Peter Morville is an Information Architecture and UX veteran. With his books and articles, he taught people how to store, organize, and retrieve information in the right way. And he did it all at a time when the web was in its nascent stage, we millennials used to call ourselves web designers, and the term “UX” wasn’t even heard of.
His face always remind me of two things:
- A book with a polar bear on its cover, and
- A honeycomb structure
What a wonderful time it was! BTW the book’s name is Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. And the honeycomb structure is known as “The Facets of the UX”. You can read the book in your own time, but meanwhile let’s see what these facets of the UX are.
Facet in Psychology
In psychology, a facet is a unique aspect of your personality. And humans have multifaceted personalities. Heard of the Japanese 3 faces theory?
The Japanese 3 Face Theory
According to this, you have 3 different faces, or 3 versions of yourself:
- The first one you show to the world.
- The second you show to your close friends and family.
- The last you never show to anyone. It is the truest reflection of who you are!
Fascinating, right? You can also use a technique called “The Johari Window” to know more about yourself or to better understand your relations with others.
The Johari Window
To figure out where you stand in a relationship, just put the following 2 parameters on vertical and horizontal axis respectively:
- How willing you are to disclose personal thoughts with others.
- How open you are to receive feedback from others.
Now, put your mark on both of these axes and draw a straight line from them to create a graph. Also, enclose both axes to create 4 quadrants.
- Open Area: what you both know about you.
- Hidden Area: what you know about yourself but others don’t.
- Blind Spot: what others know about you but you don’t know about yourself.
- Unknown: what neither you nor others know about you.
It’s a great tool to keep in your arsenal to either learn about your blind spots or your users’. You also realize that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know and that keeps you humble.
It’s enough psychology. Let’s go back to our topic: The facets of the UX.
User Experience Honeycomb
Keep in mind that the facets of the UX and UX honeycomb are the same thing. So you can use the terms interchangeably. And just like gemstones have facets cut into them to improve their appearance, the facets of the UX improve the overall product. They
- list more characteristics of good UX other than just usability.
- help to prioritize the improvement of a product one facet at one time.
- act as different lenses that you can use to deeply scrutinize a product.
There are a total of 7 facets: useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible and valuable. I have already written at length about the first 3 facets i.e., useful, usable, desirable. If you want to read about them just go ahead to the “Characteristics of good UX” or just stick here to get an overview.
1. Useful
A product which is not useful is not a product at all and useful doesn’t always mean something that helps you to finish a task. Usefulness could also be playing a game on your smartphone. So although you’re not doing any meaningful work, you’re enjoying/killing your time, the product is being useful to engage you (even at your wedding).
And if you notice, most of the popular products whether they are from
- social media such as FB, X, TikTok or
- gaming like Minecraft, PUBG, Roblox or
- messaging such as Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram or
- streaming like Netflix, Hulu, Prime or
- e‑com such as Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra
do nothing but help you to kill time. So usefulness is the first and the most important facet of good UX.
2. Usable
A product should be easy to use. If you have to choose between 10 products that help you to kill your time, you usually go with the most efficient one. But should efficiency be the only quality that you look for in a usable product? Because it’s easy to look at a product and tell whether it is functional or not but how do you define usability.
Jakob Nielsen, the OG, in his book Usability Engineering suggests 5 qualities of a usable product: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors (low rate, easy to recover), and satisfaction.
I like a checklist from Whitney Quesenbery (because it’s easy to remember) which more or less talks about the same qualities. It’s called Balancing the 5Es — Usability.
balancing the 5es — usability
- Effective: How accurately the product helps you to achieve your goals.
- Efficient: How quickly the work can be done with accuracy.
- Engaging: How pleasant or satisfying an interface is to use.
- Error tolerant: How well the product prevents errors and helps users recover from errors that do occur.
- Easy to learn: How well the product supports both initial orientation and deeper learning.
3. Desirable
A product should be able to invoke feelings into you. Emotions play a big role in decision making. The iPhone is a desirable product. Isn’t it? If it’s not then how would you explain the long queues outside Apple stores whenever they release a new version?
Don Norman in his classic Emotional Design, talks about how emotions play with us into 3 different levels.
- Visceral
- Behavioral
- Reflective
On the visceral level, your emotions take the driver’s seat. Don’t you wonder how someone who didn’t do anything good for you but even then you like him/her. On the contrary someone who didn’t do anything bad for you but even then you hate him/her.
Love at first sight is caused by strong feelings and not careful thought. If you desire a product so much that you don’t even care whether it’s gonna be useful or not, understand that it’s visceral thinking in play.
On the behavioral level, emotions are still there but rather than come into play immediately, they come when you find a product/person that works/behaves great. Sometimes you don’t like a person until you talk to him/her and then you realize how wrong you were in the first place.
Similarly there are products which don’t give a good first impression but are beast underneath. For example, Maruti Suzuki cars — whether it’s Swift, Alto, WagonR, Brezza etc. look like tin cans running on roads. They don’t have any safety features but they’re the most-selling cars in India.
Third is the reflective level where a product might not look or even work so great but either
- it has its own story that makes it worthwhile to have, or
- it invokes memories into you, or
- it reflects who you truly are, or
- it could be an object around which a great conversation can happen.
That’s why your parents are so attached to their old table fan, pressure cooker, almirah, sewing machine etc. and don’t want to throw them out. They are not trash, but mementoes and have memories attached to them. Memories of their wedding, honeymoon, first home, your birth etc.
That is why Tom Hanks in Cast Away starts to cry when a volleyball he personified as Wilson gets lost into the sea. How could he not, he had spent 4 years with it on a deserted island, he has memories with it.
4. Findable
If you can’t find what you are looking for in a product then it doesn’t matter how good its other facets of UX are. For example, let’s say you go to Netflix to watch a movie but you can’t find it. Now, as a user, you don’t care
- how fast Netflix is, or
- how large a movie catalog it has, or
- how cheap its subscription plan costs
it’s still a bad product if it doesn’t help you to find what you’re looking for.
On the other hand, Amazon struggles with a different type of findability issue. Here, a search for a typical product returns so many similar results that confuse the hell out of you. Today you
- can read all these products’ reviews, or
- compare them side-by-side, or
- buy as cheap or as expensive as your pocket allows
but even then it has become too difficult to make a decision. There are so many similar fake products in almost every category that to find an actual good product among them has become finding a needle in a haystack.
That’s why we are now seeing products that do nothing but curating, and also D2C brands that manufacture a few things and serve a specific market.
5. Accessible
A product should be easily accessible to everyone regardless of their disability. Mind you, a disability could be situational, temporary, or permanent. For example, a few days back I was watching cricket and didn’t want to disturb my family so I muted the audio. It was a demand of the situation for me to feel like someone who is deaf. It’s an example of situational disability.
Similarly in a nightclub, it’s difficult to have a conversation because of the loud music. I read they do it intentionally so you spend less time talking and more time chugging their expensive drinks. Whatever the reason is, I feel partially deaf as long as I’m there.
Other than physical, a disability could be cognitive or something else that is not a disability in a typical sense. For example, my mother doesn’t understand English so she can’t use an Indian government website because there is no option to change language. So that’s also an accessibility issue.
My father knows English but he has a fine motor disability. His shaking hands make it difficult for him to click on small buttons on their website. Similarly, old people have vision problems. They can’t read smaller fonts or can’t differentiate between low contrast objects etc. So whenever you build a product, prioritize accessibility from the beginning.
6. Credible
Being credible means a product that people can put their trust on. There are a few industry-standards that you can follow to make people trust your product. For example:
- Secure your website with SSL/TLS Certificates
- Provide your contact details along with social proofs
- Add trust badges if you collect payments online
- Build a professional-looking product
But building real credibility takes time. You have to provide a consistent good experience for a long time to earn it. The brand is nothing but the credibility associated with a business and to build this reputation, businesses spend millions of dollars every year. But once they become a brand, once they earn people’s trust, then they can set their own rules, standards, and credibility measures.
That’s why whenever you hear the words Apple, Google, Philips, Toyota, you expect a high-quality product or service. You feel safe when you shop on Amazon as compared to any random e‑commerce website or put your trust in Apple rather than Xiaomi, Redmi or Oppo, Vivo.
7. Valuable
At the end of the day, a product should be valuable to all its stakeholders whether they’re business people or customers or anyone in between. In the UX honeycomb, “Valuable” sits right at the heart’s place. And without the heart the surrounding parts don’t matter.
Similarly, it’s possible to create a product considering all the facets in mind but still forget to provide any value. And without value, nothing matters.
For example, back in the day, Nokia was the largest worldwide vendor of mobile phones. Their phones were effective, easy to use, robust, and relatively cheap in price. And as it was doing it for a long time, people used to trust Nokia. It had all the aforementioned characteristics and more but despite all that it couldn’t remain valuable for its stakeholders. Similarly, Tupperware also met the same fate.
Look, every product starts its journey in the hope that one day it’ll become valuable for its business and users and some do but unfortunately most don’t. To always be in the market, you need a vision and innovation. You have to spend big on talent and R&D. And even after that you still have to cross your fingers and hope that one day the stars will align in your favor.
So it doesn’t matter how good your product is, if you can’t sell it and if it can’t generate money, it’s a bad product.
So these are all the facets or characteristics of UX that help you to recognize a good design. Next, you’ll see the building blocks of UX — the components that actually facilitate a user’s experience. Let’s go.