Basel: Very interesting take. So you have a theory on user experience, UX. What is it?
Brant: I wouldn't say that it's my theory.
Brant: What's interesting is that, I believe UX is more important than it has been in a long time, at least, in the high tech world. There are so many UX experts out there that know this stuff way better than I do. But, generally, what I blogged about recently was that the technology revolution, when we brought computers and networks into businesses, the benefits that we get from that over time have changed. Originally, it was really about big business productivity gains that we were seeing.
Then during the 2000s with the evolution of SaaS and the browser being the common desktop interface for the users, what we saw were sort of departmental level productivity gains. IT didn't have to be as involved. It was lower cost. Business units themselves could now solve their own problems by buying applications that didn't require all this IT approvals and implementations.
During the 2000s, to me, it was about departmental productivity gains. Now, what I think we're at the level of is individual productivity gains. How can we actually change users' behavior a little bit and see large productivity gains? I think that's where UX shines. Getting these professional people to engage with customers in a way to figure out, "How much am I able to get away with changing their normal way of doing things, so that they can see these huge benefits to using a particular application."
That's why I think UX is big now and I think that's why you hear a lot about UX. There's people around the world that are saying, "OK, well, we can't do UX the old way." I was on a panel actually in San Diego with a UX group, and somebody was talking about agile development. This woman in the audience raised her hand and she goes, "You can't do UX in agile! It takes me three months just to schedule an interview with a customer!" Well, if you're a startup, you can't run your life that way. You can't run your business that way. You'll fail for sure.
How can we combine lean and the UX? There are a lot of thought leaders around the world that are saying, "Not one pixel more. You're not going to put one pixel more into your UX than accomplishes the goal that you set out for that particular minimal viable product." So, you're following the same lean principles as engineers do when developing the minimal features. The designers need to follow that same mentality, "I'm not going to do any more design than is necessary to solve the problem that we're trying to solve."
What I think is really is cool is…I was just talking to a couple of lean UX people back in New York. These are bigger companies and they're going to be in my next book, hopefully. Where they're actually forming teams - engineers, designers, product managers, and I would actually like to see marketing and sales people included, but I don't see that yet. But they're forming teams around problems. So, they're segmenting correctly.
Like I said earlier, it's around users that share the same problem. And then they've got an engineer, a UX person and a product manager that are developing the solution. And no waste, everything that they do is only to solve that problem. These are in bigger businesses, so I think it's an example of how these lean principles can be used by startups, both small and big. Again, it sort of emphasizes the UX component of that.
About the Guest:
Brant Cooper helps startups get started
As the author of the popular Lean Startup book "The Entrepreneur`s Guide to Customer Development.", he is a sought-after writer, speaker and consultant. The "CustDev book" is required course text at several universities, including the University of Chicago MBA program, Stanford University, De Paul, Boston University, UC Santa Barbara and
University of Oslo. Brant has been published in Venture Beat and Business Insider and frequently travels the world speaking to entrepreneurs at conferences, hackathons and workshops.
He has spoken at Qualcomm, the Kuala Lumpur Venture Capital Symposium, and Lean Startup conferences in Vancouver and Michigan. Other speaking events include the Forward Technology Conference in Wisconsin, the Lean Startup Challenge in Boston, and Lean Startup
Machines in London, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.
Brant consults for and advises startups on Lean Startups and Customer Development, serving clients in Silicon Valley, New York, San Diego, France, Australia and Singapore. Clients include Qualcomm, MOGL, HubKick, MotherKnows, i.TV, and Lean Startup Machine.
Brant Cooper is passionate about growing the San Diego tech community. He runs the San Diego Tech Founders monthly meetup that consistently draws 200 attendees. Brant is also the curator for the San Diego edition of the Startup Digest. Brant mentored at CONNECT for four years and holds open office hours at a weekly informal coffee meetup.
Brant has over 20 years experience in IT and a long track record of bringing innovative products to market. As a leader in Professional Services, Product Management and Marketing, he has directed strategy, design, marketing and implementation of numerous products for a variety of startups including Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, Incode and InfoBright.
Brant Cooper blogs at Market By Numbers and tweets @brantcooper.
Comment on the Interview:
User Experience (UX)
Brant Cooper will tell us about the importance of User Experience in the high tech world.
