What I learned from designing from hundreds to millions of users

At the beginning of my UX career, I use to design stuff that was used for hundreds of users, then it reached thousands and now I design for millions. I’m currently working at Motorola and it has been an awesome experience to be part of a global team that designs a full experience from device to app.

Recently I was invited to speak about the UX design process behind an app. And when I was preparing the presentation, I decided to focus not only on the current one but also in the important things I learned in my career that shaped the process I run today. And the easiest way I found to present it was by separating the challenges I faced designing for hundreds, thousands, and millions of users:

When designing for hundreds of users

1. Learn to fall in love with the problem you are working on, not with the solution you are exploring.
2. It’s hard to trust on data at the beginning, especially if it’s an early stage product. Your first users are probably early adopters and not the big mass of users you plan to reach.
3. There is a big chance that you are the only designer, so you need to do all the UX, UI, and UR work and prove the value of investing in design.
4. Feel free to try all the methods you read and learn about, at this stage, your design process is also a prototype and you are able to refine it.
5. Put some effort in learning how to conduct a user testing, it’s not an easy task.

When designing for thousands of users

1. Your team starts to grow, it’s time to have a routine with design critique sessions so the designers can know what others are working and share constructive feedback.
2. Co-creation is a cool thing to try, invite users to work with your team for some days and let them be part of the solution.
3. Styleguides for visual components are mandatory, it’s the best way to maintain your product consistent when you have more than one designer working on it.
4. Find a way to document your learnings, other designers may need it.
5. You don’t need to be a unicorn anymore, if you choose to follow the UX path as I did, you probably now have the support of a User Interface designer and a User Research also if you are lucky.

When designing for millions of users

1. Multi-language is a big thing, and your layout needs to support all the variations that come with it.
2. Data is your partner and 1% is a lot, you need to understand what this amount means in your product. Is it ok to lose this amount of users in order to reach a new niche in the market?
3. When you are looking for feedback, don’t skip the 5-star reviews of your app on Google Play or App Store. Some user gives valuable feedback on this kind of review, they rate it high because they are attached to the brand, even if they had a hard time using it.
4. You are probably part of a global team working in different parts of the world, it’s a shared responsibility maintain the consistency of the product don’t matter how big the team gets.
5. You need to prove more than ever that your decision is based on research, and by it, I don’t mean only user testing and data analysis. But also that you are sure that the change you are proposing will not affect marketing, business, support, or any other team.

Your own process

Focus on be a great problem solver and refine your process in a way that you can aways learn with it and have fun applying, don’t matter the number of users you are designing for.