CONFERENCE, MELBOURNE. The higher education sector offers a breadth of interesting UX challenges to solve, but resources are limited. Lean UX methods help teams stay sane and productive.
Originally presented at the UX in Higher Education Conference 2017, which included talks from Alistair Simpson (Atlassian), Dan Martin Smith (Westpac) and UX design leaders from across all the major universities in Australia.
In the public and higher education sectors, the challenges facing digital and design teams are unlike those in most commercial environments. Funding is volatile. Teams are small. Scope is broad. And yet, expectations for quality, usability, and speed are just as high—if not higher.
This is the context in which our UX team began exploring Lean UX. What started as a necessity—working with tight resources—evolved into a more effective and sustainable way of delivering value. Here’s what that journey looked like.
Big Challenges, Small Teams
For those of us working in higher education, this will sound familiar: IT projects often operate in cycles of uncertainty. Funding is unpredictable. Teams are temporary. Long-term stability—whether for a product or a project team—is rare.
This volatility makes traditional approaches to UX incredibly difficult. One example: the cost of fixing design problems escalates dramatically the later they’re addressed. According to AM+A’s 2004 study on the ROI of Usable UI Design, making changes after development begins can be up to 100 times more expensive than resolving issues during design. That’s a hard pill to swallow when time and resources are already limited.
And then there’s team size. In many universities, UX teams are modest—perhaps two or three practitioners in a digital team of twenty. That’s a stark contrast to other sectors. In my experience, insurance companies may have teams twice the size. Energy companies and postal services run teams ten times larger. Major banks? Larger still. Of course, those organisations support large-scale ecommerce systems—but the point remains: we’re often expected to deliver similar impact, with a fraction of the people.
Compounding this is the sheer breadth of scope. UX teams in universities often serve the entire organisation. That means supporting everything from prospective student marketing to admissions systems, faculty portals, research repositories, and even the intranet.
There’s also a high demand for generalists. We’re expected to work across information architecture, interface design, analytics, UX research, and reporting. There’s little room to specialise—every team member must cover a wide range of responsibilities.
A New Way of Working: Lean UX
Enter Lean UX.
What began in startups and product companies has become a lifeline for resource-strapped teams. Lean UX brings together principles from Agile development, Design Thinking, and the Lean Startup movement, offering a framework that prioritises speed, collaboration, and continuous learning.
At its core, Lean UX is about working smarter with fewer resources—without compromising the user experience.
Let’s look at three foundational principles:
- Build things people want
Prioritise user value above all. Focus on solving real problems for real people. - Build stakeholder trust
Create transparency in your process. Bring others into the fold and build credibility through results. - Deliver stronger outcomes, faster
Lean UX isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about eliminating waste and accelerating value delivery.
From Challenges to Practical Responses
Making Lean UX work in higher education meant adapting it to our constraints. Here’s how we tackled some of the key challenges:
Challenge 1: Expensive, slow-moving research
Response: Run research in-house.
We created a simple but effective testing lab. It didn’t require fancy tools—just a quiet room, screen-sharing software, and a good facilitation script. Keeping research internal helped us move quickly and stay connected to our users.
Challenge 2: Limited specialist capacity
Response: Collaborate and coach.
We treated UX as a team sport. Designers coached developers and content strategists to contribute to UX activities. In turn, our work reached further and carried more influence across disciplines.
Challenge 3: Wading through too much data
Response: Create and control the data.
We shifted focus from passively receiving data to actively generating it. Lean synthesis and lightweight reporting helped us move from data overload to actionable insights.
Challenge 4: UX as the Agile bottleneck
Response: Apply lean methods and eliminate waste.
Rather than trying to do everything upfront, we adapted to Agile’s rhythm—delivering just enough UX at the right time to keep development moving.
Looking Ahead: The Future is Lean
Lean UX has changed how we work—not just as a method, but as a mindset.
It allows us to move faster and operate more effectively within the natural constraints of the public sector. More importantly, it’s helped us reconnect with the human side of UX: working alongside our users, learning continuously, and improving bit by bit.
By embracing Lean UX, we’re able to:
- Run leaner, more focused teams
- Conduct small, continuous research cycles
- Move from insight to action more efficiently
- Listen. Share. Learn. Act.
In higher education, our challenges are real—but so are our strengths. With Lean UX, we can turn those strengths into lasting impact.
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