How to get the most out of the UX process for lean growth hacking.

1. Growth Hacking with Lean UX
John Rockson
Co-founder, Growth Machine
john@growthmachine.com.au
@growthmachine_co
A talk for HashChing’s
Growth Hacking
Competition, 2015

2. What is Lean UX?

3. Lean UX is researching and
validating your user experience as
quickly and cheaply and possible.
If you have UX already,
it’s about getting UX from
being about outputs
(design documents) to
being about outcomes.
If you’re in a lean startup
with no UX,
it’s about cherry picking the
best learning tools from the
UX toolkit to match your
situation.

4. What are the standard UX tools?
● User research
● User needs
● User personas
● User journeys
● Wireframes
● Mockups
● Prototypes

5. Everybody knows UX is important,
but there is no accepted
framework for measuring the ROI
of the UX process.

6. So we use research & lower level
metrics to measure success, and
constantly refine our UX
artefacts.

7. Is growth hacking a good
use case for Lean UX?

8. ‘Functional, task flow projects
work well (with Lean UX). There’s
a clear end goal.’
- Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX

9. My typical Lean UX Process
Background
research
User
research
User needs
User
journeys
UI Sketches
User
Validation
Production
Feedback &
analytics
User
personas
Hot spot
prototype
Tools I only use in more
involved projects

10. Why do user research?
It’s cheaper and faster to test assumptions and iterate with interviews,
mockups and prototypes than it is to test and iterate after your product has
launched.

11. Everything is an assumption.

12. So test your assumptions as
quickly and cheaply as possible.

13. User research & user needs
Aim first to thoroughly understand the problem space, not to create a solution.
That way, you’re far less likely to encounter confirmation bias in your findings.
So in this case, don’t aim to create a winning growth strategy straight away.
Instead, understand the user and their needs and pain points.

14. User research
Determine your research questions.
The general topline research question:
“What are the user needs and pain points?”

15. User research
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia

16. User research & user needs
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia

17. User research & user needs
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia

18. User research & user needs
Question types determine your research methodology.
Source: H. Mueller, UX Researcher, Google Australia
Choose something from each quadrant
to triangulate your findings

19. User research
You can build user needs from
competitor’s social media comments.

20. How to generate user needs: Step 1
Paraphrase quotes from your research in this format: “I want to X”
“I want to know what’s happening to
my flight in unexpected extreme
weather”
“I want to be able to choose my
flight time if my flight canceled”
“I want online pre-check-in”

21. Step 2: Create an
affinity diagram
● Write your user quotes on
yellow stickies
● Arrange them into related
clumps
● Describe each category with a
blue sticky
● Arrange the blue categories into
related clumps and describe
them with top level areas in
pink

22. User Personas
Build user personas if:
The product is totally
unprecedented.
The team is of a totally different
demographic to the target user.
The team lacks a common
direction.
One of my user
personas for
EyeKite, a drone
tourism app

23. User Personas
If you create more than one user
persona, make sure each is easily
definable in a single phrase and there
is no overlap.
They can then be easily referred to by
the team throughout the dev process,
with matching Agile user stories.
The social
traveller
The adrenalin
junkie

24. User Journeys
Every sales marketing or software experience needs a user journey.
Yours only needs to be a sketch. But refine it throughout the process.
The user journey provides the sequence of steps in the funnel to A/B test. Source:
OGT, servicedesigntools.org

25. Optimize for Understanding & Engagement
Before finding out “do they like my product?”, find out “Do they understand my
product?”
Pay razor sharp attention to testing taglines and USPs.
The same applies not only to your product, but also the CTAs in your growth
strategies.

26. UI Sketches
Determine what sections you need
in your landing page or app
screen.
Sketch multiple versions of each
section.
Pick the best design for each
section, based on your
assumptions.
Cut them out so they can be
swapped in easily.
Stick your sketch up on the wall
and annotate with your testing
sequence - stickies work well

27. Validating after launch
Validation after live is the most expensive and relies on high traffic.
Cohort A/B test with Optimizely or Google Content Experiments (Eric Ries did
this)
Long term satisfaction survey across all site users (Google Drive did this)
Live chat agents (Zendesk, Intercom etc)
Choose particular analytics to test your assumptions - then confirm your
quantitative results with a qualitative survey

28. Narrowing your niche with analytics
My first business, Online English Tutors:
4,000 users in the first year
$20,000 of mostly passive revenue

29. Narrowing your niche - what worked for me
Keyword search volumes (Adwords keyword planner)
Competitor rankings and top incoming queries (Alexa)
Set up a site with keyword rich content and measure your top queries
Pivot quickly if you find something unexpected -
In my case, my analytics revealed queries to my site asking for a product I
didn’t have. So I built the product straight away and gained 4,000 users and
$20k in revenue.

30. The major growth levers

31. Having a great product
“Businesses grow when the product falls into a conversation.”
- Dan Norris, founder, WP Curve
The lean UX tools will help get you to product market fit faster and cheaper.

32. Building virality into the product
● Requires a large network and a smooth user experience to work
● Is adding friends necessary or beneficial to the product’s experience?
● Could the product become a habit? If so, use Nir Eyal’s cycle from hooked: Trigger, Action,
Investment, Variable Reward.

33. Content marketing
● How-tos, emotionally relatable stories, and controversial information get the most traffic.
● Content helps attract relationships and opportunities.
● Content, press articles and SEO can feed each other synergistically.

34. Outreach
● Finding influencers and asking them via email, Twitter or Facebook for specific help that also
benefits them - e.g. sharing a deal with their group or followers
● If targeting end customers, be sure to profile them correctly. Hassling people who don’t need
the product does brand damage.
● Warm emailing based on existing relationships works better than totally cold emailing

35. A few final actionable tips for the
hackathon

36. 1# Get good insight before you
decide which channel to focus
on.

37. 2# Allow your learning on the
user and the channel to guide
which UX tools you include in
your learning process.

38. 3# Nail one channel.
Don’t try to build an across the
board integrated marketing
strategy.

39. Resources & Tools

40. Interactive prototyping:
(especially for building virality into the product)
Sketch + Invision
Growth hacking strategies:
criminallyprolific.com
A/B testing:
Optimizely, Google content experiments
Advice and feedback from fellow entrepreneurs:
7 day startup (open) Facebook group

41. Reading

42. This presentation is available at:
growthmachine.com.au/growth-hacking-with-lean-ux

43. And feel free to email me with any questions.
john@growthmachine.com.au

44. Good luck!