Understanding the Micro, Meso, and Macro Worlds of User Experience

Abstract

Overview: The article presents a framework for holistically understanding a product’s user experience (UX). Informed by the author’s experience as a UX researcher and manager at Google, it is intended to demystify the competencies that UX researchers can bring to organizations to help propel successful innovation. The framework outlines how users simultaneously inhabit three nested scale dimensions of experience with products (Worlds of UX) and demonstrates that engendering user-centered thinking within organizations requires integrating knowledge from each. The Micro World of UX comprises moment-by-moment experiences: direct sensory and motor phenomena, tasks, tools, and decision-making moments users encounter when using a product to accomplish lower-order goals. The Meso World of UX consists of user journeys: sequences of lower-order goals that form pathways toward higher-order goals. The Macro World of UX is the realm of user–product relationships: how users experience successive user journeys and how user segments orient toward products longitudinally.