushing for a solution that feels right for everyone in the room rather than pushing for what’s right for customers. That’s not efficiency; that’s just expediency. And it’s definitely not user-centred. It’s OK to storm together over the important strategic stuff. And it’s a lot better to storm over the strategy rather than the colours and placement of buttons. Arguing at the strategic level is healthy; at the interface level is wasteful. The Experience Canvas: your insurance policy against the dark side Put simply, the Experience Canvas is your ticket to getting the strategy right, both at the start, and whenever you have the opportunity to steer your strategy. It’s inspired by Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, and also borrows from Spark59′s Lean Canvas, which is itself a version of the Business Model Canvas optimised for lean startup operations. The Experience Canvas is a framework for project teams of any size to ensure that the end result – whether it’s a minimum viable product (MVP), a new feature roll-out, even a process or other business initiative – is thorough, considered, user-centred and lean, without compromising on flexibility. The emphasis is on the experience to be achieved by that result; a minimum viable experience (MVE), if you will. It’s typically used as a big hand-drawn poster on a wall or drawn up on a whiteboard in a workshop. It is not a requirements specification, and it is not a roadmap. It is more like insurance: it helps us stay honest and […]
Previous Topic
