The User Experience Honeycomb
In 2004 Peter Morville wrote a pretty cool article about an idea he called the User Experience Honeycomb. It’s really brilliant. I’ve used the honeycomb example a million times when talking about UX.
I printed it out and hung it on the wall in my office.
I showed it to friends, colleagues and clients.
I loved it.
But…after a while I didn’t love it as much.
Not the idea – all of these elements have to be in place for the user to find value in the product and have a positive user experience – I’ll always believe in that.
What I didn’t like, or rather what seemed to be missing, was the idea of consequences.
With the honeycomb it seemed as if if one area was lacking, the other five could pick up the slack and still deliver a valuable user experience.
That may not be the case in the wild.
So I started rearranging the shapes and came up with a little different layout, which I call…
The User Experience Bridge
The way I’ve seen things work is that not all honeycomb cells were created equally.
I see the users’ experience as more linear, like crossing a bridge.
They want to get to their goal or destination and the way they get there is through your user experience.
Some bridges are big and strong and well made, others may not so much.
At any point in their journey over your bridge they can stumble and slip and fall into the icy rivers of discontent and have a bad user experience (which is typically followed by them telling their friends and circle of influence about their terrible user experience).
They probably won’t return to your bridge, but if you’re the only one in town they might try again and again but they’ll eventually leave if your bridge is too risky or dangerous or irritating.
What makes things tricky is each user has their own tolerances before they proceed or fall off. Our goal as UX professionals is to craft the bridge as well as we can using standards, best practices and primary and secondary research.
The other thing I like about the idea of a bridge vs. a honeycomb is the starting point.
With the honeycomb all six elements seem to have equal weight or importance – I think that’s a little unrealistic.
I put findability and accessibility as the first two steps.
If you have the most usable, desirable, useful and credible site or app ever and people can’t find it then you’ve got customers in the water.
If users find your site or app and there are accessibility issues, you’ve got customers in the water.
So when designing a user experience, remember the bridge and keep your visitors safe and dry.
uxo 