A Quantum of Solace: UX Design Happens at Different Scales

On the one end, it’s often critical to get the label on a specific button “right” when designing a software application because it can potentially impact the user experience. At the other end of the scale, you need to think about the aggregate set of experiences your customer or user is going through across multiple interactions with your organization. Design for both and everything in between.

Other things to think about when designing at different scales:

• Many artifacts are the same or alike and can scale up or down. Personas, for instance, can be at a product or corporate level.
• Product scale and project scope interact, and you must think about scope at every scale, especially the highest.
• Two examples of UX scope are designing all elements belonging to your user or product ecosystem and but also something as simple as how you define the start and end of a user journey. Both are part of a UX scope conversation.
• The most extensive UX scope tends to force design on a larger scale -“ for example, a long journey with a growing set of information forces the design scale up.
• You want to connect the scales in your UX artifacts. When you drill down on a user journey, you should get to tasks. Similarly, you should be able to work your way up from actions to tasks to journeys to strategy.
• As necessary as going up and down is connecting across products and services. So, steps in tasks or stages in a journey must logically connect at each scale.