Lean UX: The Big Promise to Address Key User Pain Points
Today any company understood the value created by apps in their overall branding strategy. The mobile app is the most important touch point to reach a wider audience with the sophisticated user experience. Besides making customer interaction easier than ever before, mobile apps for businesses also helped immensely in uplifting customer satisfaction and enhancing the reputation of the business brands.
But to ensure more result-driven brand interaction through mobile apps, it is important to address the user pain points. Mobile UX is undergoing constant validation and research to make customer interaction better. With smartphone users having crossed two and a half billion figure globally, the competition for market presence has shifted to the mobile apps.
When rethinking mobile user experience, the Lean UX approach deserves a serious consideration now. Lean UX focuses on making assumptions for app development based upon the answer to an array of customer-centric questions. It offers us a new research method to understand the customers better. Knowing where and when a user leaves an app and chooses another app is the key aspect to this approach.
Lean UX: A New Method of Validating Your UX Decisions
Most of the apps on the market follow the traditional and time-tested methods if validating and research about user expectations. They conduct surveys, do usability tests, take customer interviews and get opinions from various niche groups and forums to know the type of UX to be suited for the users of the respective apps. Once a very primary level interface is built like the prototype, mockup or wireframe, usability tests are carried out. So, understanding the user through traditional method takes a lot of time.
In complete contrast, to understand the user quickly Lean UX is more effective. This approach suggests asking key questions based on your target audience. Apart from this, it requires continuously validating and refining the assumptions over time. This helps more in-depth knowledge of where and when users leave an app. Many app developers India or mobile experts in emerging markets are of the opinion that, wireframes and prototypes are not always enough to validate an app idea. Most important of all, the whole process of understanding users takes much shorter time involving fewer steps than in the traditional method of UX validation.
What precisely is lean UX?
Lean UX is a method or technique inspired by the models used in manufacturing industry. The technique is completely in sync with the agile development methodology which is geared to deliver more precision-driven output in less time. The objective of Lean UX is to create maximum value in less time while keeping the wastage of resources to a minimum. Technically speaking, Lean UX consists of solution-focused approach common to design thinking as well as continuous validation and rapid iteration common to agile development method.
While Lean UX focuses on bringing the real value of an app faster, it boasts a collaborative development process where every stakeholder shares a mutual understanding of the final product. Lean UX achieves faster collaboration and cross-functional teamwork without needing detailed documentation of every aspect. The whole process pertaining to Lean UX works through continuous checks and balances.
The real advantages of using Lean UX?
As the developer, you aim to build a perfect app with all required objectives fulfilled at the quickest possible time. Well, the objective of Lean UX is exactly the same. Instead of going through a series of complex steps Lean UX cuts the process short by focusing on the most relevant. It saves a lot of development time without compromising on the development standard and your end result.
Lean UX reduces the entire process of documentation to a minimum and thus saves your app budget from spending on many irrelevant things. The sitemaps, flows and diagrams you need in traditional processes can be completely avoided. These traditional elements can be helpful for the uninitiated and learners, but for producing the intended end product, they are mostly not useful.
This is precisely why assumptions enjoy higher importance in Lean UX. But as a check and balance measure, Lean UX is equipped to validate these assumptions on a continuous basis. Another important aspect of Lean UX is that it is fully collaborative and is perfectly suited for a development environment comprising both developers and designers. With Lean UX actually, all team members can exercise their design inputs. The cross-functional environment also helps to encourage everyone in the team to contribute to design elements and make it better instead of depending on just a set of people designated as designers.
The ultimate advantage of Lean UX is the higher level of efficiency and speed of execution as the product development cycle gets shorter with less number of processes. The whole development process instead of going through a series of processes focuses on delivering the minimum viable product for the market. You create the basic app, release Beta version, understand and evaluate responses and then iterate further to come with a better product. The process goes like this.
Conclusion
As the competitive app economy demands app development cycles to be shorter to deliver perfectly user-focused apps in quickest time, methodologies like Lean UX will continue to gain popularity and traction among mobile app developers worldwide. In a nutshell, Lean UX reduces resource waste, boosts collaboration, makes development process faster and efficient and makes your whole process more oriented with user-satisfaction. It is the kind of development approach, and experts always advised developers to follow. Now, as a methodology, it arrived complete and ready.
