From User Experience Design by Peter Morville (06/21/2004)

…I’ve found the infamous three circle diagram to be a great tool for explaining how and why we must strike a unique balance on each project between business goals and context, user needs and behavior, and the available mix of content.

Figure 1. The Three Circles of Information Architecture (courtesy of Peter Morville)

While this diagram was conceived with IA in mind, it’s equally useful for explaining UX. In conjunction with Jesse’s masterpiece, I use the three circles to illustrate the distinction between user experience and user-centered design. I’m still not convinced UCD exists outside the realm of theory, but I practice user experience design every day.

Facets of the User Experience

When I broadened my interest from IA to UX, I found the need for a new diagram to illustrate the facets of user experience - especially to help clients understand why they must move beyond usability - and so with a little help from my friends developed the user experience honeycomb.

Figure 2. The User Experience Honeycomb

Naturally, the jump from three circles to seven hexagons gave me an instant buzz, but after several months of road testing, I can safely say this diagram has survived the honeymoon.

Here’s how I explain each facet or quality of the user experience:

• Useful. As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines drawn by managers. We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our deep knowledge of craft and medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.
• Usable. Ease of use remains vital, and yet the interface-centered methods and perspectives of human-computer interaction do not address all dimensions of web design. In short, usability is necessary but not sufficient.
• Desirable. Our quest for efficiency must be tempered by an appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design.
• Findable. We must strive to design navigable web sites and locatable objects, so users can find what they need.
• Accessible. Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10% of the population). Today, it’s good business and the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law.
• Credible. Thanks to the Web Credibility Project, we’re beginning to understand the design elements that influence whether users trust and believe what we tell them.
• Valuable. Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.

The honeycomb hits the “sweet spot” by serving several purposes at once. 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.

Second, this model supports a modular approach to web design. Let’s say you want to improve your site but lack the budget, time, or stomach for a complete overhaul. Why not try a targeted redesign, perhaps starting with Stanford’s ten guidelines as a resource for evaluating and enhancing the credibility of your web site?

Third, each facet of the user experience honeycomb can serve as a singular looking glass, transforming how we see what we do, and enabling us to explore beyond conventional boundaries.

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And from a later post User Experience Strategy, also by Peter Morville [excerpted]

From Design to Strategy

Jesse James Garrett famously defined user experience design in a great diagram and an even better book:

Businesses have now come to recognize that providing a quality user experience is an essential, sustainable competitive advantage. It is user experience that forms the customer’s impression of the company’s offerings, it is user experience that differentiates the company from its competitors, and it is user experience that determines whether your customer will ever come back.

Similarly, Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman explain that user experience design “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” And, Nathan Shedroff positions user experience design as “an approach to creating successful experiences for people in any medium.”

A great deal has been written about user experience design but only recently has much ink been spilled on the subject of user experience strategy. I suspect there are a couple of reasons for the new focus. First, the elevated stature of user experience and design thinking in the business world have opened doors in the executive suite. Designers have a real opportunity to influence strategy. Second, we’re nearing an inflection point in an expanding set of markets, beyond which traditional product design is rendered obsolete.

Experience Ecologies

As we’re increasingly able to embed information and intelligence in physical objects connected via ubiquitous wireless networks, such concepts as open source, open APIs, mashups, co-creation, and findability are rapidly and irrevocably escaping the confines of the Web.

Adam Greenfield encapsulates the ensuing erosion of distinctions between “product” and “service” and the importance of “beautiful seams” in On the Ground Running, a brilliant piece that explores and eviscerates the iPod, Nike+, and Amtrak Acela ecologies.

Peter Merholz offers a valuable and complementary perspective in Experience IS the Product, and his partner Jesse James Garret, in a mesmerizing podcast on Experience Strategies, drives home the absolute imperative of designing from the outside-in.

Jared Spool positions what’s going on as a simple progression toward market maturity from technology to features to experience to integration. I’m sure Jared’s right, but this framing misses the real story. The way we conceptualize products, services, and brands is changing. We can glimpse the destination in Bruce Sterling’s spime and Julian Bleecker’s blogjects, but the journey has already begun, which is why we’re talking so much about user experience strategy.

It’s About Futurity

As Michael Raynor explains in The Strategy Paradox, strategy and futurity are inextricably bound together:

Most strategies are built on specific beliefs about the future. Unfortunately, the future is deeply unpredictable. Worse, the requirements of breakthrough success demand implementing strategy in ways that make it impossible to adapt should the future not turn out as expected. The result is the Strategy Paradox: strategies with the greatest possibility of success also have the greatest possibility of failure. Resolving this paradox requires a new way of thinking about strategy and uncertainty.

Raynor argues that to manage uncertainty, companies must build scenarios of the future, and identify strategies and strategic options for each possible future. I’d argue that those who develop user experience strategy would do well to embrace this framing in futurity.

For while our work certainly supports incremental progress towards better usability, findability, and credibility, user experience methods are equally well-suited to disruptive innovation. In the deep dives of design research, we gain insight into the latent needs of users, and with our sketches, mental models, and prototypes we bring greater richness and depth to the exploration of possible, probable, and preferable futures.

In short, we are futurists.

Peter Morville is co-author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large Scale Web Sites,” published in 2006 by O’Reilly Media.