This document outlines steps for conducting a Lean UX workshop to define hypotheses. It discusses establishing assumptions about customers, desired outcomes, and features to test assumptions. Participants brainstorm potential users, needs, and metrics to measure success. Features are then organized into themes. Hypothesis statements are created linking assumptions about doing something for certain people to achieve outcomes, with evidence of success. The riskiest assumptions are prioritized for initial testing to reduce risk and waste. The goal is to define hypotheses to guide product development in testing assumptions.

1. Lean UX Workshop I.I

2. Lean UX
Assumption Hypotheses
Workshop
Chris Barklem
Lean UX Labs & Just UX

3. What is a Hypotheses
Let us look at Feynman on Scientific Method on how science comes up
with a new law.

4. What is a Hypotheses
First we guess, then we compute the consequences and then compare
the outcome to see if it fits our guess.
• We declare our assumptions
• We run experiments
• If our results disagree with our ideas of the outcome, we are wrong.

5. Declare our assumptions
What assumptions do you have?
• About your customers?
• That if proven false, will cause you to fail?
In other words: what do you need to know in order to move forward
successfully?

6. Lean and the Design of Business
• Every decision you make about your offering is a design decision.
• Every design decision is a hypothesis.
• Declare your assumptions and test them.
• Evaluate your results ruthlessly, and be prepared to change course.

7. Reduce Inventory, Risk and Waste
MONTHS

8. Reduce Inventory, Risk and Waste
HOURS

9. Less risk, more often

10. Nail it, then scale it. Key ideas…
• Prioritize learning over growth
• Prioritize making over analysis
• Frame your business as a set of hypotheses
• Reality testing
Allows teams to move faster..

11. Typical product assumptions…
• Who is the user? Who is the customer?
• Where does our product fit in their work or life?
• What problems does our product solve?
• When and how is our product used?
• What features are important?
• How should our product look and behave?

12. Typical business assumptions…
• How will we acquire customers?
• How will we make money?
• Who are our competitors?
• What’s our differentiator?
• What’s our biggest risk?
• How do we expect to solve it?

13. Hypothesis: Write the test first
We believe .
We’ll know this is true when we see
• Qualitative outcome and/or
• Quantitative outcome
• That improves this KPI.

14. Hypothesis Statement
We believe that
[doing this]
for [these people]
will achieve [this outcome].
We’ll know this is true when we see
[this market feedback].

15. BeYou: Vision Statement
BeYou will and .
We will succeed by:
•
•
•

16. Personas
Lightweight personas
• Model of what we know today
• Low investment, easy to improve

17. Assumption: our users
What info do we need?
1. Name and sketch
2. Demographic and psychographic (relevant)
3. Needs
4. How we address needs

18. Team exercise: our customers
1. Name and sketch
2. Demographic and
psychographic (relevant)
3. Needs
4. How we address needs
1 2
3 4

19. Exercise: Who could use our service?
1. Flip size: Brainstorm a list of potential users.
2. Be more specific.
3. Identify groups of like mindedness.
4. Choose the two you want to work on first.
5. Personas are people, drill down from group to individual.

20. Exercise: Who could use our service?
1. Name and Sketch
• Draw
• Age
• She/He
2. Needs
• Help with?
3. Demographics
• Job
• Education
• Tech understanding
• How does she use technology
• Social media
• Where is he/she
• Physical challenges
4. How we addrees the needs

21. What is progress
Manufacturing: production of high-quality goods.
Agile: working software is the primary measure of progress.
Lean Startup: the measure of progress is a validated learning.
Lean UX: Outcomes and impact.

22. Output, Outcome, Impact
• Output: the software we build. The materials we produce.
• Easy to measure
• Outcome: the observable change in the world after we deliver
output.
• Hard to measure
• Impact: the change we see over time.
• Very hard to attribute

23. Output, Outcome, Impact
• Output: a new log-in page (feature)
• Outcome: users of this page log in at a higher success rate
• Impact: increase in sales

24. Why manage with outcomes?
From “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto.”
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the
environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job
done.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-
organizing teams.

25. Exercise: Detailed outcomes
Step 1: individual brainstorm
What KPIs and metrics determine the success of our product/project?
Write one idea per post-it(use the black markers)
Example:
• Increase in workouts, completed.
• Decrease in the number of questions about making workouts directed
at the fitness coach.

26. Affinity Mapping
• Time boxed, 6 minutes.
• What KPIs and metrics determine the success of our
product/project?
• One per post-it note.
• Changes in behaviour that indicate our product is hitting the mark.

27. Organize into themes
• Put all the post-it notes up onto the space.
• Explain each post-it to the group.
• Then as a team, come up with groups, themes of how you would
measure success.

28. Exercise: Features
Step 1: individual brainstorm
What features will serve our users and create our desired outcomes?
Write one idea per post-it (use the black markers)
Example:
• 10K preporation schedule
• Losing 5Kg of weight for a wedding

29. Exercise Start
6 minutes to create as many features that will serve our users and
create our desired outcomes.

30. Organize
Like before, place the features, explain the features to the group. Then
organize into themes.

31. Hypothesis Statement
We believe that
[doing this]
for [these people]
will achieve [this outcome].
We’ll know this is true when we see
[this market feedback].

32. Exercise: Create your hypotheses
Take all your assumptions to the wall and group into themes with your
team.
We believe For Will achieve Proof/Evidence
[Doing this] [These people] [these outcomes] [measured this way]
So as a team what do you believe first? You can grab post-its or rewrite the
row in pen. Feature can address multiple personas, multiple outcomes and
have multiple measures. Make some stripes.

33. Exercise: continued
Optimize these statements to form
hypotheses for the project.
You should have a set of statements
that read:
“We believe that doing this for these
people will achieve this outcome.”

34. Its easy to fall into the feature trap
• This exercise details how and why you chose features and for what
outcomes.
• As a team you want to look at which assumptions are the most
riskiest to confirm. Which have the greatest impact on success.
• Test the risk first. Remove it first.

35. Its easy to fall into the feature trap
• This exercise details how and why you chose features and for what
outcomes.
• As a team you want to look at which assumptions are the most
riskiest to confirm. Which have the greatest impact on success.
• Test the risk first. Remove it first.

36. Test your riskiest assumptions first

37. Stop – Well done
• You have:
• Declared a series of assumptions around who we believe we are building a
product for.
• What outcomes we would like to achieve.
• What features we believe will drive those outcomes
• We have written hypotheses from those.
• The last assumption we need to define is how the product needs to look to
deliver these features. Which is what we will look at in a design studio
environment.