Scoping UX: Why Research and Design Scoping are Different
Constrain the challenge space, broaden the solution space — Stanford d.school
Context: As the project manager (or coordinator, I prefer) for my CMU capstone team, I am facing the challenge of “determining the scope of the project”. I found it challenging — not because of the constraints I am facing, but because I realize that scoping a project is not something a typical HCI program teaches you.
Why scoping?
Constrain the challenge space, broaden the solution space — Stanford d.school
I think the sentence succinctly summarizes what scoping does. It’s about framing the challenge and expecting creative solutions.
What to scope?
In a typical class or capstone project, you do “end-to-end” design, meaning you have research, interaction design, and visual design all in one project. So typically you have only one scope — which is handed to you in the project brief by the Professor.
It took me some trials and errors and experiments to understand that project, research and design scope are different.
Research scope
I come to understand that — research scope is about what to explore in a study. It can be large or small, and design work may or may not follow. For instance, a research scope can be as large as —
To figure out the new ways city folks adopt to facilitate work-life balance during the quarantine.
…or it could be more embedded in the iterative process of design —
To figure out why returning users purchase (or not purchase) the fitness app after a 7-day free trial.
In my humble opinion, research scope should be invoking. It invites you to think about the key research questions and methods when seeing it.
Design scope
Design scope should be about what is the problem you are trying to solve, assuming you have a basic knowledge about the content and users, and you have taken other constraints into considerations.
Seems abstract, let me give an example —
To redesign the Spotify music discovery experience for users who constantly share music with friends in one week
Research vs. Design Scope
Whereas a good design scope usually leads to ideation, more ideas surfaced and more hypotheses tested, the research scope usually leads to more exploration, more questions and more unknown.
So these two are different. Later I realize if we mix up research and design scope, it might hinder the logical coherence of the project. For instance, let’s say the scope for a health app project is —
Understand the needs of teenager users to design the weekly progress report for a health-related app
This is not a well-scoped project because it implies the results of the research on teenage users will naturally lead to the design of the weekly progress report — which constrains the solution space while at the same time restrain the impact of research.
Disclaimer: every scope here is made up by me, not affiliated with any organization. If they are bad scoping, it’s on me.
Who is doing the scoping?
In school projects, a lot of people are doing the scoping, but mainly it is —
- The Professors, or
- You, as a student designer
However, in a more realistic project, it is usually jointly set by the client (or project stakeholder), designers, engineers, PMs, researchers (I’m taking a guess here as I don’t really have full-time working experience), so there will be a lot coordination and expectation setting.
For me, that’s what makes a project exciting — not just the freedom to scope a new project, but also working around the constraints to scope a project that works.
Scoping is hard. But figuring out what to scope and who are you scoping with is already progress toward a well-framed project scope. #Keep learning.
