How Lean UX Helps Startups Avoid Common Pitfalls and Scale Fast

?? Welcome to #GetUX 19, where we discover Lean UX, its core principles, why it’s best for early-stage startups, and the potential challenges.

Many startups fail: from year two to year five of inception, the failure rate for new startups is a staggering 70%. This high failure rate can daunt anyone, even the most dedicated entrepreneurs, from entering the market.

Why do these startups fail, though, and what can one do to mitigate or avoid such failure?

It turned out that around 34% of all the failed startups have issues with product-market fit (PMF). Product-market fit is a congruence between what the startup offers and what the market requires. The statistic highlights what we’ve mentioned in a previous episode of #GetUX: ideas alone are not enough.

Many startup owners begin with ideas, for something that they wished exists or a problem that they want to see solved. While this is not in itself a bad reason to start a business, it could turn out to be one when there’s a lack of fit between the perceived problem and the perceived solution.

• Related: Don't Build Blindly: How to Know if Your Idea Will Fly

Therefore, market research here becomes crucial. Unfortunately, many startups don’t have enough resources to conduct extensive market research, and this makes them noncompetitive with larger companies.

In the design business, however, we have a potential way out to this conundrum. Enter Lean UX.

Lean UX: What It Is, and How It Helps Your Business

Lean UX is a design approach to building better products. It works by focusing less on theoretically ideal design and more on iterative learning, overall user experience, and customer outcomes.

Let’s go over the core principles one by one:

1. Collaborative design

Collaborative design is a principle to close the distance between stakeholders and designers. A great example of collaborative design is including stakeholders in the design and development process. This ensures alignment between what the stakeholders need and what the designers hypothesize will work.

2. Rapid experimentation

Because only ideas are not enough and they need to be validated — experimentation and the incoming results cement facts about where the product needs to go, while avoiding biased guessing. “Rapid” here means going directly to creating and testing a form of prototype, as a start, using rapid design tools like quick wire-framing apps or even pen and paper sketches.

This ensures that the product continues to develop and reduces continued friction between competing product and business hypotheses.

3. Continuous feedback

Even after the product has matured, request and expect continuing feedback from the users and clients. This is done to ensure points of optimization. Provide ways for them to create feedback loops — the product receiving feedback from one end, and the user/client receiving status and clarification on the other end.

Another way to do this is to schedule periodic guerilla user testing. “Guerilla” here means doing testing with any kinds of people — including those you meet down the hall in the office, or maybe a friend and acquaintance.

4. Outcome over output

Prioritizing outcome over output means focusing on things such as user adoption and retention rates as opposed to feature count. By doing so, the product stays focused and the user stays engaged. Leave the thinking process for a new feature for after you’ve investigated it thoroughly.

Implementing Lean UX in an Early-stage Startup

Implementing Lean UX in an early-stage startup starts by creating a proper mindset for prioritizing user research. Begin by defining the problem clearly, then prototype quickly, validate, and iterate.

Define the problem quickly

Use a problem statement like:

“We believe that [user group] has [this problem] and solving it will lead to [this outcome].”

This becomes your initial hypothesis, the one to create an idea for. For example, a fitness app startup hypothesizes that users want to track workouts quickly and not go into advanced analytics. This lets the team hyper-focus on what's truly necessary and not spend any time dwelling on irrelevant ideas.

Test a prototype

1. Brainstorm an idea with the team.
2. Sketch the idea into a working prototype, even using pen and paper.
3. Draw every screen involved with the idea.
4. Gather five potential end-users.
5. Treat the sketches like a screen: when the user “clicks” on something, present them with another piece of paper representing the next screen in the line.
6. With the screens, ask the users to do your idea. Ask them to vocalize their thoughts and feelings as they go through the screens.

Be careful about potential pitfalls and biases. This procedure is best done by a professional. We at Maturis can handle this — reach out to us through LinkedIn Messages now to make it simple.

Iterate based on data

After you received some data from the paper prototyping test, gather those data and turn it into actionable insights. Use the learnings to refine the prototype. Repeat the cycle, until you hit product-market fit.

Challenges of Using Lean UX

The challenges of using the Lean UX paradigm mostly revolve around resources, quality, and the results.

Managing limited resources

Limited resources can be a strain on any startup, but it can be particularly hard on early-stage startups trying to lean hard on market research. One thing to do here would be to optimize usage on free resources like the Google work softwares to receive feedback and conduct meetings. The design tool, Figma, and the wireframing tool, Whimsical, also provide usable service at no cost.

Balancing speed and quality

The speed of research that is done when using Lean UX can sometimes preclude quality, especially when on very tight schedules involving less-than-a-week project runs. Prioritizing here becomes key: focus on building solutions and keep the “nice-to-haves” for later. The prioritization matrix may help.

Handling ambiguous feedback

It takes a good professional to understand, dig deep, and delve deeper into user feedback. The user sometimes can be ambiguous or not answering the question in a direct manner. Avoid ambiguities by focusing on patterns — what happens between users — instead of outliers. Also, use the “five whys” method to quickly sort out root causes.

Conclusion

The value of Lean UX for early-stage startup is in the quick building, filtering, and prioritization of great, marketable ideas. Not all ideas are feasible and Lean UX helps business owners to prioritize what’s best and what’s quick to go to market. Principles include collaborative design, rapid experimentation, and continuous feedback. Implementation begins by market research, followed by a sketching out of the idea, validating or invalidating said idea by putting it in front of users. Challenges might come from limited resources and the ability of the researcher to make sense of the data. Prioritization of important ideas is key.

Maturis is a UI/UX design studio creating tasteful & tested designs aimed to propel business growth. Get in touch with us now through LinkedIn Messages to take your ideas to the next level.

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