p>Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.
No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.
Determine whether people will buy your product before you build itListen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycleUnderstand why you should design a test before you design a productGet nine tools that are critical to designing your productDiscern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-havesLearn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisionsUse A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practicesSpeed up your product development process without sacrificing quality
Laura Klein's book is fantastic. If you are expecting a web design, interaction design or color/look-feel design then you are in the wrong place. Laura writes about those things, but his focus is to show how a product team using the Lean Startup method need to iterate and test continuously the User Experience.
The best subjects and insights I liked in her book:
-- How to do Early Validation of problem/solution
-- Tips about MVP Experiments like Landing Pages, Concierge MVP, Fakes, Wizard of Oz, etc
-- When to use Qualitative versus Quantitative Research and Testing
-- A/B testing do's and don'ts
-- Design Hacks
It's always important to make sure that you read at least one of the books below to deeply understand why Lean Startup UX is so much focused on validation and hypothesis testing:
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean Series)
And if you need more details about Analytics I strongly recommend you to read also:
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (Lean (O'Reilly))
The author goes overboard with her terrible writing skills trying to make her content sound interesting and comical, but fails only to be a drab read. The informal writing is just terrible.
Coming to the content part, it’s repetitive and it’s highly opinionated to the author’s narrow perspective of design. The examples used to illustrate her point are used from a mocking perspective, and don’t add any value. Someone really needs to work on better scripting before trying to be comical.
Such a book advocating product owners/ entrepreneurs to copy design ideas from others are a bane for the design profession and community. It misses out on the novelty of design completely. Such is difference between the thinking of an architect and a draftsman. She doesn’t dwell into the intricacies of design but looks at it as a commodity.
An extremely disappointing read and thought to follow.
This could be a good intro book if it is your first in both Lean and UX. I was expecting a bit more being a UX-focused book but I was not impressed. "Don't make me think" makes for a much better UX book, and reading "The Lean Startup" + either Running Lean or Lean Analytics makes everything in this book intuitive.
Too familiar for me to gain much from reading this but for anybody who doesn't do digital product design professionally, this book is a go-to resource if they need to get up to speed.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It explains UX design in the context of lean startups. It’s a great read for anyone, even if you don’t work at a startup. And it made me laugh out loud several times as I was reading. (I listen to Laura’s podcast, What is Wrong with UX, so I’m familiar with her sarcastic sense of humor.)
Laura shows you how to validate hypotheses with UX tools like user research. She goes into detail about the different user research methods out there and when to use them.
I’m glad Laura also explains an MVP. Contrary to popular belief, an MVP is not the shittiest version of your product you can ship. An MVP is the smallest thing you can build to validate or invalidate a hypothesis.
Laura uses funny stories and examples to illustrate her points. I appreciate her analogy “fixating on the cupholders.” Fixating on the cupholders is like building a car that doesn’t have any brakes, yet focusing on how to design the cup holders. This analogy refers to when teams channel time and money into building the wrong things, such as building low priority features.
Laura talks about fixating on cupholders in the context of startups, but I’ve seen this happen outside of startups.
I also appreciate Laura’s approach to new product ideas. Laura says, don’t try to come up with brilliant product ideas out of thin air. Instead, think about every product as a solution to somebody’s problem.
This book is packed with great stuff for entrepreneurs and UX designers. Do yourself a favor and read it. :)
This book can be useful for entrepreneurs, product designers, owners and managers. Book did not have new things for me because I had read Lean UX before it. At the end of the book, the author put a summary of the book: User research: Listen to your users. All the time. I mean it. Validation: When you make assumptions or create hypotheses, test them before spending lots of time building products around them. Design: Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.
With a lively, if somewhat irreverant , tone , Laura Klein guides you through the process of starting a venture using UX as a gateway into finding a market and success. This book has pragmatic advice on what to do and how to do it now, and more importantly, what not to spend time on. Not just a concept book, this book discusses tools and detailed approaches. Klein addresses many of the concerns people might have about "skipping steps" in order to be lean, and explains the both the challenges and benefits of a lean approach to UX design. The author discusses how UX fits into an agile startup environment.
This books has a slightly different audience than the earlier, similarly titled book, Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience is more about how to apply Lean Principles to UX design, with an eye toward migrating from a non-iterative UX process to a more iterative, lean, agile process. That book seemed to be geared more towards UX professionals, though anyone who touches UX could benefit from it. This book addresses the needs of entrepreneurs and members of a startup who want to have a good UX, but can't waste a lot of time and effors on it. I'd reccommend that either individual get both books. But if you are building a startup, this one will give you the most actionable advice quickly.
You can benefit from reading both books. If you want to read one on UX, you might get more out [[ASIN:1449311652 Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience]], but both books make for useful reading for any member of a team, from engineers to entrepreneurs, who wants to build a good product quickly.
Finish it within 3 days! #MONSTERKILL Laura Klein have a great and practical book. The message are so direct and had minimum example or sucess story. Lean UX are the new perspective and methodology to validate your idea, design and product immidiately and had lot of itteration. Always validate at all stages of developing process.
This book teach us to research, doing validation, design a MVP, and we should build an interactive prototype for better validation process. Laura also teach us how to A/B testing effectively and reduce waste when developing. Lean UX are concept that addopted by Design Sprint process.
Great book and Laura write it with so simple&direct langguage. You should keep this book and re-read it when you are developing & designing products.
Great read on the high-priority things to focus on in order to save resources while serving your users, your customers, and your business as well as possible. It says it's for "Lean Startups" and indeed it would be much easier to apply 100% quickly to an organization that already identifies itself as a Lean Startup, as getting buy-in in larger, more slow-moving organizations will be harder, but it's worth a read, even if your company is thousands people big and ships on a multi-year schedule.
The writing is clear, insightful, and pretty snarky at times, which I enjoyed. The author pretty much calls you out on your bullshit if you make excuses for why you can't do this or that, and gives you practical, useful strategies for actually implementing her tips. There were plenty of examples to learn from, without being verbose.
Over all, I wish everyone I ever have to work with, present and future, will read this book. :)
A ruthlessly pragmatic guide to doing user research, design and testing for non-designers in lean startup environments. I am not the book's audience, I mostly read it to validate some assumptions I made during my recent tenure as a product manager and designer at a startup, and was mostly satisfied by the end. Klein tries to spice up what would otherwise be rather dry material with a somewhat flippant tone of voice. It didn't always work for me. For people seeking advice on how to do design outside of the hyper-consumer-capitalist environment that is the venture capital funded software product startup, this book is best avoided. But when it comes to what it says on the tin, it mostly delivers.
Decent book with sensible advice - I'd call it a strong 3 / 5.
Main points were: * test your ideas early and continuously - qualitatively (user interviews & observation) for open-ended questions - quantitatively (A/B testing) for well-formed either-or questions * prototype early and add incrementally
Only two things I think could have been improved: * felt very repetitive to me * the tone didn't help me respect the material (but maybe I'm just old school?) a little "flippant", and sort of preemptively angry about the fact that someone might disagree
Great insights in the topics of research, testing and metrics. I didn't find a ton of new ideas, but still, this book is a nice refresher for me and a reminder that with lean design, you don't have to go all-in with the whole UX process. You can be flexible, and sort of pick and choose the methods that best suit the situation and still get solid results.
Great introduction for people who don't really know much about UX Design. It was well written, pretty funny, and valuable. Only downside for me was that it seemed a little bit repetitive. Still worth the read though!
The introduction of the book talked about what Lean UX is and isn’t. It was compared to Agile Design and User-Centered Design, which meant nothing to me, to be honest. The actual definition was irrelevant to why I was reading this book - I care more about the practice and benefits of Lean UX. But the rest of the book got into the meat of that.
Lean UX can be summarized into 3 principles:
1. Do research. Ask questions, make hypotheses. 2. Validate. Answer questions, test hypotheses. 3. Iterate. Take answers and data, and then make adjustments.
Research is extremely important not just because it tells you whether your product or service is viable, but because it saves you time and money. The key to Lean UX is doing research and avoiding problems before they come up. Don't waste your resources.
"Lean UX isn’t about adding features to a product, it’s about figuring out which metrics drive a business.”
The author talked about the 2 different kinds of research you can do: quantitative and qualitative. "Quantitative research tells you what your problem is. Qualitative research tells you why you have that problem."
Quantitative research is about getting statistically significant data about a potential feature or workflow - like A/B testing. Qualitative research is about listening to what the user has to say. You have to pay attention to what they do and how they use your product. Looking over someone's shoulder while they use your product is a great way to do user research.
The best way to figure out if you product is any good is to hand your product over to the people and observe how they use it. The worst way is to ask people if they would use it. The main reasons for this are because we as consumers don't really know what we want and our dollars speak louder than our words.
Another thing I liked from this book was this set of questions we should ask when determining if a landing page has good UX:
1. What does the user think this product does? 2. Who does the user think the product is for? 3. Can the user figure out how to get the product?
It seems simple, but those questions are golden. I think they apply not just to UX designers and marketers, but also to authors, video producers, and a whole slew of other people. Think about The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman. Make sure you can answer these questions about yourself as a professional.
Another important aspect of UX design is making sure that you're starting with problems, not solutions. Bad starting point = "Let's add commenting functionality to the product page!" Good starting point = "Users aren't able to communicate with each other, which affects their engagement with the product."
All in all, good book. This is extremely accessible to lay people and most valuable to anyone working in the startup realm (especially marketers and business dev folks). If you're already a UX designer or you've read a fair amount of stuff on UX, you probably won't find this novel at all.
This is 3rd Lean book that I have read on Lean, the first two being Lean Startup and Lean Analytics. I can vouch this is definitely one of the best books and strongly recommend to anyone who has an idea about solution to a problem and wants to convert that to a product. The book offers practical advice for validating all that you need towards building a product.
The book starts by offering advice on how to conduct qualitative research on the idea to check if customers really need that and then moving on to landing pages to confirm the hypothesis and then to A/B testing to get statistically significant data on whether proposed changes increases certain metrics or not.
Between the various ideas, the books talks about how to speed up things aka faster user research, faster design etc. emphasizing the "lean" concept of doing just enough and thus avoiding wastage.
Other key takeaways for me were designing the test first, when to use qualitative vs quantitative tests, tips on creating various types of MVP including landing page, Wizard of Oz, Fake door test etc.
Web design is such a creative pursuit. As a software engineer, I'm amazed at the beautiful interfaces that designers can create.
I certainly appreciate the eye for design (which a sorely lack) that designers bring to the table, but a lot of times I've seen designers not worry about how their designs are interpreted by the end user.
Doing the kind of qualitative and quantitative tests suggested by Klein will make your beautiful design also friendly enough to provide a great overall experience to the end user. Definitely recommend!
This is hands down one of the best UX books I've ever read! Its core focus is on using tools and techniques to validate your design decisions, ensuring you're building the right product for the right people. The author's sense of humor makes it fun and engaging.
If you're a Product Designer, UX Researcher, Product Manager, Founder, or anyone involved in building products, give this book a read. It's a quick read with a wealth of valuable knowledge. Highly recommended!
UX for Lean Startups is a great overview of basic UX principles—nothing revolutionary, but what sets it apart is how easy and fun it is to read. Laura Klein writes in a way that’s accessible even to professionals outside of design, and many of the principles can be applied well beyond UX. Some of the platforms mentioned are a bit outdated (the book’s not brand new), but that actually helps keep the focus on timeless principles rather than specific tools. A great starter or refresher read.
The book has useful content, but the style of writing keeps getting in the way of reading it efficiently. I get it, the author wants to be keep it conversational and witty, but she over did it imo. Remove 50% of the fluff for next edition if you ever read this comment. (Why: I wanna read this faster; it kept making me lose my chain of thoughts. Also, a lot of sentences were unnecessarily wordy and repetitive)
I had much fun reading this book Laura Klein is not only good UX designer, she also writes hellova fun and entertaining. This book is for all designers and product owners, entrepreneurs or anyone actually having some product and wanting to make it successful. She goes into details about analytics and testing side of UX and how to implement any ne iteration. A must read.
Un libro que habla sobre metodologías para diseño ágil de productos. La esencia de la metodología es validar las hipótesis con indicadores de experiencia de los usuarios para ver si las nuevas ideas de diseño valen la pena o no. Me parece que el libro es útil, y después se pone demasiado repetitivo, pero vale la pena aprender de él.
It's a great book for beginners as well as other cross functional teams who dont have an understanding about user experience design process and how it works for a business. Author has tried it to make it much more simple so that someone who is not familiar with UX terms find easy understanding things.
It's hard to enjoy the book when there's a rant or diatribe within each chapter. Things like “ you’re delusional “, “you snowflake”, “maybe you should think of changing careers”.
The content is good for beginners, but there's more fluff and unnecessary dialogue; it's very far from being lean. And, again the tone is quite unwelcoming.
I enjoyed reading it, Klein is funny and straightforward. Reading her book felt like getting to have a conversation and finding out all the most important things you need to know, along with all the things that annoy her the most.
Author has not stretched the contents that would have rendered the book dull and boring. Though she has not delved deeper into the execution of a specific tool (A/B testing for instance), she made a point by stressing on why a tool should be used or not used for different scenarios.
Book itself is truly lean and people can read it from cover to cover in easily digestible language. At the end of the book, she has nicely condensed the whole book into key points for quick recap. I suggest this book to all Product Managers / UX designers which will help them to save quite a lot of time and avoid waste.
Can't say I read so many new things in this book. I guess I expected to find more about UX principles, examples of good and bad UX etc. Instead I just re-read how to research and design the product in overall.
Not a lot of new stuff for people already familiar with Lean startup methodology. Otherwise, it’s a great book filled with countless small-small tips for building great UX. The slick sense of humour in writing makes it a fun read too :p
it provides invaluable strategies for integrating UX design into the lean startup process. It offers practical advice on rapid, iterative user research and design, helping startups create user-centered products efficiently and effectively. A must-read for agile innovators.