Lean Masterclass (Udemy, AIGPE)

Lean production is the production system of the 21st century like mass production was the production system of the 20th century.

Lean thinking example of empty soap boxes

"A Japanese soap factory used to produce soap boxes with too many instances of boxes delivered without the soap inside. The production chain consisted of preparing the soap in a nice shape on the one hand, building the box matching with the soap shape on the other hand, and finally putting the soap in the box. That sounds simple, yet many boxes ended up delivered to the customers without a soap inside!

After receiving several customers complaints, the factory manager could not afford to let so many defects out of his factory anymore… but, as everyone, he had tough budget constraints: no question to hire someone to check every single box had a soap inside before being delivered (considering the volumes of soaps being produced, it would have required dozens of people anyway); no question to invest in an expensive machine to X-ray, or even weight each box (beyond the machine investment, that would have also required more people to maintain the machine, and deal with the defects spotted by the machine anyway).

So, the soap manager brainstormed with his team, with the objective to find a simple and cheap solution to prevent the defects (empty boxes) from being delivered to the customers… and the solution came! A  fan ! Put a fan above the last element of the production chain: empty boxes will fly away! It took very little time and money to put the fan in place, and now the soap factory has regained the confidence of its customers."

What is Lean?

Lean is the systematic identification and elimination of waste.

Benefits of Lean

• Lower production costs
• Fewer personnel
• Quicker product development
• Higher quality
• Higher profitability
• Greater system flexibility

5 Areas that drive a Lean Producer

1. Cost
2. Quality
3. Delivery
4. Safety
5. Morale

Are Lean techniques applicable to the service industry?

MVP Diagram

Types of usability testing

Usability Testing

• Your users don't think like you. In fact each person has a different way of thinking. 
• Users will make hundreds of mistakes. The intent is to understand what happens after that and how quickly they can pick themselves back up. 
• You might want to avoid the feeling of confusion / questions they have when looking at your product, relate to your brand. 
• You might want to avoid the COGNITIVE LOAD (how much each user overloads things into their working memory while working with your product). Better intuitively designed products reduce this load on working memory. 

Usability Audit / Checklist

Perspective

• Perspective is your point of view
• Perception is what you interpret out of it

Perception

1. "Let's see if I am wrong" kind of thinking has died out. Now it's mostly "I am right, my view is right. Period."
2. Logic is the enemy of perception. Logi leads to post-rationalization. 

Change of perception >> Change of emotions >> Change of view/thinking [Logic or data cannot do this]

• See the world around you
• Understand the deficiencies of sight
• People are "blind" 8% of their day (blinking). Our mind covers it by image processing (cortex which has 30% for vision processing alone).
• We are confident that we see the complete picture without realizing that the gaps are filled by the mind thru image processing. 
• Optic nerve blocks part of the retina and creates a blind spot. The rest of the picture is "filled in" by the brain. 
• Peripheral vision is out of focus, and at most can sense movement. 
• We see only those areas we focus on. We don't focus on the same thing, we keep moving our eyes (Saccadic eye movement). We piece all these images together and then it looks like we are seeing the real world. 
• Understand your "blind spots" (What are you blind to?)
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• Hear the world around you
• Understand the deficiencies of sound
• People have a finite and temporary amount of "working memory"
• Every time they switch tasks, they erase what they are working on (on the sketch board) and fill it with the new information, which means the old stuff is essentially gone except part of it that is stored in the long term memory.
• If someone is on PC or on a mobile phone in your meeting, they are not 100% listening to you. 
• When you design stuff keep a note of the concept of "working memory" --- designing an e-commerce screen for an e-comm website what are you asking people to keep in their working memory.
• Read the world around you
• Read multiple perspectives, viewpoints, and then arrive at a decision.kinlay ranking of 
• Feel the world around you

Iconic Memory

It's fast but is very short.