Lean UX Canvas
To create valuable products, Scrum Teams must have clarity on what problem they are solving and whom they are solving it for. The Lean UX Canvas is a tool created by UX consultant Jeff Gothelf. It is a visual tool that helps teams capture and communicate key aspects of their design process concisely and structured. It serves as a framework for collaborative discussions and decision-making. The canvas consists of sections representing essential elements of Lean UX, such as the business goals, user problems, solution ideas, hypotheses, and metrics. Scrum Teams can use the canvas to articulate and align their understanding of the problem, generate and validate design ideas, and track progress towards achieving the desired outcomes. It acts as a visual representation of the team’s shared understanding and helps foster a collaborative and iterative approach to design.
Further examples of the purpose behind the Lean UX Canvas:
- It is a simple model anyone can use to start with Lean UX.
- It’s a facilitation tool for cross-functional teams designed to create a customer-centric conversation around the work the team is doing.
- It promotes a less top-down and more team-collaboration approach on even the highest-level assumptions and business problems.
- The goal is to help the team focus on “why” they do the work.
- It helps ensure that learning takes place in every Sprint.
- It exposes the gaps in the team’s understanding of the problem they’re solving.
- It can help shift the conversation from outputs to outcomes.
Although this tool is excellent for teams at any level of UX maturity, it is especially relevant for those new to UX and wanting to start doing UX activities.
UX research and design require a lot of listening, observing, prototyping, testing and taking feedback from users. The Lean UX Canvas allows teams to focus on business problems, business outcomes, user personas and their benefits and convert these assumptions into hypotheses. It guides teams to design research to test the most critical hypotheses.
- Business Problem: What problem does the business have that you are trying to solve?
- Business Outcomes: How will you know you solved the business problem? What will you measure?
- Users: What types of users and customers should you focus on first?
- User Outcomes & Benefits: Why would your users seek your product or service? What benefit would they gain from using it? What behaviour change can we observe tells us they’ve achieved their goal?
- Solutions: What can we make that will solve our business problem and meet the needs of our customers at the same time?
- Hypotheses: Combine the assumptions from previous sections into a hypothesis statement.
- What’s the most important thing we need to learn first?: For each hypothesis, identify its riskiest assumptions. Then, determine the riskiest one right now. This assumption will cause the entire idea to fail if it’s wrong.
- What’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing?: Design experiments to learn as fast as you can whether your riskiest assumption is true or false.
Lean UX Canvas Templates