UX for Lean Startups

Preface

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for entrepreneurs. It’s also for product designers, owners, and managers who want to make products that people will buy, use, and love. It’s especially for people who are creating products in startups or companies that are trying to innovate like startups.

Don’t worry if you’re not a designer. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never made a wireframe or talked to a user. If you read this book, you’re going to learn enough about user experience (UX) to let you design your own product. No prior background in user experience or any other type of design is necessary to understand the concepts in this book.

This book is for decision makers. This book won’t teach you how to sell your idea to your manager or how to convince people that user research is helpful or that a good user experience is necessary. What it will do is give you specific tools and tips for learning, designing, and shipping something amazing.

You see, this book is only for people who want to build things. Right now. It’s for people who want to learn how to make products that people will love without wasting a lot of time and money.

Like I said, this book is for entrepreneurs.

What Is This Book About?

Fantastic user experiences are becoming a requirement for new products. Unfortunately, if you’ve ever tried to build one, you’ll know that fantastic user experiences are incredibly hard to deliver. It’s even harder when you’re building something new and innovative.

In fact, one of the only things harder than building an intuitive, delightful, innovative, easy-to-use product is hiring a designer to do it for you.

This book was written to help you create a fantastic user experience for your product. It will teach you how to understand your user in order to build something brand new that people will love and possibly even pay you for (if that’s what you’re into).

While focusing on UX design techniques and processes, I’m also going to cover a bit about Lean Startup, a methodology created and popularized by Eric Ries. Perhaps you’ve read his book, The Lean Startup (Crown Business)? It’s really good, but don’t worry if you haven’t read it. It’s not a prerequisite.

This book will make a lot of references to web-based products and software, but the UX design techniques in this book will work equally well for building most things that have a user interface. Hardware, software, doorknobs...if you sell it and people interact with it, then you can use Lean UX to better understand your customers and to create a better product faster and with less waste.

How to Use This Book

My editor wanted me to write a section explaining how to use this book. My first draft just said, “Read it,” but apparently that wasn’t specific enough, so I’ve written a couple of tips for getting the most out of the book.

You don’t have to read this book in order. It’s designed so that you can skip around, find something that’s pertinent to you in your current product development cycle, and learn an important tip about making your product better or your process faster. I don’t expect you to sit down and read it cover to cover before starting your company. Who’s got that kind of time?

Although you don’t have to read it all the way through, there are parts you may want to read a few times. You see, there are going to be things in the book that sound easy, but really they require quite a lot of practice. All the user research stuff, for example, is a bit harder than it sounds. It’s nice to have a book like this around for reference when things get tough. Also, my name is right on the cover, so it’s handy when you want to swear at me for making something sound easier than it is.

Even if you do read it cover to cover, don’t feel like you have to do everything in the order I present it. There’s no exact recipe to follow that will get you to a fantastic product. Sometimes you need to design, sometimes you need to observe users, sometimes you need to run tests, and sometimes you need to do all that and a few dozen other things at the same time. In this book, you will learn practical, hands-on tactics for doing all those things leaner, better, faster, and more cheaply.

And if you’re still confused about how to use the book, I will point out that it also makes a great paperweight, doorstop, and holiday gift. Do not eat this book.

If you’re still confused about how to use this book or about any of the information in it, you can always reach me at [e-mail].

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Acknowledgments

Books don’t write themselves (unfortunately), and anybody who thinks the author is the only one responsible for the writing is completely delusional. In other words, there are a whole lot of people I would like to thank for helping me turn a bunch of ideas into something that people might want to read.

First, I’m pretty sure I’m contractually obligated to thank Eric Ries for getting this whole crazy Lean thing started. He is fantastic, and I owe him more than I could ever repay.

I also want to thank everybody at O’Reilly for being generally amazing, but also specifically for answering all of my stupid questions and putting up with my bizarre unicorn-related requests. Mary, Nathan, Kara, and Kiel, you are saints.

I’d like to say thanks to Eric Prestemon for all of his love and encouragement. I never would have started writing the blog if Eric hadn’t said, “Will you please stop talking about this stuff and just write it all down?” I love you, honey, even though you don’t want to listen to me complain about UX all the time.

Thank you as well to everyone else who contributed to this book—all the people who read it early and gave great feedback and said nice things about it in public. You are wonderful. Thank you especially to Sarah Milstein for reassuring me that I could finish this thing, even at my darkest moments.

I couldn’t have done any of this without Ellen and Julie at Sliced Bread Design. They are the people who turned me into a UX designer in the first place. Thanks for taking a chance on me.

And, of course, I owe the biggest thank you to Marianne and Tony Klein for...well...everything, really. I love you both. It’s the future.