Lean User Research for Agile Organizations

In the context of Digital Transformation, organizations need to react in a flexible manner to rapidly changing markets and disruptive technologies. Customer and user satisfaction are important in order to succeed. Agile User Experience (UX) Design and Lean User Research enable the organization to focus on the needs of its customers and users. The objective of this paper is to investigate the best practices that exist for user research in agile product development. In particular, we want to answer the following question: What impact does Lean User Research have and how is it conducted in industry? We have carried out several studies to answer our questions. First, we created the pattern Lean User Research by means of a systematic pattern mining process. Next, we gathered quantitative data by means of a questionnaire study. This was followed by the collection of qualitative data in a panel discussion with experts from academia and industry. The results reveal that Agile has an impact on how user research is conducted because of the speed of agile product development. In addition, we provide best practices of Lean User Research and show how they are applied in industry by giving practical examples. Moreover, we found that the UX community values the aspects of Lean User Research as important, but do not constantly apply it in their practical work. We can conclude that people have to experiment and adapt the best practices of Lean User Research to their special contexts as well as develop an agile mindset.