Useful terms & definitions
Test two or more iterations or versions of a design which enables designers to test out different ideas with users to choose a better option.
Adaptive design refers to graphical user interface (GUI) design that adapts to different screen sizes.
The content on a webpage that doesn’t require scrolling to experience
Designing products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. Accessibility is just one aspect of inclusive design
Teams of creatives hired by clients to build marketing campaign
A feeling of like-mindedness or compatibility toward something or someone
A method of synthesizing that organizes data into groups with common themes or relationships
Provides on-the-job training to help people develop real skills
Everything from the text and images to the design specifications, like font style, color, size, and spacing
Intersecting lines that divide pages into small squares, which allows you to easily lay out elements in a design
Favoring or having prejudice against something based on limited information
A method of containment that uses continuous lines that often form shapes, like squares or rectangles, to break up sections of a page
The visual appearance and voice of a company
A series of visually rendered panels that focus on the user’s experience
A visual prompt that tells the user to take action, like to click a button
Summarized presentation of a design project that typically includes the project’s goal and objectives, your role in the project, the process your team followed and the outcome of the project
Cognitive load is the mental processing power needed to use a product
An overview of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
Get CanvasA competitive analysis report outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors compared to those of your own business.
Get CanvasOccurs when you start looking for evidence to prove a hypothesis you have
The use of visual barriers to keep elements of a design neat and organized; the four methods of containment are dividers, borders, fill, and shadow
A series of visually rendered panels that focus on the product
The principle that elements located within the same area are perceived to be grouped together
Measures the percentage of users who complete a desired action
A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives
This approach of data-driven design helps to create a user-centric design and a better user experience. It enables you to make better design choices based on real evidence about the user’s behavior, attitude, needs, etc.
Design culture is an organizational culture focused on approaches that improve customer experiences through design.
A planned period of time where UX designers present their work to team members and listen to feedback
Design principles are widely applicable laws, guidelines, biases and design considerations which designers apply with discretion
Design Research is done while you design. Within the product development lifecycle, design research happens during the design stage (stage three) to help inform your designs, to fit the needs of users, and to reduce risk
A time-bound process with five phases typically spread over five 8-hour days. The goal of design sprints is to answer critical business questions through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users
The sprint brief will act as a guidepost for the team throughout the sprint.
Get CanvasA one-stop shop for the look of brands, products and services
A way to create solutions that address a real user problem and are functional and affordable
The conversion of design into code, also known as handoff occurs when a design has reached a stage where the developers are to implement the design
A series of reusable elements that allow teams to design and develop a product following predetermined standards
A method of containment that uses single lines to separate sections of a page
Address of your website
Answers the question: How should we build it?
Have offerings that are similar to your product and focus on the same audience
Removing any identifying information from a users’ data that is collected during a research study
The number of users who abandon the experience
A situation that arises if a user take an action that pushes the product to the limit. For eg, if a user selects a birth date which is in the future
Figuring out pain points, behavior, wants, and much more about the user before making any design decisions.
A way of attracting attention to text, a button, or another object in a design
Equity-focused design seeks to build products that meet the needs of specific individuals in groups who have been excluded in the past
Building blocks for creating a design
Design elements are the fundamentals to all designs: form, shape, line, texture, color, space, movement.
The ability to understand someone else’s feelings or thoughts in a situation
An easily understood chart that explains everything designers have learned about a type of user
Get CanvasThe specific audience a UX designer creates something for
A popular shape or pattern which represents the way users read text or view content. Users start from the top left, and then keep on reading right, much like a reading book
The person who runs the design critique and guides the process
Asking for or receiving ideas about what is or isn’t working in a product design
How closely a design matches the look and feel of the final product
A method of containment that assigns colors to borders and shapes
Steps a designer takes to turn an idea into a working product. The five elements are strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface, where each element refers to a specific layer involved in creating the user experience
The tendency of people to agree with those they like in order to maintain a non-confrontational conversation
The size, thickness, and emphasis of characters of text
Answers the questions: What should we build? What are the user problems? How can we solve them?
Creates the basic structure that focuses and supports the problem you’re trying to solve, like an outline for a project
Designers who work for themselves and market their services to businesses to find customers
UX designer with a broad number of responsibilities such as user research, branding, user flows, UX writing, visual design, prototyping, production design, information architecture, and usability testing, among other things
Gestalt Principles are principles/laws of human perception that describe how humans group similar elements, recognize patterns and simplify complex images when we perceive objects. Designers use the principles to organize content on websites and other interfaces so it is aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand
Any method of interaction a user has with information on their device using touch
A goal statement is a document that demonstrates your writing ability on a more personal level for your application into a graduate program.
Get CanvasGroupthink is when one person shares an opinion and everyone immediately agrees with it instead of sharing their own feelings about a subject or topic
The stage of the design process where designers transfer assets, designs and documents to the developers to code
An ideal situation where everything happens perfectly as the designers were expecting. We also call it "Ideal case" or "Ideal path"
The hero image is the large banner at the top of a website
A visual design principle that orders elements on a page and classifies them by their level of importance
A design that closely matches the look and feel of the final product and is more refined or polished; called “hi-fi” for short
Human-centered design is an approach to problem solving, commonly used in design and management frameworks that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process.
A hypothesis is a statement made with limited knowledge about a given situation that requires validation to be confirmed as true or false to such a degree where the team can continue their investigation and find the best solution to a given problem.
Get CanvasA system of graphic images or symbols associated with a subject or an idea
Focuses on finding solutions to meet different needs. Inclusive design means making design choices that take into account personal identifiers like ability, race, economic status, language, age, and gender
Makes the prototype functional
The collection of attitudes and stereotypes associated with people, without one’s conscious knowledge
Information architecture is the framework of a website, or how it's organized, categorized, and structured
Interviews are a research method used to collect in-depth information on people's opinions, thoughts, experiences, and feelings. Interviews can be performed one-on-one or in a group setting, like a focus group.
An observation about people that helps you understand the user or their needs from a new perspective
Revise the original design to create a new and improved version
Critical measures of progress toward an end goal
Ways to arrange elements on a page
A series of columns and alleys that allow you to organize elements in a design
A design that has a lower amount of complexity and is less refined or polished; called “lo-fi” for short
The steps to take to conduct research, collect data, and analyze data
A high-fidelity design that represents your final product, without the interactivity of a prototype
A way to animate static design elements to focus the user’s attention and tell stories
The gaps between elements in a design
A contract that gives one party legal protection against another party stealing their ideas or revealing proprietary information before a product is launched
The person who captures all of the ideas and feedback from the reviewers during a design critique
A few-step process of introducing the user to our product when he first opens an application or a link to a service
Problems, issues, or things that irritate people. These are found during user reseach, or even through customer support. These are part of the user's problems that will be addressed in the design process
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
Get CanvasPost-launch research can be used to evaluate how well a launch feature is meeting the needs of users
A group of slides, where each slide has new information
The designer who is sharing their work with others in the design critique session
Primary research is research you conduct yourself. Information from direct interactions with users, like interviews, surveys, or usability studies, are considered primary research.
A problem statement is a clear description of the issue (problem) which also includes a vision and methods used to make ways into solving the problem.
Get CanvasPeople who are involved in the project or who will be affected by its results
The balance or harmony between elements that are scaled
A Gestalt Principle that describes how elements that are close together appear to be more related than elements that are spaced farther apart
A prototype is an early model of a product that demonstrates functionality, like a wireframe, but a lot more advanced
Qualitative research is primarily collected through observations and conversations. Qualitative research is based on understanding users’ needs and aims to answer questions like “why” or “how did this happen?”
Quantitative research focuses on data that can be gathered by counting or measuring. Quantitative research is based on numerical data that’s often collected from large-scale surveys. This type of research aims to answer questions like “how many?” and “how much?”
Understand audiences and learn about their backgrounds: demographics, like age and location, motivations, pain points, emotions and life goals
A step-by-step examination of a group of users and their needs, which adds realistic context to the design process
A document to share research insights in detail, with few visuals
Someone who gives feedback about the design and offers clear actions to take during a design critique session
Concept that’s used to explain the size relationship between a given element and the other elements in the design
Describes a system that’s able to maintain performance levels when workload increases
A method of containment that creates dimension in combination with borders or fill
Secondary research is research that uses information someone else has put together. For example, using information from sources like books, articles, or journals is considered secondary research.
When given a list of items, people are more likely to remember the first few and the last few, while the items in the middle tend to blur
A Gestalt Principle that describes how elements that look alike are perceived to have the same function
Skeleton screens provide an alternative to the traditional loading method. Rather than show an abstract widget, skeleton screens create anticipation of what is to come and reduce cognitive load.
The tendency for people to answer questions in a way that will be viewed favorably by others
A specialist dives deep into one particular UX design role, like interaction, visual, or motion design
A storyboard in UX is a tool that visually predicts and explores a user's experience with a product.
Get CanvasA survey is an activity where many people are asked the same questions in order to understand what most people think about a product. Surveys are a great way to measure the success of your product, during development and after it’s launched.
Combine ideas to draw conclusions
A questionnaire used to measure the usability of designs
A T-shaped designer specializes in one kind of UX design and has a breadth of knowledge in other areas
Graphical representation of the product areas (using the color spectrum) that are easiest or hardest to click with the thumb
The amount of time it takes for a user to complete a task
The technique of arranging letters and text to make the language readable, clear, and visually appealing
The ordering of typefaces and fonts in a layout to create divisions that show users where to focus and how to find information
The overall style of text, distinguished by stroke weight, shape, type of serif, and line lengths
A general system to describe styles of type, like serif and sans serif
User Centered Design is the philosophy that designers should empathize with the user, put the user in the center of the process and focus on them.
Measures how well elements of your design work together to communicate an idea
Universal design is the process of creating one product for users with the widest range of abilities and in the widest range of situations
A usability study is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users. Usability studies help demonstrate if a product is on the right track or if the design needs to be adjusted.
The number of people who use a website or app’s navigation compared to the number of people who use the search functionality
A user is any person who uses a product
User-Centered Design or User-Driven Development is a framework of processes in which usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and workflow of a product, service or process are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process
Indicate the parts of a design that cause users to make errors
User experience is how a person, the user, feels about interacting with or experiencing a product
When it comes to evaluating user experience, there are a few key questions to examine
UX Research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation and feedback.
User stories are representations of small instances in peoples' lives. They are a type of scenario used in design processes to enable a designer to empathize with a user and, from there, generate ideas that fit into the user's life.
Get CanvasDifferentiating the elements in your design to add visual interest
The sense that a design is equally weighted on both sides of its emphasized center
How a product or technology appears to users
A measure of the force that an element exerts to attract the eye
Groups of people who have limited ability to provide their consent or have special privacy concerns
A wireframe is an outline or a sketch of a product or a screen. It helps the designer figure out how a page is arranged, where each piece of a product fits in with the others, and how users will likely interact with the product
The principle of decorating a design according to a given color scheme. It is, in short, the proportion of using the colors in the way of 60% + 30% +10%