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.


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.KEYWORDS: User experience, UX research, User journeys, User-centered thinking, Consumer research If recent decades are any indication of those to come, product-building organizations will increasingly require capabilities to confront trends of rising labor mechanization, computing technology proliferation, and the continued migration of social, professional, and economic behavior into digital ecosystems.User experience (UX) research capabilities are particularly suited for such trends, as the discipline's aims are to understand and make comprehensible the range of experiences people (users) have with products so as to discover ways to make them more useful, satisfying, and meaningful.To date, however, most UX literature has been oriented toward a traditionally "tech" industry audience.This is more an artifact of history than evidence of an applicability boundary.Arguably, the product leaders of today and tomorrow, no matter the industry, will require UX research roadmaps to meet the innovation demands of a digitally transforming world as much as any other core competency.It is pertinent, therefore, that UX researchers develop frameworks of their discipline and make them accessible to a broad audience.
Over the course of my career at Google, I have developed a framework that I refer to as the Worlds of UX.It divides UX into three nested scale dimensions: the Micro, Meso, and Macro.Why such a framework?Just as other research domains disaggregate into nested scale dimensions-for example, molecular biology vs. organismal biology vs. ecosystem biology-UX can be similarly partitioned.At Google, I have observed how this framework can help organize the product development challenges that teams grapple with and clarify requisite research strategies to pursue.
The Worlds of UX framework complements other models aimed at helping product developers grasp the phenomenological breadth of UX.One such model, articulated by Hassenzahl and Tractinsky (2006), delineates three UX facets: an experiential facet that considers the situatedness and temporality of product use; an emotional and affective facet that concerns subjective experiences and the mechanisms that engender positive subjective states; and a facet referred to as "beyond the instrumental" which specifies the non-goal-specific features of good UX.Karapanos et al. (2009) offer a framework that demonstrates how users can shift over time from emphasizing the pleasures of using a product and the utility of its features (anticipation, orientation, and incorporation) toward emphasizing the meaning the product provides to them (identification).These examples showcase the usefulness of considering separate yet interrelated categories of UX, as doing so can reveal opportunities for innovation that might otherwise remain hidden when taking an overly narrow view-for example, simply focusing on user satisfaction or usability.

Situating UX Research
Before delving into each World of UX, some context setting is in order.
One could argue that UX research has been practiced for as long as humans have leveraged observation and introspection to devise and improve tools.As the field of psychology formalized in the 20th century, various subdisciplines emerged that seek to understand people's needs for, interactions with, and relationships to technology, products, and brands-for example, human factors, consumer behavior, and market research.It was not until the 1990s, however, that "user experience" as we now know it became established when Apple employees began using the phrase to describe product interaction phenomenology (Norman, Miller, and Henderson 1995).Thus began the association between UX and the tech industry.
Due to this relatively recent formalization of terminology, there is scant convergence among organizations on UXrelated job titles.The titles human factors researcher, design researcher, human-computer interaction researcher, and consumer insights researcher, for instance, all imply some variety of UX research yet lack the "UX" moniker.Title variability, which is also reflected in conferences and journals associated with UX, presents a challenge for organizations hoping to identify candidates suited for their UX needs and can make it onerous for aspiring UX researchers to identify job opportunities.Moreover, because of the historical linkage between UX and the tech industry, researchers from across the social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences whose backgrounds do not contain a focus on human-computer interaction topics often struggle to notice the applicability of their skills to UX professions.
Despite these issues, UX research has flourished in recent years and is an increasingly sought-after career path (Buhle 2021;DeAngelis 2020).The Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and similar forums serve as recurring touchpoints for UX researchers to convene and publish.Organizations such as the User Experience Professionals Association function as communities of practice, establish standards, and facilitate career development opportunities.Universities, trade schools, and online course platforms offer an abundance of UX qualification pathways.This state of affairs has produced a diverse field of UX researchers ranging from generalists (who have broad methodological capabilities suited for a variety of UX challenges) to domain specialists (who deploy to narrower UX problem-spaces based on specialized training and/or a preference for focus).While UX researchers have historically skewed toward qualitative methodologies, quantitative UX researchers who specialize in applying statistics and data science to UX problems have increasingly become sought-after as organizations acclimatize to and seek to leverage big data (Chapman and Rodden 2023).
Who do UX researchers work with?The optimal UX team composition and deployment model for a given organization is ultimately determined by context (Kaplan and Pernice 2019).There can even be a range of models operating across different verticals within the same organization.This is true at Google, though certain generalizations can be made.UX researchers here are usually on multidisciplinary UX teams deployed to a specific product area who collaborate with product management, engineering, marketing, operations, and other cross-functional partners across the product lifecycle.UX designers are typically the largest constituency on UX teams.These practitioners develop user-interface (UI) components and interaction patterns that make products usable.They devise design systems that standardize a product's full set of components and patterns and leverage these as features are developed and altered (Google 2021).UX content designers, meanwhile, focus on how products communicate information to users and craft language to establish a product's tone and character (Neilson 2019).UX engineers build prototypes to test nascent UX features as well as develop infrastructure, data, and tooling for the UX team (Google 2023).UX programs and operations specialists structure initiatives, manage budgets and contracts, drive partnerships between internal and external collaborators and stakeholders, and establish plans for growing the organization's UX capabilities.

The Worlds of UX
The Worlds of UX framework comprises three phenomenologically distinct yet interrelated nested scale dimensions of experience-the Micro, Meso, and Macro.

The Micro World of UX
When we zoom in on a user's experience with a product spatially and temporally, we enter the Micro World of UX.This realm consists of direct, moment-by-moment sensory experiences-for example, what it looks like when a word processor detects a misspelling; what it sounds like to hear a smoke alarm; and what it feels like to handle an airplane's yoke.These perceptions manifest specific cognitive and emotional states in users, and by leveraging research on how these states associate to users' intuitions and learned schemas, designers can create UX patterns that deliberately feature specific sensory perceptions that scaffold users' understanding of what to do with a product (Tonetto and Tamminen 2016).
Knowing what to do is a prerequisite for the user to accomplish the most basic units of constructive interaction with a product: tasks (Diaper and Sanger 2006).Using a mouse to click on an underlined word in a word processor to reveal the nature of a misspelling is an example of a task.Tasks thus proceed from perceptions and advance users toward an immediate lower-order goal-for example, correcting a misspelling.UX researchers inventory the tasks a product facilitates and identify strategies that assist users in task completion.
UX researchers study the cognitive load of tasks and identify means of decreasing unnecessary load and assisting users through states of high load (Ning, Goodman-Dean, and Clarkson 2019).There may be opportunities for a product to execute certain tasks on behalf of users by default-for example, an auto-correction algorithm within a word processoror ways to selectively withhold content from users until contextually relevant.UX researchers in the Micro World of UX contemplate ways to present in-product feedback to support tasks, as well as help to identify content and design patterns that optimally signal to users task success or failure-for instance, error messaging (Crumlish and Malone 2009).The user typically has multiple senses available to them, thus researchers consider whether a product's selected mode, amplitude, and rate of feedback are optimal or whether they detract from a task-for example, visual overload (Weinstein and Wickens 1992) and auditory fatigue (Fernandes et al. 2019).
UX researchers also explore how to scaffold user-product expectation alignment.That is, when faced with a task, will the user's understanding of the behavior expected from them comport with what the product expects from the user?A non-food product made to seem like food might confuse a child into thinking that the product actually is food, and thus the child may attempt to eat it (Basso et al. 2014).Faced with the need to help users acquire mental models conducive to expectation alignment, UX practitioners leverage design analogies and interface metaphors (Carroll, Mack, and Kellogg 1988;Goel and Bhatta 2004).These are design strategies that leverage knowledge users have previously acquired through contact with design patterns in other domains and are why task design convergence can appear across products of a similar nature-for example, the tasks one must complete to reset an internet account password are fairly consistent from website to website.
Lack of adequate tooling can make even straightforward tasks challenging or impossible.Thus, UX researchers investigate tool requirements-a keyboard to facilitate text-entry, for example-and work iteratively with designers to build product toolkits that lubricate goal-directed behavior (Cooper et al. 2014).
Task navigation does not unfold deterministically.Rather, it involves users injecting agency into systems of potential.This brings us to decision-making: when a user commits to a lower-order goal and associated actions for achieving it, presumably from a set of alternatives (Redish 2013).Given the breadth of decisions users could make using the affordances of a product, and that they can be wrong or uncertain about the tasks necessary to complete their goals, UX researchers help optimize choice architectures intended to harmonize the decisions users ultimately make with the goals they ostensibly have.Though the concept of choice architecture has become fairly ubiquitous due to Thaler and Sunstein's (2008) influential book Nudge, which spawned considerable derivative literature within UX, the concept can be traced to psychological research that emerged in prior decades concerning the role of heuristics and biases in human decision-making-for example, dual process theories of cognition (Petty and Cacioppo 1986).
As product developers have become savvier about how to construct choice architectures that elicit or prevent certain user decisions, an ethical debate has emerged within the UX profession regarding dark patterns (Brignull 2010).Such designs "hack" heuristic decision-making processes and result in action or inaction that may not be in users' best interestsfor example, making the hyperlink to unsubscribe from a company's marketing emails burdensome to identify.Antidotes to dark patterns are choice architectures that respect users' agency and ensure they have frictionless access to information that helps them understand the ramifications of their decisions-like privacy patterns (Bösch et al. 2016).

The Meso World of UX
Zooming out, we encounter the Meso World of UX where researchers focus on user journeys: paths of interconnected lower-order goals that progress the user toward higher-order goals.Higher-order goals are typically more significant to the user than lower-order goals, and generally involve more than basic task-outcome pairings.Consider the following vignette: 1) a user enters their login credentials to their email platform to access their account (lower-order goal); 2) they navigate the platform's UI to a menu from which they can initiate a new email (lower-order goal); 3) they type what they desire into a text terminal in order to compose the email (lower-order goal); and 4) they enter the recipient's email address and formally send the email (lower-order goal), thus completing UX researchers study the cognitive load of tasks and identify means of decreasing unnecessary load and assisting users through states of high load.
their higher-order goal of communicating via email to a desired recipient.This framing of higher-order goals as derivative of lower-order goals borrows from Carver and Scheier's (1982) Control Theory of psychology (Becker, Jaakkola, and Halinen 2020).
UX researchers construct journey maps: schematics depicting how elements from the Micro World of UX amalgamate into a user journey (Marquez, Downey, and Clement 2015).These help product teams translate journey components into technical requirements, inform software testing and quality assurance protocols, and reveal opportunities to reduce complexity and redundancy (Arguelles et al. 2020).Journey maps are especially useful for complex user journeys comprising many lower-order goals, non-linear pathways, or long timespans-for example, building a retirement portfolio.
UX teams must also design for accessibility by considering interaction modalities for those with divergent abilities (Firth 2019).To illustrate, imagine all of the elements of a basic thermostat that would need to be adapted in order to offer usability to reading-impaired users.In certain circumstances governments enforce industry design standards to ensure broad accessibility (particularly for public goods and services).The American Disabilities Act of 1990 triggered the regular publication of design standards for accessibility (United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division 2010).Beyond those borrowed from regulated standards, UX researchers help designers and content strategists craft distinctive accessibility patterns that scale with their product's overall design system-for example, Google's Material Design (Google 2021).
UX researchers continually evaluate the overall health of user journeys, especially critical user journeys-that is, those most essential to users and fundamental to a given product.One approach to this developed within Google is the HEART framework: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success (Rodden, Hutchinson, and Fu 2010).
Happiness encompasses the emotions users experience along a user journey.UX researchers ask: What emotions are present at the beginning of the journey?What emotions may be prompting the user to initiate the journey in the first place?What emotions are elicited by the journey?Where are the user's emotions upon journey completion?Surveys and customer service interactions are common means of eliciting answers to these questions, while more intimate methods such as diary studies can provide richer signals (though are not as scalable).
Engagement captures the frequency, depth, and quality of engagement with a user journey.Frequency is typically defined over a standard time horizon (daily average users, for example).Depth signifies how far users immerse themselves within a journey (for instance, do they just complete necessary tasks?Or do they persistently leverage optional tasks?).Finally, engagement quality captures whether the journey is meaningful to both the user (for example, did it produce a minimally acceptable outcome?Or did it exceed expectations?) and to the business (for instance, did the business benefit from the journey?).For software-based products, UX researchers can work with engineers to instrument engagement metrics as part of the product's activity logs.For metrics that cannot be instrumented in such a manner, UX researchers often rely on surveys, interviews, diary studies, and other qualitative techniques.
Adoption captures the rate at which current and/or potential users try a journey (provided they actually aspire toward the goals the journey facilitates).Adoption is often interpreted as a proxy for users' level of awareness as to the goals that a product can help them achieve.
Retention considers the rate at which users return for subsequent engagements with a user journey provided a continued need to accomplish the higher-order goal the journey facilitates.Oftentimes teams define "churn" metrics to represent non-retention (for example, of the active users of a user journey last month, how many did not return this month?).Retention metrics often serve as proxies for the utility users associate with a product.
Task Success, finally, represents the friction users encounter along a journey.Metrics can include error-rate (how often users unsuccessfully attempt a journey's tasks), time-to-completion (the efficiency with which users complete a journey), and abandonment rate (how often users drop off along a journey with or without having made an error).Such metrics help identify product improvement requirements, especially when consistently instrumented through software logging.

The Macro World of UX
Zooming out one last time, we arrive at the Macro World of UX.This realm consists of the relationship users build with products before adoption and longitudinally thereafter.
To understand user-product relationships, it is first important to know who a product's actual or potential users are.Since it is often impossible or impractical to understand all users individually, UX researchers conduct user segmentation (or more traditionally, customer segmentation) to generate models that cluster users into quasi-homogeneous groups defined by dimensions hypothesized to predict differentiated user orientation to a product.These dimensions can include demographics (or firmographics if the product's users are businesses or enterprise accounts).Certain behaviors might differentiate users-for example, how they navigate a UX researchers continually evaluate the overall health of user journeys, especially critical user journeysthat is, those most essential to users and fundamental to a given product.
product, or which features they use.A variety of beliefs, attitudes, and values may differentiate segments of a user base, as well as goals and motivations.Users can also be distinguished according to their specific met and unmet needs.(Chapman and Feit [2019] provide an in-depth overview of user segmentation.) User segmentation has myriad practical applications for product teams.The process helps clarify who, generally, the product is being designed for.UX researchers derive personas from segmentation models that illustrate archetypal segment characteristics.These can be overlaid onto journey maps to spark inspiration and problem-solving.Segmentation models can also be incorporated into evaluation frameworks (like HEART) to discern how user journey health differentiates across segments.Typing tools are usually developed from segmentation models.These are simplified heuristics for categorizing users into segments (Vriens et al. 2022).Typing tools aid in dataset classification and partitioning, research participant recruitment, data slicing (disaggregating metrics by user segment), and can be leveraged to create user panels for longitudinal research-for example, diary studies.
While user segmentation can tell us who users are at a high level, it is usually an initial step in a research program that eventually delves into more complex user psychology.People are continually shaped by their culture, life experiences, and unique psyche.UX researchers pursue understanding which of these forces may activate in significant ways as users consider, adopt, and evaluate a product.UX researchers can leverage this knowledge to create design strategies that amplify the positive aspects of these forces and dampen negative aspects.Certain products thrive because they help users discover or preserve a sense of personal meaning-for example, products that recall early childhood experiences (Schindler and Holbrook 2003).Other products offer means of performing aspects of one's identity otherwise not easily expressed-for instance, video games (Cherry and Mellins 2011).Some products satisfy a need for personal or group ritual (Pekkanen, Närvänen, and Tuominen 2017).Many companies embrace environmental, sociocultural, or economic values resonant with specific user segments (Lins, Servaes, and Tamayo 2017).
UX researchers guide the crystallization of a product's value proposition, and this significantly shapes how user-product relationships initiate and unfold over time.Vargo (2009) argues that value is not an intrinsic property of goods that can be dispersed to users.Rather, organizations can only offer users value propositions: opportunities to cocreate value in relationship with the organization and its products.Within organizations, strong value propositions clarify prioritization and decision-making (Straker and Nusem 2019).UX research focused on identifying and refining resonant value propositions for target user segments, as well as locating marketing channels through which to cultivate awareness and confidence in value propositions, is critical to a product's marketing and brand strategies.Once a product is adopted, UX outcomes can be benchmarked against the product's proposed value, and researchers can identify means of repairing the user-product relationship when experiences fall short of expectations.
An increasingly critical facet of user-product relationships focused on by the UX research community is user trust.Trust in products and organizations can be conceptualized as consisting of three main factors-namely, feelings that the product or organization is 1) benevolent, 2) competent, and 3) acts with integrity (Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman 1995).Users are much more likely to forgive a company and products for mistakes if they have developed trust in them (Joireman, Grégoire, and Tripp 2016).When user trust declines, it can produce abrupt and irrecoverable damage (Bozic 2017).This has happened to even the most seemingly indestructible institutions-for example, the Northern Rock bank run (Gillespie and Cornish 2013).UX researchers measure and monitor user trust as well as generate strategies that scaffold its formation and preservation.
It is worth noting that some UX practitioners argue that certain phenomena raised here as belonging to the Macro World of UX, entangled though they may be with "core" UX concerns like user journeys, are better left to other (non-UX) research specializations traditionally more concentrated on issues of brand, market, and customer experience (Roto et al. 2011).Though this argument is in keeping with the historical roots of UX research, it diverges from the perspective of this article since UX researchers in applied settings-at Google, for instance-reliably face questions of brand affinity, trust, market positioning, for example, and the answers to such questions are significantly shaped by lower realms of UX.Moreover, UX researchers often possess methodological toolkits wellsuited for such questions and operate in proximity to the product, marketing, and operations teams who ask them.

Example: A Hotel Booking Smartphone App
To illustrate how the Micro, Meso, and Macro Worlds of UX tie together, let's consider a hypothetical hotel booking smartphone application a product team wishes to develop.
Suppose a lower-order goal users must undertake within the Micro World of UX is that of choosing a hotel from search results that the app returns based on criteria they have entered-namely, the dates and location of travel.The app could facilitate this in many ways given the underlying technology powering the app and the affordances of the User trust is an increasingly critical facet of user-product relationships focused on by the UX research community.
smartphone itself.Nevertheless, a UX researcher must identify an ideal strategy from the user's perspective.They may start by interviewing users of existing hotel booking apps or other booking services and discover that, when perusing search results, users appreciate high-quality images paired with clear indications of price and amenities.Research may also reveal that crucial to compelling users to select a hotel is social proof from other customers (ratings).Once the information required to elicit a selection is known, the researcher can work with their design and content strategy counterparts to iron out how best to present visual components that scaffold necessary tasks.Design metaphors may inspire an elegant way to demarcate individual search results-for example, enclosing them in silhouetted "cards" that give each result a raised, button-like quality that primes the user's intuition as to where to tap with their finger to make selections.Usability studies can stress-test chosen approaches and reveal other means of optimization (Figure 1).
Selecting a hotel from search results is a lower-order goal along a critical user journey toward the higher-order goal of successfully making a booking.Bringing this Meso World of UX phenomenon to life may begin with the UX team mapping out other lower-order goals that accompany hotel selection-for example, initiating a new hotel search, choosing a room, and entering payment information.A UX engineer might build low-fidelity interactive prototypes of these steps with which the researcher can conduct usability studies to identify optimal path sequencing and in-product feedback requirements.Optional steps-like linking a rewards program to a booking-might be identified, added, and tested until the journey is robustly defined end-to-end.The UX team would work to ensure that the various elements presented along the journey are harmonious with each other and consistent with the app's overall design system and content strategy.Once the full end-to-end journey is designed, the UX team may develop a high-fidelity prototype to facilitate final user testing and evaluate software implementation alternatives before the journey is formally productionized.Across this process, the researcher might develop a holistic set of journey evaluation metrics (using HEART, for example) for when the journey is ultimately "live" with actual users of the app (Figure 2).
Suppose the developers of this app aspire for broad market adoption.This requires more than the sleek design of tasks and user journeys.It requires a Macro World of UX composed of fulfilling user-product relationships.Thus, a UX researcher might oversee a segmentation analysis to understand how travelers disaggregate into distinct groups according to trait dimensions related to their accommodation needs.Current booking services can be overlaid onto these segments to identify where opportune needs-gaps exist.Segments can be more deeply explored via segment-specific surveys and FIGURE 1.The Micro World of UX.The focus is on individual perceptions, tasks, tools, and decision-making moments as users act toward lowerorder goals.In this example, users are propelled toward selecting a hotel via interactive UI elements as well as text and image content that provides information relevant to choice-making.
interviews.One segment might prioritize lifestyle needs when booking accommodations.Another might over-index on requiring family-oriented hotels.Yet another might skew toward work-related travel and prefer accommodations near financial districts.From this landscape, the UX team may craft personas for each segment to inspire feature ideationfor example, "Lauren the lifestyle traveler who desires hotels that nourish her need for wellness and adventure."These can help point the team toward specific features to develop, such as a robust search-filtering taxonomy-that is, a way to give users an ability to exclude from the app's search results hotels that do not offer their preferred amenities.The team may even contemplate an algorithm that learns about individual user preferences based on how they typically use search filtering and the characteristics of the hotels they ultimately book, the idea being that over time this might allow for personalized hotel recommendations and bundled offers.As needs-fulfilling features take shape, a resonant value proposition may emerge that encapsulates the notion that the booking app offers an opportunity for travelers to conveniently find the hotel best-suited for their unique needsfor example, "Don't just find a hotel, find your hotel."This value proposition can anchor the UX team and their cross-functional counterparts as new features and user journeys are ongoingly ideated, developed, added to the app, and evaluated over time (Figure 3).

Managerial Implications
Speaking from personal experience, developing and leveraging the Worlds of UX framework has proven valuable for team development and prioritization, as well as for engendering user-centric product cultures by way of stakeholder-relationship mapping.
If managing a small UX team, I find it ideal to staff it with a researcher who is methodologically flexible, given that research execution will fall on their shoulders no matter the World of UX requiring attention.This strategy has ramifications for recruiting and hiring decisions-namely, a preference for researchers trained in fields that see broad methodological exposure (like social psychology or behavioral economics).If managing early-career researchers, my strategy is to gradually expose them to projects spanning different Worlds of UX so that they gain familiarity with each and over time feel empowered to gravitate toward a specialization or remain broad in their remit.
Based on where we are in a product's lifecycle, planning and prioritization may demand disproportionate research attention toward a particular World of UX.When I worked on Google Fi Wireless, for instance, the product had only been in-market for a few years and the research that was required very much skewed toward the Macro World of UX, which clarified our user segmentation and value proposition as we set our sights on broader market penetration and differentiation from established mobile service providers.In the absence of any obvious need to prioritize one realm over others, however, my managerial philosophy is to seek a balanced portfolio of research projects that give more or less equal attention to each World of UX.
Maintaining a balanced portfolio allows the voice of the user as distilled through UX research to influence a broad array of organizational stakeholders who map to different Worlds of UX based on their remit.Front-end engineers are natural counterparts to UX researchers who home in on Micro World of UX phenomena; product managers and systems engineers tend to appreciate FIGURE 2. The Meso World of UX.The focus is on user journeys, which are end-to-end sequences of lower-order goals that complete a high-order goal.In this example, some of the lower-order goals necessary to successfully book a hotel are shown.Notice the step-by-step congruity among design patterns and content elements.
insights garnered from the Meso World of UX; and business development strategists and marketing managers gravitate toward learnings from the Macro World of UX.
I advise product developers to consider these Worlds of UX alongside the concept of UX maturity: an organization's "consistency of research and design processes, resources, tools, and operations, as well as the organization's propensity to support and strengthen UX now and in the future, through its leadership, workforce, and culture" (Pernice et al. 2021).The stages of UX maturity range from absent-where UX practices are non-existent or unorganized-to limited, emergent, structured, integrated, and, ultimately, user-driven-where there is investment in UX at all levels of product development, with UX research fully integrated into product decision-making processes.Achieving research coverage of the various Worlds of UX, as well as devising organizational mechanisms to implement insights from each realm, can thus be seen as prerequisites to attaining higher states of UX maturity.

Conclusion
Users inhabit each World of UX simultaneously.Thus this framework places emphasis on "nestedness," with the total phenomenology of experience being the ongoing result of interdependent systems and subsystems of perception, action, thought, and emotion.UX is not reducible to mere usability, utility, or attitude, nor any other narrow construal.As with fields like economics, ecology, and other sciences of complex nested systems, UX research at its best accumulates and integrates knowledge across scale dimensions in order to understand causal pathways and theorize as to how forces within lower realms influence higher realms and vice versa.The outcome is a continually sharpening image of what truly shapes users' experiences and thereby what organizations can ultimately tap into to innovate.Should the Worlds of UX framework empower organizations accordingly, no matter their prior familiarity with UX, then this article's aims will have been achieved.
I would like to acknowledge a few UX research colleagues and mentors who inspired the thinking in this article: Chris Chapman, Dawn Shaikh, Sören Preibusch, Utkarsh Seth, Nancy Bell, and Felix

FIGURE 3 .
FIGURE 3. The Macro World of UX.The focus is on user-product relationships.In this example, a hypothetical segmentation that differentiates users by their hotel needs is shown.
Understanding the Micro, Meso, and Macro Worlds of User Experience A Framework Outlining Research Competencies that Propel User-centered Innovation The Worlds of UX framework presented can help companies home in on what truly shapes users' experiences and thereby discern what they can tap into to innovate more effectively.