A small amendment to the classic diagram hopefully improves its UX 😉

Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb is a well-established and extremely popular visualization tool, which depicts the 7 aspects of the user experience. Since its creation in 2004 it has featured in numerous books and articles, its been translated and canonized, to the point that it now serves as a pretty standard response to the question “what constitutes a good experience?”.

As with most theoretical diagrams, its typically used as a teaching tool to help students and new practitioners get to grips with the basics of UX, although it also works well as a checklist for designers and content creators.

As a UX trainer I frequently refer to the honeycomb in my courses and even though it covers all facets of UX effectively, it also feels quite problematic to me. There seems to be no connection between the 7 elements, or logic as to the where in the honeycomb they are positioned. When attempting to deconstruct and explain it during training courses, it just ends up being a list of items in random order. I always felt that it didn’t help students either understand or remember those 7 important elements. …

Providing some clarity around the ever-changing landscape of UX roles (also, please stop adding UX to any job title).

Not sure which is cooler these days: adding “UX” to any given title, or adding “design” to it? Why not combine the two, which skyrockets you to coolness levels unreachable by other professions? UX Designers, or even worse, Experience Designers sound like they’re akin to a god, up on a high and mighty throne, pulling the strings, influencing, crafting, designing experiences.

Not only that, but it seems like every man and his dog are designing experiences too. I was recently on a college website, which rather than offering courses to students, was [quote] designing learning experiences [/quote].

“Design” and “Experience” are two of the most abused and misunderstood terms out there. The result is a truly astounding number of roles and titles that are obscure, unclear, overlapping and sometimes downright meaningless. This makes it hard for companies and young practitioners starting out to figure out what’s going on — heck, it’s hard even for us seasoned UXers — since the landscape seems to change so often! …

In a world where increasingly complicated and impressively named methodologies have yet to prove they’re not over-hyped, Usability is the less popular but refreshingly honest old kid on the block.

When UX killed Usability

It all started when Usability was pretty much replaced as a term (and wrongly so) by User Experience. Of course, a few years down the line, we now recognize that Usability is a hugely important component of UX, albeit not the whole story. It stands firmly at the root of UX and continues to play a pivotal role in any digital project, despite its relative fall in popularity.

Meanwhile, slowly but surely, UX made its way out of the design and development departments, up the corporate ladder, into the boardrooms and across the organizational chart. It became the subject of conferences and the star of key note speeches. It flooded the Internet with inspiring articles, videos and slide decks. …

A note on new beginnings

So, this is K Consulting. K for Katerina. That’s me 😊

After 6 exciting years at the helm of UXlab, the Atcom Business Unit I founded, loved and directed, I have decided to venture off into the world of freelancing and launch my own UX Consulting private practice.

Why leave the most successful UX agency in Greece to start over? Here are the reasons behind my decision:

#1 I like starting over.

For those who know me personally, I am a pretty stable person in most areas of my life. However, even though I have been practicing UX exclusively for over a decade, my work has gone through many transformations. It started small with personal projects. It then began to grow with Linkwise and our “performance optimization services”. We tested the waters when I joined Atcom as a Digital Strategist and we really made it happen when we launched UXlab. With each new start I felt refreshed, renewed, ready to go again. …