It is a tool that helps the agile team formulate business and user problems, hypothesize and solve them through experimentation. It promotes close team collaboration and enables working in rapid iterative cycles. It can be used during project research, design, planning, and discovery phases. The Lean UX Template provides an overview of what is being developed, why and for whom the product should be. This also allows for quick identification and remediation of potential weaknesses. At the same time, a much better and customer-oriented product is created without losing sight of the business goals.
The UX Canvas structures conversations along four basic questions:
Research Question:
Suppose there is a bus that is the first of its kind to be fully self-driving. The question is whether the users can cope with the problems on the bus - what do they need? What problems does the bus company face and what are its goals?
Business problem:
What is the business problem?
Business results:
What changes in user behavior do you need to see to know you've solved the problem? How can you measure improvements? Are you analyzing user behavior?
Users:
User outcomes and benefits:
Solutions:
List the product, features, or enhancements that will help your target users achieve the desired goal.
Hypothesis:
Summarize points 2 through 5 in a hypothesis, e.g.: "We believe X will be achieved as a business outcome when user Y achieves benefit Z using feature A."
—> We believe that the establishment of self-driving buses will be achieved when the daily user achieves good communication with a display when problems occur.
Assumptions:
What is the most important assumption you must make for the hypothesis to be true? How will you know that your hypothesis is false? What would cause the hypothesis to fail?
Experiments:
Brainstorm the experiments you would need to conduct to test your hypothesis(es).
(canvas is displayed at the bottom of the page)
Is there a business problem that needs to be solved? This is the question you should ask yourself first.
A business problem is characterized by the following:
This allows the team to work on a solution in a focused and creative way. To fill in the canvas with the current problem, you should answer the three questions:
By answering these questions, a business problem can be formulated:
Bus Drive is a technology company working to make self-driving buses attractive to the masses. The product is designed to make riding a bus as pleasant and efficient as possible. In testing, we have found that the product does not achieve this goal, resulting in low usage rates. How can we improve the self-driving buses so that our customers/users feel safe at all times through good UX/UI design and use the product more successfully?
“[Our product] was designed with [these goals] in mind. We have found [in this way] that the product does not meet this goal, which is causing [this negative impact/business problem] for our company. How could we improve [our product] so that our customers can use our product more successfully based on [these measurable criteria]?”
The last surveys showed mixed feelings. In general, users could imagine using such an offering. At the same time, however, there are still problems with error handling and with help, questions, and problems. Passengers report being frustrated when problems or questions arise during the ride and it is not clear what to do.
So our potential business problem could be:
Self-driving buses should get passengers to their destinations as quickly, efficiently, safely and comfortably as possible. Customer surveys have shown that this is not fully the case at present. When problems or questions arise, users currently do not know how to deal with them. The operation is cumbersome and not self-explanatory.
So how can we improve the user experience so that our customers can reach their destination more conveniently and also recommend it to their friends and acquaintances?
What changes in user behavior need to occur to know that the problem has been solved? How will development teams know that the business problem has been solved?
Business outcomes are higher-level success metrics, e.g., they could be measured by customer satisfaction or retention rates.
At the same time, however, it is not so easy to measure satisfaction or customer retention comprehensively. Good metrics stand out because they change people's behavior and express a part of it.
However, customer satisfaction, revenue, and retention rates are inappropriate metrics because they are abstract and difficult to measure or do not reveal trends. For example, the success of solving a business problem can be measured by increased customer satisfaction, which can be measured over time with a Net Promoter Score.
A panel survey should help assess whether improvements in communication have had a positive impact on customer satisfaction. I think this is a very important goal, because the company can only establish itself in the long term if potential customers use the offer and are happy to do so.
For my particular case, I would suggest asking customers directly on the bus or in the app. It would be a good idea to start with a rating where users have the possibility to rate their experience with 1-5 stars and justify it.
And, of course, it is an indication of the success of the project if more people use these services.
Which users and customers should be prioritized? Who are the potential customers whose problems must be solved first? The user behavior must change in such a way that it has a positive impact on the company's goals. What distinguishes users, what benefits do they derive from using the product?
One way to get to know the customer better is to create a proto-persona through customer interviews. To do this, the following should be recorded:
For our specific example of the self-driving bus, this might look like the following.
Proto-Persona:
The average user of the bus wants to arrive quickly and safely. He/She is usually a bit older and wants to enjoy a stress-free ride. The service is mainly used for short trips in the urban area for shopping or visiting the city center.
In summary, these initial approximations represent a first prototype of a persona. In the further course, however, this must be iteratively further developed. Only with further user knowledge can a persona emerge.
What goals do your users want to achieve or what problems do they want to solve?
Answering these next questions will determine the success or failure of the product:
In order to evaluate the business problem and measure whether the results have been achieved, we need to understand the motivation of the users. After all, it is the customer who ultimately decides whether he will use a product or not.
For this, I would like to revisit the Proto Persona. In future customer interviews, it is important to focus primarily on the area of what benefits the users derive from the product.
In this example, these would include:
What could be the solutions and improvements for the user to achieve the goal? Does this solution help the person? Do users and the company achieve their goals?
This question should now be answered in the next box. Brainstorming is a good way to do this, because there are no limits to creativity and you can collect a lot of heterogenous ideas.
In our example, it could look like this:
Details can be considered to optimize the proposed solutions. Here it could be useful to work practical to visualize the ideas. After the initial brainstorming session, the team can work out further details of each possible solution. Sketches, drafts, wireframes or similar can be used for this purpose.
In this point follows the summary of points 2-5 to a hypothesis.
The hypothesis here is formed with assumptions whose truthfulness is yet to be verified, i.e., it need to be tested.
“We believe that [business outcome] will be achieved if [user] successfully achieves [benefits or outcomes] with [solution].”
We believe that the number of trips per week will increase if passengers feel safe.
We believe that user satisfaction will increase if they work with a user-friendly interface.
In the following, solutions to the hypotheses should be found. Of course, the hypothesis should then be tested to see if it should be accepted or rejected.
What is the most important assumption that must be met for the hypotheses to be true? How can you prove that the hypothesis needs to be rejected? Which hypothesis should be tested? It is helpful to prioritize the hypotheses and it is also often useful to consider them in terms of value and risk. The most important question after prioritization is: What is the most important thing to learn first?
The team should not focus on feasibility when selecting the biggest risk factor. A risk in this example could be that voice control is not accepted and users do not use the operation.
It is useful to brainstorm what experiments need to be conducted to test the hypotheses. It is helpful to be clear about what is the smallest experiment we can conduct to test our hypothesis.
We need to answer these two questions adequately:
The first question is already answered in Box 6. For the second question, consider the following: "The less effort, the less time wasted."
In our example, it might be helpful to do a survey with existing users to get an overview of how and whether they would use voice control. Depending on the results, the hypothesis is then discarded or pursued.