Lean UX Assumption Workshop

Declaring assumptions and build hypotheses.

by Gion Kunz

Lean UX process

Outcomes, Assumptions, Hypotheses

Design It

Create an MVP

Research & Learning

Assumptions

Assumptions are our best guess based on what we know today. They are also filled with risk. Our goal with UX engineering is to reduce that risk.

"We believe our primary user base should be middle school and high school students who would rather use their mobile device over any other to access school content."

Examples

"We believe integrating the default calendar application on our users' mobile devices is a feature they will value and use often."

"If our users communicate with one another regularly using our app. it's an indication that we built and designed the right features"

Every project starts with assumptions, but mostly we don't acknowledge this fact. Instead, we try to ignore assumptions, or worse, treat them as facts.

The Big Four

Business outcomes - Describe a measurable change of our customer behavior.
Users - Describe the people for whom we believe we're solving a problem.
User outcomes - The goals of our users, end goals like achieving tasks, emotional or experience goals.
Features - Product changes, additions or improvements that we believe will help our users to achieve their user and our business goals.

Assumption Declaration Workshop

Who should be part of the workshop?

Anyone who will raise the product IQ! Product management, requirement engineers, customer service representatives, developers etc.

Preparation

Analytics reports that shows how the current product is performing
Usability reports that illustrate some existing user behavior
Information about past attempts to fix a problem
Justification from the business as to how solving this problem will affect the company's performance
Competitor analysis