Extended Abstract: Lean UX and Innovation in
Teaching
Tatiana Batova
Arizona State University
tbatova@asu.edu
Abstract – This extended abstract describes lean UX
methodology and explains its benefits for innovation in
technical and professional communication teaching.
Index Terms – Lean UX, innovation, teaching
INTRODUCTION
Lean startup and its derivative lean UX are becoming
increasingly popular in entrepreneurial culture. Lean UX
fosters innovation, asserting that successful innovations
need to be inventions that are also economically viable
and technically feasible [1], [2]. In what follows I first
describe the foundations of lean UX and then explain how
it can be beneficial for teaching technical and professional
communication (TPC). To explain the benefits, I use a 7.5
week online UX class that is cross-listed as
graduate/undergraduate at Arizona State University as an
example. The class introduces students to UX principles,
techniques, and tools and teaches them how to solve
design problems holistically.
DEFINING LEAN UX
Lean UX combines the principles of UX with lean
startup, design thinking, and Agile [3].
I. Lean startup
Lean startup [4] is an approach to creating innovative
products that is based on user-centered methodologies,
particularly the ones stemming from customer
development strategies [5]. Dating back to manufacturing
practices introduced by Toyota of Japan, it has evolved to
benefit various types of startup organizations. The
foundation of lean startup is the idea that for an
innovation to be efficient, there needs to be a demand for
it from the potential users and the innovation needs to
solve a real problem for real users. Investing time and
resources into an innovation that is not needed or desired
creates waste.
The process of lean startup begins with formulating a
viable and sustainable business hypothesis that is then
validated through customer development with the “get-
out-of-the-building” method: talking to real people who
could potentially be customers, both users and decision
978-1-5090-1761-4/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
makers. The goal is to build the minimum viable product
(MVP) that has the minimum features that potential
customers would pay for. During the “build-measure-
learn” feedback loop, the lean team gets more feedback
from the customers, makes changes to the product, and
tests again. This approach emphasizes efficiency in
learning and creating, as well as helps minimize the risk
of product failure by adjusting initial assumptions as early
as possible.
Similar to the lean startup, lean UX aims at
• removing waste from UX design processes. The
team creates only design artifacts that are
necessary to move its learning forward.
• harmonizing collaborative teams. The team is
transparent, cross-functional and brings non-
designers into the design process.
• bringing experimentation to the core of design.
The designer facilitates the team to experiment
with the MVP and get feedback from the users;
the team measures if the design met the goals.
This process is rapid and iterative [3].
II. Design thinking
Also a user-driven innovation approach, design
thinking was developed by the design company IDEO. It
relies on “direct observation of what people want and
need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the
way particular products are made, packaged, marketed,
sold, and supported” [1], as well as extensive iteration
cycles.
This approach is important for lean UX because it
enables design methods to be applied to various aspects of
a business, allowing designers to work beyond typical
boundaries and non-designers to use design methods to
solve problems. While there are strong similarities
between lean startup methodology and design thinking,
there are also differences, e.g., methods used and target
groups [2].
III. Agile
Agile methods of software development aim at
reducing the time of delivering software to the customers
and at continuously adjusting the software to meet the
changing needs of the customers. Lean UX borrows the
following four core principles from the Agile Manifesto:
• individuals and interactions over processes and
tools. The entire cross-functional team must
exchange ideas freely and frequently.
• working software over comprehensive
documentation. The goal of the team is to build a
series of viable solutions quickly, so that they
can be assessed for market fit and viability.
• customer collaboration over contract
negotiation. Collaboration and continuous
customer feedback create a shared understanding
about decisions and decrease the need for
documenting them.
• responding to change over following a plan.
Successful product development relies on
frequent testing and continuous iteration [3].
BENEFITS OF LEAN UX FOR TEACHING
I. Lean UX enables iterative approach
While the iterative approach is very beneficial for UX,
a 7.5 week timeline can prove to be extremely difficult to
teach it. The small batch size and removing waste
principles of lean UX [3] provide a solution by helping to
determine what minimum activities and designs are
necessary to move a team of students forward. In my
online class, these principles materialized in several
rounds of designs and testing, in which students tried out
a different research method each week, analyzed the
findings, suggested design changes to their team, and
implemented changes in a low-fi shared redesign. The
week after the teams used this redesign to try a different
research method. The small number of users each student
worked with combined with the user-friendly prototyping
technology and the minimum number of changes to the
design each week allowed the teams to practice iterative
design.
II. Lean UX combines business goals with user focus
The lean startup foundation of lean UX helps to
combine the focus on the users with the focus on business
sustainability. It encourages students to think of real-
world applications of their rhetorical activities and to
carry out their projects after the class is complete.
To take advantage of this benefit in the class, I relied
on the business canvas as the hypotheses that need to be
tested [5]. My UX class used a derivative of the business
canvas, Gothelf’s [3] business assumptions worksheet that
differentiates between business and user assumptions and
provides specific questions entrepreneurs need to answer
to create a hypothesis and prioritize assumptions, as well
as foundations of measuring the success of the redesigns.
During the first week of class students created a
hypothesis based on the website design principles and
their assumptions about the users. At the end of the class,
all student submitted an evaluation plan that described
how they can measure the success of their current
redesign.
III. Lean UX provides foundations and guidelines for
cross-functional, problem-focused teams
One of the goals of lean UX is to break down barriers
that isolate designers from business needs and
technological implementation requirements by demanding
cross-functional collaboration [3]. As designers and
developers interact in the workplace, students of different
majors interact in a class as part of a team. Not only does
this approach prepare students for workplace
collaboration, it helps technical communication students
see how they can be involved in early stages of product
development and engineering students how to base their
designs on user needs. It also helps students focus on the
problem they are trying to solve rather than concentrate
on features when conducting user research. It provides
strategies for creating a shared understanding of the
design problems and user analysis through externalizing
each team member’s work.
At the end of each week interdisciplinary student
teams determined the specific problem to solve in the
following week based on their findings and discussions.
This problem statement impacted the setup of the next
research method.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The lean UX approach can provide solutions to several
class-design problems not only for UX classes, but also
for other classes in TPC curricula. While the lean UX
methodology was particularly beneficial for the intensive
online UX class, it can be easily adopted to other
contexts. For example, the small batch size and removing
waste principles can be adopted for the practice of
multiple revisions on a short time frame in any TPC class.
In implementing lean UX, it is important to remember its
“permission to fail” [3] principle: to encourage creativity
by providing students with a safe place to experiment and
take risks.
REFERENCES
[1] T. Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking
Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New
York, NY: Harper Business, 2009.
[2] R. Mueller and K. Thoring, “Design thinking vs. lean
startup: A comparison of two user-driven innovation
strategies,” in Proc. Int. Design Manage. Research Conf.,
Boston, MA, 2012, pp. 1–12.
[3] J. Gothelf, Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to
Improve User Experience. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly
Media, 2013.
[4] E. Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s
Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create
Radically Successful Businesses. New York, NY: Crown
Business, 2011.

[5] S. G. Blank and B. Dorf, The Startup Owner’s

Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great
Company. Pescadero: K&S Ranch, 2012.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tatiana Batova is an assistant professor at Arizona
State University. She teaches and researches content
management, user experience, and global technical
communication.