Lean UX at a Lean Startup

During my time as UX Engineer at Adzerk, I learned a lot about Lean Startup philosophy. Adzerk is completely lean, and very dedicated to the idea of the Minimum Viable Product.

Since I was the only UXer on the team, I was a jill of all trades, spending time on product management, planning with customers, sketching with developers, and even writing code.

I’d say the #1 tool in my arsenal was my handy UI Sketchpad. Many times, paper is the highest fidelity mockup that there’s time for before implementation.

In order to avoid cutting customer feedback out of the loop, we conduct most of our upfront testing on digital wireframes rather than fullscale mockups.

After the team got over the initial shock (“You’re showing *that* to a customer?!”) this has worked out quite well. I’ve written several posts about our workflow on our team blog. I was even interviewed for a case study in the book Agile User Experience Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to Making It Work based on my posts.

I worked with our enterprise customers to design custom features, as well as gather metrics on an ongoing basis to periodically redesign existing features or suggest new ones to the team. I also conduct tests and research.

Projects included:

• Overhaul of the application navigation and workflow architecture.
• Implementation of a feedback map to capture miscellaneous comments and feedback to customer support.
• Implementation of a natural language processing pipeline to get the most value out of the feedback map.