UX Design Glossary

Interviews

A research method used to collect in-depth information on people's opinions, thoughts, experience, and feelings

User group

A set of people who have similar interests, goals, or concerns

Usability study

A technique to evaluate a product by testing it on users

Design Sprint

A time-bound process, with five phases typically spread over five full 8-hour days. The goal of design sprints is to answer critical business questions though designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users.

UX researchers

A type of researcher that conducts studies or interviews to learn about the users of a product and how people use a product

Happy path

A user story with a pleasant ending

call-to-action

A visual prompt that tells the user to take action, like to click a button

Design Thinking

A way to create solutions that address a real user problem and are functional and affordable

UX writers

Create the language that appears throughout a digital product, like website or mobile apps

framework

Creates the basic structure that focuses and supports the problem you're trying to solve, like an outline for a project.

Key performance Indicators (KPIs)

Critical measures of progress toward an end goal

The human factor

Describe the range of variables human bring to their product interactions

Iteration

Doing something again, by building on previous versions and making tweaks

UX program managers

Ensure clear and timely communication so that the process of building a useful product moves monthly from start to finish

Assets

Everything from the text and images to the design specifications, like font style, color, size, and spacing.

Personas

Fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users

Interaction designers

Focus on designing the experience of a product and how it functions

Visual designers

Focus on how the product or technology looks

Qualitative Research

Focused observation on why and how things happen

Quantitative research

Focuses on data that can be gathered by counting or measuring

UX research

Focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs; and motivations through observation and feedback

Direct competition

Have offerings that are similar to your product and focus on the same audience

User experience

How a person, the user, feels about interacting with, or experiencing a product

Networking

Interacting with our people to develop professional contacts and learn more about job industry

Mental Models

Internal maps that allow humans to predict how something will work

case study

Leads you through a design process from beginning to end

Production Designers

Make sure first and final designs match in the finished project materials and that the assets are ready to be handed off to engineering team

Hypothesis Statement

Our best education guess on what we think the solution to a design problem might be

apprenticeship

Provides on-the-job training to help people develop real skills.

user-centered design

Puts the user front-and-center

Secondary Research

Research that uses information someone else has put together

Primary research

Research you conduct yourself

Five elements of UX design

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

advertising agencies

Teams of creatives hired by clients to build marketing campaigns.

empathy

The ability to understand someone else's feelings or thoughts in a situation

Impostor syndrome

The belief that you're unskilled, inferior to others, or bad at your job, despite your success

above the fold

The content on a webpage that doesn't require scrolling to experience

Information Architecture

The framework of a website or how it's organized, categorized, and structured

platform

The medium that users experience your product on

Hick's Law

The more options a user has, the longer it takes for them to make a decision

Feedback loops

The outcome a user gets at the end of a process

Problem development lifecycle

The process used to take a product from an idea to reality

end user

The specific audience a UX designer creates something for

brand identity

The visual appearance and voice of a company

personal brand

The way in which your personality, unique skills, and values as a designer intersect with your public persona

Motion designers

Think about what it feels like for a user to move through a product

UX engineers

Translate the design's intent into a functioning experience

Pain points

UX issues that frustrated the user and block the user from getting what they need

UX research

Understand users and learn about their backgrounds, demographic, motivation, pain points, emotions, and life goals

Edge case

What happens when things go wrong that are beyond the user's control

serial position effect

When given a list of items, people are more likely to remember the first few and last few, while the items is the middle tend to blur

Von Restorff effect (isolation effect)

When multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered

Generalist

A UX designer with a broad number of responsibilities

Problem Statement

A clear description of the user's need that should be addressed

retrospective

A collaboration critique of the team's design sprint

Reatrospective

A collaborative critique of the team's design sprint

non-disclosure agreement

A contract an employee might sign when working with business, in which they agree not to share sensitive information

specialist

A designer who dives deep into one particular type of user experience, like interaction design, visual design, or motion design

T-shaped designer

A designer who specializes in one kind of user experience(e.g., interaction, visual, motion) and has a breadth of knowledge in other areas

Sprint brief

A document that you share with all your attendees to help them prepare for the sprint

User story

A fictional one-sentence story told from the persona's point of view that inspires and informs design decisions

startup

A new business that wants to develop a unique product or service and bring it to market

personal statement

A one or two-sentence phrase that describes what you do and what you stand for

Responsive web design

Allows a website to change automatically depending on the size of the device

Surveys

An activity where many people are asked the same questions in order to understand what most people think about a product

prototype

An early model of a product that demonstrates functionality

empathy map

An easily understood chart that explains everything designers have learned about a type of user

Wireframe

An outline or a sketch of a product or a screen

Design research

Answer the question: How should we build it?

Foundational research

Answer the questions: What should we build? What are the user problems? How can we solve them?

Post-launch research

Answers the questions: Did we succeed?