Tenet 4: Killer UX Design [23] In Lean Entrepreneur Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper advocate, “If you are doing best practices, you are not innovating.” This is a provocative statement, because established interaction design patterns help make consistent user experiences. Then again, there is no harm in breaking a rule or two through experimentation to make a killer user experience. The “user experience” (UX) is how a human feels when using the interface of a digital product while attempting to accomplish a task or goal. Yes, we can say a door handle is an interface and go off the nondigital highway into the world of 100 percent physical products. But in practice, the term “user experience” refers to whether a person has a good or bad time trying to utilize a digital product. Traditionally (if I dare use that word for a discipline barely two decades old), UX design is associated with deliverables for development and design execution — site maps, wireframes, process/task flows, and functional specifications. Recruiters for enterprises and agencies identify UX design with the job titles that create these deliverables, including interaction designer, information architect, and UX designers. These definitions are used by large enterprises and agencies and are pretty much how UX design is currently practiced. Yet, what ultimately happens in this “traditional” system is that the UX designer and therefore the UX design are often more focused on the issues of user engagement and design rather than customer development and business-model generation. The common problem that many product makers don’t realize is how much their UX decisions are tied to customer acquisition. Just think about any transactional website or even a simple sign-up process. The UX design should be very concerned with barriers to entry, which can prevent validated leads who have previously engaged with the product from converting to customers. We’ll talk more about this in Chapter 9. Interfaces and user flows should be geared toward the desired response of the user. It’s all about engagement. This is what distinguishes a novice UX designer from a killer UX designer. Killer UX designers know now to guide the value innovation of a product in the following ways: They work collaboratively with stakeholders and teammates at the idea’s inception. Then, the UX designer can be involved in designing structured experiments for validation. These experiments need to be focused on how successful the value proposition can be communicated to the customer from