Morville's User Experience Honeycomb

June 21, 2004 | 3 Comments

From Jesse James Garrett’s classic Elements of User Experience (PDF) to all the killer three-circle diagrams out there, I’ve been a huge fan of visual representations of what people do.

While consulting up in Edmonton back in March I saw perhaps my favorite so far: Peter Morville’s (with help from QLTD) User Experience Honeycomb. I’ve been waiting for Peter to get it up and “published” and now he’s done that.

You can see it and learn more about it over here.

What I love most about it is its “wholeness” — it takes seven unique pieces of what makes a great user experience and pulls them together in a way I find very appealing and very useful. The write up that goes along with it is pretty good as well.

I’ve also seen the honeycomb in practice and it really works well. When Peter says:

First, it’s a great tool for advancing the conversation beyond usability and for helping people understand the need to define priorities. Is it more important for your web site to be desirable or accessible? How about usable or credible? The truth is, it depends on your unique balance of context, content and users, and the required tradeoffs are better made explicitly than unconsciously.

He really means it. It’s an awesome and easy to understand visual tool to help get people who might not “get” user experience design involved and talking about coming to that balance that makes for a great user experience.

Thanks Peter, you da man.

Filed under: IA and Usability

Comments

1. Kevin said:

This is really neat. Peter taught a course in Information Architecture I took last fall at U of M (he does some teaching in addition to his work at Semantic Studios) and he used this diagram to explain these concepts. I recommend reading his book and other publications and spending some time heeding his advice. He has a lot of knowledge that he is willing to share that can be extremely useful when doing IA. Some of it will seem like common sense to experienced web designers, but some of it may be things you have never been able to verbalize effectively. In particular look at his writings on findability for larger web sites.

Posted on June 21, 2004 07:03 PM | #

2. Irfandhy Franciscus said:

Hi,

I have to say IA is an eye opener. It’s a shame that most IT projects these days only cares about how to get the job done in the shortest amount of time, without any concern with the user experience in the process. I am not sure what I mention here represents the entire globe.

But from where I am now, Singapore, Business entities e.g: the government, are overly excited to jump into the bandwagon of e-commerce.

They are such in a hurry to build websites that they claimed to enable people to do transaction easily. But at the end they end up with obscure websites that is so difficult to navigate.

I hear client complain they cannot even apply for applications in our new gov. Health Care website.

I hope that IA will have a bright future. And it is nice to have great people like you supporting it.

Love the articles that you posted here ^___^

Posted on June 22, 2004 07:27 AM | #

3. Keith said:

Irfandhy – Thanks! And you are too right. IA should be one of the most important parts of any Web project. The bigger the project, the more important it is. Sure with some smaller gigs, it might not be that big a deal, but still – it’s needed no matter what.

Posted on June 22, 2004 09:35 AM | #