Essential Terms to Know

Question 1

Accessibility

Answer 1

Accessibility or accessible design is a design process that enables people with disabilities to interact with a product. This means designing for people who are color blind, blind, deaf, and people with cognitive disabilities, among others.

Question 2

Adaptive Design

Answer 2

An adaptive interface is a collection of layouts designed specifically for different devices. It detects the device type being used and displays the layout designed for it. It means you’ll see a specific version of the website which has been optimized for mobile, desktop or tablet.

Question 3

Affordance

Answer 3

On user interfaces, affordances help clearly communicate to users what can and cannot be done on a screen. Buttons on interfaces, for example, afford being pressed to trigger an action.

Question 4

Agile

Answer 4

Agile is an incremental approach to software development. Instead of building the entire product at once, Agile breaks it down into smaller bits of user functionality and assigns them to two week cycles we call “iterations.”

Question 5

API

Answer 5

Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are pieces of software that help different applications communicate with each other. Products develop APIs to let you access and read information on their server easily.

Question 6

Backend Development

Answer 6

The back-end powers the front-end but we don’t necessarily see it. Think databases and servers.

Question 7

Frontend Development

Answer 7

Think buttons, text, beautiful colors and the layer you see on your screen when interacting with a product.

Question 8

Beacon

Answer 8

Beacons are small Bluetooth radio transmitters. They communicate with the user’s smartphone and are used to share information.

Question 9

Card Sorting

Answer 9

In a card sorting exercise, we’ll give users topics, cards, and a Sharpie pen. We will then ask users to write down the topics on the cards and organize them in a way that makes sense to them. This exercises helps us understand and design the information architecture of a site.

Question 10

Click Stream

Answer 10

When you land on a site, you click your way through it to complete a task. This is what a clickstream represents: the path of clicks you took on it to accomplish a goal.

Question 11

Commits

Answer 11

Throughout the development process, developers create commits whenever they have reached a good point in their work. Commits are similar to drafts.

Question 12

Customer Experience (CX)

Answer 12

This entire journey is what we call Customer Experience, or CX. It refers to all the different interactions a user has with a brand through its different channels and products, and how a user feels about them.

Question 13

Data Science

Answer 13

Data Science focuses on making sense of these numbers or data and uncovering valuable insights that help us make better product decisions.

Question 14

Design Thinking

Answer 14

1. Empathize: Understand the challenge
2. Define: Define the problem
3. Ideate: Brainstorm potential solutions
4. Prototype: Build your solutions
5. Test: Test your solutions

Question 15

Empathy Map

Answer 15

Empathy maps are collaborative tools that help us visualize user behavior, attitudes and feelings. They are split into 4 equal quadrants containing information about what the user is saying, thinking, doing and feeling. At the center, we place our user persona. We fill each quadrant with information we’ve collected through user research.

Question 16

End User

Answer 16

Who are we designing the product for? This person is our end user.

Question 17

Flow Charts

Answer 17

Flowcharts illustrate the steps a user can take to complete a task on a product.

Question 18

Grid System

Answer 18

Grids systems are organizational tools that help us arrange content on a screen. They are made up of vertical and horizontal lines that create what we call columns and gutters.

Question 19

Human Computer Interaction

Answer 19

HCI is a field of study concerned with the design and use of computer technology. It studies how we interact with interfaces and computers today.

Question 20

Information Architecture

Answer 20

Information architecture is the practice of arranging content in a product in an understandable manner. It involves organizing the content we interact with, as well as the different structures, such as the website’s navigation, we need in order to interact with it.

Question 21

Interaction Design

Answer 21

Interaction Design, or IxD, is the practice of designing interactive digital products and considering the way in which users will interact with them.

Question 22

Lean UX

Answer 22

Remember Agile? Lean UX, based on Agile, is a collaborative user-centric approach that prioritizes “learning loops” (building, learning, and measuring through iterations) over design documentation.

Question 23

Material Design

Answer 23

Material Design, often called just Material, is a design language developed by Google used in Android devices.

Question 24

Refactoring

Answer 24

Refactoring is the process of cleaning up and tidying code without affecting functionality, essentially increasing its quality. It isn’t done all at once but rather in small, incremental steps.

Question 25

Storyboard

Answer 25

Storyboards are a visual representation of a user’s experience with a product or problem space. They are a film technique we’ve adopted and look a lot like comic strips.

Question 26

SVG

Answer 26

A popular image format, scalable vector graphics, or SVGs, are scalable two-dimensional graphics that can be manipulated and animated with code.

Question 27

Task Analysis

Answer 27

Task analysis is the process of listing tasks or the steps a user takes to complete any given goal from the user’s perspective. It is typically done during early stages of product development to help us identify and communicate problems in the user experience.

Question 28

UI Element

Answer 28

User interface (UI) elements are all the different parts found on an interface we need to trigger specific actions or get around an app or website. Think the buttons, input fields, toggles, and radio buttons.

Question 29

Usability Testing

Answer 29

Usability testing is a research method that lets us evaluate how easy a product is to use by testing it on a group of representative users.

Question 30

User-Centered Design

Answer 30

Like the term suggests, user-centered design, or UCD, is an iterative design framework in which users and their needs are always kept at the center of every decision.

Question 31

User Experience

Answer 31

The user experience refers to a user’s emotions, attitude, and perceptions about a product, system, or service. In other words, it is how you feel while interacting with an app or website. Good UX makes a product useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible.

Question 32

User Flow

Answer 32

A user flow describes the intended series of steps a user needs to take to complete a goal on a product. They often include a name, steps and a description of what happens during each step.

Question 33

User Interface

Answer 33

The user interface is a set of visual components a user needs to interact with a product, made up of UI elements (see below).

Question 34

User Journey Maps

Answer 34

User Journey Maps are narrative documents that help us visualize the process a user goes through in order to accomplish a goal. They document the stages the user goes through, the tasks executed during each stage, user emotions, and product opportunities.

Question 35

User Scenario

Answer 35

Used in early stages of a product, user scenarios are mini stories that describe the needs and/or context that brings a user to your product. They tell us who the user is, why the user is interested in your product, and what his or her goals are.

Question 36

User Stories

Answer 36

User Stories share actions different kinds of users can take in a product. The formula for user stories is simple:

“As a , I want , to be able to .”

Question 37

Waterfall

Answer 37

In software waterfall development, each phase must be completed before the next phase can begin. So, all the design would have to be completed before developers could begin any work.