Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb
In order to start understanding different design frameworks, I chose to analyse Hostel World’s website against Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb.
The six components, useful, desirable, accessible, credible, findable and usable all come together to make the end product valuable to the user. I have presented my thoughts in the form of bullet points below.
Useful
- Extremely useful to the right user – has a very particular target audience. E.g. you wouldn’t use this service if you wanted to find somewhere to buy a new jumper.
- A tired traveler can book a private room just to sleep in / A sociable traveler can book a room with more people in a dorm.
- Website – Not only can you book a room in a hostel, you can read articles about travelling such as travel routes, cultures, or fun activities to try out. The website makes it easy to explore interesting hostels near where you are which might even influence travel plans and present a new place to go and explore.
- Mobile App – Very simple A to B set up where everything works in a chain.
- Geo-location enables the user to find close-by hostels in a new busy area. They may not know the names of streets yet.
Usable
- Easy to use and navigate whether the user is relaxing somewhere looking to book their next place to stay.
- Additionally for travellers who need a place to stay quickly.
Desirable
- Appealing for travellers to book cheap accommodation on the go.
- Solo travellers would be interested in this to be staying in a communal area.
- After clicking through to view the different hostels – Aesthetically pleasing buttons with rounded edges. Light gradient from the bottom of description box to show depth. Standard information shown in grey on white, important information is shown in orange to draw attention to it and addition information is shown in different colours to emphasise this as extra and interesting.
Findable
- Greeted at the front page with ‘Where do you want to go?’ to prompt the user for information.
- Geolocation is at the end of the search bar in the form of a recognisable icon.
- When this is clicked on, 3 more tabs appear below showing a Check In date, Check Out date and number of guests.
- All the buttons are where you would expect them to be.
- When viewing the list of hostels there are clear arrows on the image on the left hand side to scroll through images without having to click through to another page.
Accessible
- Accessible through website or downloadable app.
- Website can be accessed at an internet café or on personal electronic device.
- App can be accessed through tablet or smartphone.
Credible
- Users are able to leave 1-10 rated reviews. This is very valuable in particular for solo travelers because they can read about the legitimacy of a hostel and its location before they arrive.
- Rating system Superb, Fabulous, Very Good, Good, OK, Not Good, Bad etc.
Conclusion
All in all, Hostel World matches up to this framework well. There is something positive to say about each element which amounts to the service being valuable to the correct audience. The layout, style and ability to let the user flow through is well thought out and creates a smooth user journey.
Bibliography
Hostelworld. (2017). Hostels Worldwide – Online Hostel Bookings, Ratings and Reviews. [online] Available at: https://www.hostelworld.com [Accessed 2 Oct. 2017].
Morville, P. (2004) User Experience Design. [website] Available at: http://semanticstudios.com/user_experience_design/ [Accessed 2 Oct 2017].