UX for Lean Startups

Foreword

This book will make you a better designer. If you’re already a designer, that probably sounds pretty good. But I believe this is true for just about anyone, from engineers to MBAs.

I have had the privilege of working with Laura Klein for many years. She is a fantastic designer and has worked on many outstanding products. (Don’t tell her I said this, but she’s also a pretty good programmer, too.) But her talents as an individual contributor are surpassed by her ability to impact whole teams. And I am pleased to report that this extremely rare skill has now been translated into book form.

Laura has a special talent for helping nondesigners access the arcane toolkit that is sometimes called interaction design, usability testing, user experience (UX) design, or—as is my preference—making things that work. Whatever you call it, every modern company must realize that good design drives growth, customer satisfaction, and continuous innovation. This book will put those tools immediately in your hands, no matter what it says on your business card.

Startups require good design, but they can’t always afford a full-time designer. In fact, many of the most famous startups had nobody on staff trained in traditional design. Unfortunately, the kind of rapid, cross-functional collaboration that startups require is often at odds with the traditional approaches most designers grew up with. So in order to take advantage of the strengths of the design discipline, we need new approaches that support speed, collaboration, and experimentation.

If you’re reading this, chances are you work in a startup or hope to become an entrepreneur someday. But one of the most important things we in the Lean Startup movement have been evangelizing is that anyone who is trying to create something new under conditions of high uncertainty is an entrepreneur—no matter what their job description. If you find yourself becoming an “involuntary entrepreneur”—for example, someone inside an established company who faces high uncertainty all of the sudden—you will find these tools especially useful.

If you’re looking for a book of abstract theory, aesthetic jargon, or gentle clichés, look elsewhere. This is simply the most practical design book, ever. It pulls no punches and accepts no excuses. Complicated concepts like the Minimum Viable Product are made accessible: it’s a cupcake, not a half-baked bowl of ingredients (see Figure 9-1–Figure 9-3). And every chapter is loaded with step-by-step instructions for how to make each concept come to life.

But by far my favorite part of this book is that every tip, every concept, every tool, every approach is placed in its proper context. It is extremely rare to see any expert—let alone a designer—explicitly tell you when not to use their “best practices.” But in real life, there is no such thing as a best practice. Every practice is contextual. Used in the wrong situation, every tool can become extremely harmful. Every tool and recommendation in this book (except one, which I leave as an exercise to the reader to find) comes with an explanation of when to skip it; most are helpfully labeled with their own When Is It Safe to Skip This? headings.

Laura and I worked together long before I wrote the book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. I still cringe when reading some of the highly entertaining stories Laura tells of failed products and bad decisions; many of those mistakes were made by me. Let my dumb mistakes be your gain: listen to Laura Klein and do what she says. Become a better designer. Build great products. Make your customers’ lives better.

Good luck.

Eric Ries

San Francisco, CA

April 15, 2013