Lessons from the internal combustion engine
It’s been a long week. You’ve been looking forward to your weekly ride. You sit down on your bike. You turn the key, press the ignition. The engine turns over a few times. Then silence. You try again. Same. One more time. No dice.
So there you are. Your motorcycle stubbornly refuses to turn over. You already filled up the gas tank, so what gives? Well, motorcycle engines are fairly simple creatures. They need four things: air, fuel, compression, and spark. Miss any one of these, and you’re stuck. It doesn’t matter if you have the highest octane fuel in the world. Without the other elements, you’re riding nowhere. Simple, right?
Many teams (especially outside UX) think “good UX” means great usability. You know…smooth interactions, intuitive interfaces, and clean visual design. But that’s like thinking a motorcycle just needs fuel to run.
Products follow the same unforgiving logic.
Teams spend months perfecting usability, crafting interfaces that flow like silk, only to watch their products fail in the market. Why? Because they’ve been optimizing for fuel while ignoring the spark plugs. They’ve confused one essential element with the whole system.
Teams often act like usability equals value. It’s like thinking fuel equals a running engine. Sure, fuel is essential, but it’s just one piece of a larger system that must work together.
Peter Morville and some friends created (what should be) a famous honeycomb framework over twenty ago. The insight was simple: value doesn’t emerge from individual excellence-it emerges from multiple factors working together as a system.
You can build the most usable interface in the world, but if your product isn’t useful, users won’t stick around. You can create something both useful and usable, but if it’s not findable when users need it, they’ll give up in frustration. Make it useful, usable, and findable, but strip away credibility, and trust evaporates.
This is especially brutal in B2B SaaS, where someone else signed the contract for your product. Teams get lulled into thinking captive users equal guaranteed success. But here’s the reality check: when renewal time comes, those “captive” users have voices. And unhappy users become vocal opponents of renewal contracts.
In our hyper-startup world, it’s way too easy for functional products to lose contracts not because they were broken, but because they were only firing on a few cylinders while competitors delivered better value.
Morville’s honeycomb identifies six essential dimensions that surround and create value: useful, usable, findable, credible, accessible, and desirable. Value sits in the center as the emergent result of these six elements working together:
- Useful answers whether your product actually solves a real problem. You’d think this would be obvious, but how many features get built because they seemed like good ideas rather than addressing genuine, broad user needs?
- Usable is where most UX teams focus their energy (and rightly so). Can people actually operate your product without pulling their hair out? This is critical, but it’s not sufficient.
- Findable determines whether users can locate what they need when they need it. The best feature in the world is worthless if buried three levels deep in the wrong workflow behind a kebab menu.
- Credible establishes whether users trust your product and your organization. This encompasses everything from visual design that looks professional to data security that actually protects user information. If your fintech app looks like it was designed by someone’s nephew over the weekend, trust becomes an uphill battle.
- Accessible ensures your product works for people with different abilities and in different contexts. This isn’t just about compliance, it’s about inclusion that expands your potential user base.
- Desirable addresses whether people actually want to engage with your product. In some B2B contexts, this can get dismissed as “nice to have,” but desirability drives engagement, and engagement drives value realization. If people don’t know they want it…you can have everything else right and still be at a loss.
These dimensions are owned by different disciplines across your organization. Credibility involves marketing, legal, and security teams. Findability requires information architects and content strategists. Accessibility needs both design and engineering partnership. This isn’t a “UX problem”. This is a product ecosystem challenge.
A team celebrates their usability testing results, ships their interface, and then scratches their heads when adoption stays flat or renewals decline.
A project management tool perfectly nailed task creation flows but buried the search function so deep that teams couldn’t find completed work when deadlines loomed. An analytics dashboard showcased beautiful charts that looked amazing in demos but took 30+ seconds to load real data, making it useless for daily decision-making. A customer service platform had an intuitive interface but looked so unprofessional that enterprise clients questioned whether their sensitive data would be secure.
Most painfully, I’ve seen products that hit five of the six dimensions perfectly, only to fail because that missing sixth dimension became their Achilles’ heel. A perfectly useful, usable, findable, credible, and accessible product that no one wanted to engage with. It’s an incredibly useful tool that they couldn’t see themselves using. There wasn’t a business sustaining desire for it.
So how do we avoid these single-dimension traps?
Ready to shift from usability tunnel vision to holistic value thinking? Start with an honest audit of your current project against all six honeycomb dimensions.
Grab a whiteboard (or digital equivalent) and list your six dimensions: useful, usable, findable, credible, accessible, desirable. For each one, ask: What evidence do we actually have? Not assumptions or hopes. Real evidence. Real data. Real users. Real world.
You’ll likely discover gaps that explain mysterious adoption problems. Maybe you’ve got solid usability data but zero evidence that people actually find your feature desirable. Maybe you’ve proven it’s useful but never tested whether enterprise users find it credible enough for sensitive workflows. Those gaps become your research priorities. Instead of defaulting to another usability study, focus on the dimensions you know least about. This isn’t about perfecting everything…it’s about identifying which missing element might be your Achilles’ heel.
For post-launch analysis, when a feature isn’t performing as expected, the framework guides you through systematic evaluation. Do people find the feature useful enough? Do they even want it? When they find it, do they trust it enough to engage with it?
This “whole value approach” reveals patterns that single-dimension focus misses. Maybe your onboarding flow is perfectly usable but fails to establish credibility early enough. Maybe your advanced features are highly useful but completely unfindable for new users. Maybe your idea is desirable, but not enough to build a business on.
As product and UX design practitioners, we have a responsibility to understand how our role fits into holistic thinking for our teams and organizations. This means resisting the urge to jump straight to interface optimization when the story is more complex. It means partnering with product managers to ensure we’re building useful things, not just usable ones. It means working with content strategists and information architects to solve findability challenges. It means collaborating with marketing and legal teams to address credibility concerns.
Most importantly, it means changing the conversation from “make it more usable” to “how do we nail the elements that convey value?” But design leaders inevitably face predictable objections when advocating for this broader thinking. Here’s language that works:
When they say: “We don’t have time to research all six dimensions”
Try: “You’re right. We can’t perfect everything. But can we spend 30 minutes identifying which dimension might tank this project? I’d rather catch a findability problem now than after launch.”
When they say: “That’s not UX’s job” (regarding credibility, usefulness, etc.)
Try: “Absolutely. You’re right. We don’t want to step on your toes. But we can help you uncover credibility risks that might undermine our usability work. Want to partner on this?”
When they say: “Just make it more usable”
Try: “We’re definitely got some opportunity to improve usability. One other thing we’ve noticed in our research is a lack of enthusiasm for this new feature. I wonder if we could try to validate that enough people want it?”
The key is positioning yourself as a partner identifying shared risks, not someone expanding scope for the sake of it. When stakeholders bring interface change requests, we can partner to understand the underlying value dimension that’s actually at stake.
The honeycomb framework gives us language to understand the broader view. It lets us support product success through systematic value creation.
How do you know if your holistic approach is working? Watch for these signals across dimensions:
- Useful: Task completion rates, feature adoption, user retention
- Usable: Time to completion, error rates, support ticket volume
- Findable: Search success rates, navigation analytics, time to locate features
- Credible: User trust surveys, enterprise sales conversion, data security questions
- Accessible: Usage across different abilities/devices, accessibility audit scores
- Desirable: Engagement metrics, Net Promoter Score, renewal rates
The magic happens when these metrics move together. Rising usability scores with flat engagement suggests a desirability problem. High task completion with increasing support tickets might signal findability issues.
Track leading indicators too: Are teams asking about multiple dimensions during planning? Are research plans examining more than usability? Are stakeholders bringing up credibility and findability concerns early rather than after launch?
Your product doesn’t need just fuel to run. It needs clean air to flow into the cylinder head. It needs the valves and piston rings to seal so you achieve compression. And you need a clean spark plug to initiate combustion. The teams that understand this (and organize around it) build products that don’t just function, they thrive. They rip.
And when renewal time comes, users don’t just tolerate your product. They can’t live without it.