UX STRATEGY
Most teams equate great UX with "easy to use." After 6 years designing SaaS & client focus products, I've learned that usability is only one lever of seven. Here's the framework I run every product through before it ships, and the questions I ask at each step.
Ask 10 people what "good UX" means and most will describe usability, clean flows, obvious buttons, nothing that makes you think. They're not wrong, they're just incomplete. Usability is where our field started, and it's still the part everyone can see. But it's one instrument in a much larger console.
The model I keep coming back to is Peter Morville's UX honeycomb. Morville a genuine pioneer of information architecture, argued that a product's experience is shaped by seven qualities, not one. I've found it to be the most useful gut-check a team can run before launch, precisely because it forces the conversation past "is it easy?" and into "is it worth using at all?"
What follows is each factor in plain terms, why it moves the needle for the business as much as the user, and a short checklist I actually use in design reviews. Read it as a diagnostic: the factor your product is quietly failing is usually the one nobody's talking about.
01
If a product doesn't solve a real problem for someone, nothing downstream matters. It can't compete for attention in a market already crowded with tools that do have point. Utility is the price of entry.
The catch is that "useful" lives in the eye of the beholder. Value isn't only practical delight, beauty, and play are legitimate outcomes. A game or a beautifully made object can be deeply useful without helping anyone check a box on a to-do list. Part of my job is naming which kind of usefulness we're actually designing for, because teams that can't answer that tend to build features nobody asked for.
ASK BEFORE YOU SHIP
Can we state the core job in one sentence, without jargon?
Who feels the pain today, and how do they cope without us?
If this feature vanished tomorrow, would anyone notice?
02
Usability is whether people can reach their goal effectively and efficiently, without fighting the interface. It's the factor our discipline grew up on, and it's still the one stakeholders point to first. A product can survive being hard to use, but it rarely wins that way.
Poor usability is the signature of a first-generation product. Early MP3 players existed years before the iPod; they lost the market the moment something genuinely easier arrived. The iPod wasn't first. It was the first that felt effortless and effortless is what people pay for.
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03
Findability works on two levels: people have to be able to find your product, and onceinside it, they have to be able to find what they came for. Both are silent conversionkillers. If a user can't locate the thing, from a purchase decision to a settings toggle, itmay as well not exist.
Picture a newspaper where every story is placed at random instead of under Sports, Business, or Culture. Nothing is technically missing, yet reading it is miserable. That's what weak information architecture feels like from the inside, and it's the factor teams most often mistake for "we just need better search."
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04
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Modern users don't handout second chances, every category has enough alternatives that a broken promise is reason enough to leave. Credibility is your permission to keep the relationship.
It's more than the product doing its job. It's whether it will hold up over time, whether the information around it is accurate, and whether the claims match reality. You cannot deliver an experience to someone who suspects the maker is careless or dishonest, they've already mentally moved on. In design, credibility is built in small, boring, consistent signals: honest empty states, error messages that own the problem, no dark patterns.
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05
Two cars can both be useful, usable, findable, credible, and accessible, and one still be the one you'd actually choose. Given a free Porsche or a free Škoda, most people don't Drop a supporting image (e.g. product / craft detail) or browse files hesitate. Škoda isn't undesirable; it sells plenty. Desire is simply the tiebreaker when the rational boxes are all checked.
Desirability is carried by branding, identity, aesthetics, and emotional design, the parts of the experience that make someone want to be associated with your product. And it compounds: a desirable product turns its users into advocates, and their bragging creates desire in the next person. That's the cheapest growth you'll ever get.
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06
Accessibility is the factor that quietly falls off the roadmap, usually because some one assumes it serves a tiny minority. The numbers say otherwise: in the U.S. alone, at least 1 in 5 people live with a disability, vision, hearing, motor, or cognitive. Designing them out isn't an edge case; it's forfeiting a fifth of your market.
Here's what I remind teams: accessible design almost always makes the product better for everyone. Captions help in loud rooms, high contrast helps in sunlight, clear language helps the rushed and the distracted. And increasingly it's not optional accessibility is a legal requirement across the EU and many other jurisdictions. Treating it as a late-stage audit is how you end up rebuilding what you should have designed correctly the first time.
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07
Finally, the experience has to deliver value in both directions, to the person using it and to the business paying to build it. Nail the other 6 factors but miss this one, and any early traction eventually erodes. Value is what makes an experience sustainable.
Value is also the sharpest input into a buying decision, and the math is unforgiving. A $100 product that solves a $10,000 problem practically sells itself. A $10,000product that solves a $100 problem is a very hard conversation. As designers we don't set the price, but we absolutely shape the perceived value, how quickly someone feels the payoff, and how clearly the product proves it was worth it.
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THE TAKEAWAY
Use the honeycomb as a diagnostic, not a checklist. In most reviews, six factors are fine and one is quietly failing. Find that one, that's where the next real improvement in your experience is hiding.
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