Book Review: Lean UX — Designing Great Products with Agile Teams (2nd Edition)
If you’re looking to build a cutting edge team with modern practices, update your current process or confirm the validity of your own process. I couldn’t recommend this book enough.
Written by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, both explain practices on gathering feedback as quick and as often as possible whilst working in collaboration within product teams. You’ll learn how to push the design of your product in short and iterative cycles to help you understand what is needed to create a greater product.
Key word being — collaboration
Separated into three parts, principles, process and how to implement these steps into your organisation. The book gives you everything you would need to know and understand on how to build better products.
What the book points out is designers, developers or anybody involved in a product should not be working in silos (alone). Yes, there are still times where a design or development team receives a brief and spends time on it alone. But that stage needs to be the start of a longer series of conversations or workshops. Involving both client and production team as often as is needed or possible.
Knowledge that helps UX design is spread across several roles, and is always evolving. Every sprint, workshop or meeting brings additional technical capabilities required, competitor information, design updates, user expectations, new expected business outcomes and demands.
There’s no possibility that one person alone could maintain a deep understanding of them all. The result is that the UX is forever trying to hit a moving target. This is what this book explains and helps with.
Including real life case studies this book is invaluable. Aimed primarily at team members with management roles, I would argue this book should be read by all members of a team looking to switch to a lean and agile environment.
You can get hold of this book at most good retailers but if you’d prefer to order it online, here you go.
Score 9.5 out of 10
This book is top notch. The only reason I didn’t give it a perfect 10 is because the images contained within the book aren’t the most legible.
