UX Glossary Flashcards
What is the 5 Planes?
A philosophy developed by Jesse James Garrett to inform a holistic product development process.
The 5 Planes (from “bottom” foundation to “top”) are: strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface.
What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is the comparison of two designs against each other to determine which performs better.
What is Accessbility?
The practice of designing experiences for people who experience disabilities.
Those with the difficulty with any of the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch or taste may be benefitted by using products and services that have been designed with accessibility in mind.
What is Agile Software Development?
A software development process in which requirements (and solutions) evolve through the collaborative effort between product development teams and their customers.
What is Augmented Reality (AR)
A technology that adds a computer-generated, visual layer on top of the real world.
For example, Generating an image of a mech robot that dances on your (real)desk.
AR is a burgeoning technology that will help users in a new wave of user experience and interface design.
What is Back-end Development?
Backend concerns the portion that the user doesn’t see (hence the “black”, acting as the backbone logic and code that gives and application functionality.
A UI may be beautiful but suffer from a poor user experience due to backend problems like features not working as expected, or slow loading applications.
What is Business Analyst?
Generally, business analysts, or BAs, analyze organizations and document their systems. In software development, business analysts often act as the bridge between product development and business stakeholders to craft and document product requirements and help ensure that product decisions make business sense.
What is a Card Sort?
A research method used to see how people interpret information.
This is most often carried out by several participants, who are asked to sort and group together similar “cards” using post-its or software.
The goal is to understand how users view a given set of items and identify potential categories.
The patterns that arise may help inform the menu items in website navigation, or what information should be combined or separated.
What is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets. A language that describes how HTML should be displayed. HTML is the bones of content, whereas CSS is applied to HTML to give elements styling options like layout, color, typography, and more.
What are case studies?
In relation to UX careers, a case study showcases the process of solving design problems.
An emphasis is placed on how design thinking, methods and deliverables were used to solve user experience problems.
What is a Closed Card Sort?
In closed card sorts, researchers provide pre-determined categories (hence “closed”) for participants to sort cards into.
What are Cognitive Biases?
Cognitive biases are errors in reasoning, memory or other cognitive processes that result from holding onto existing beliefs regardless of contrary information. There are more than 100 documented cognitive biases, commonly categorized in four categories: biases that arise from too much information, not enough meaning, the need to act quickly, and the limits of memory. Cognitive biases are particularly important to be aware of while conducting research, as a way of arriving at truer findings instead of relying on personal preferences.
Example: Designer Bob loves minimalist design, and exhibits confirmation bias when he decides to approach his new UI project with an ultra-minimalist approach.
What is a Content Strategist?
Content strategists help maximize the usability and profitability of content, throughout the full content lifecycle: analyzing, planning, writing, editing, distributing, managing, and monitoring content. Due to the wide breadth of this field, the work that content strategists do often affect and involve information architecture and the user experience.
What is Content Strategy?
The strategy, organization and management of content that aligns between user and business goals.
What are Dark Patterns?
Tricks used in websites and apps that cause unintended user action, like buying or signing up for things that you didn’t mean to. Example: sometimes, web forms include a little tick mark that says “Keep me logged in”, probably. You are probably used to that and it’s likely not something you think about usually. Now imagine you’re signing up for something, and there is a tick mark that is already checked for you, right beneath your password field. But instead of “Keep me logged in”, it says, “I agree to subscribe to this newsletter.” Not fun, right? That’s a dark pattern – when a product tricks you into buying or signing up to things that you actually don’t want. For a collection fo dark patterns, visit: https://darkpatterns.org/
What is a Design Exercise?
Often a take-home “quiz” of sorts to determine a design process. Sometimes a part of UX interviews.
What is a Design Facilitation?
The skill of facilitating design process and efforts, such as presenting to stakeholders or conducting design workshops.
What are Design Patterns?
Repeatable design solutions, often leveraging widespread user recognition to aid in the design process. For example, graphical icons such as the magnifying glass (search) are now design patterns that users know how to interact with.
What is a Design Sprint?
Popularized by Google Ventures (GV), the design sprint is a 5 day process for developing business solutions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
What is an Edge Case?
An edge case is rare situation. In software design, edge cases often threaten to break a system and the user experience. Edge cases deal with the extreme maximums and minimums of parameters. For example, if an application allows for “unlimited” photo uploads knowing that users rarely upload more than 1000, how does the system deal with the edge case of the user who uploads millions of photos? Are there boundaries at this maximum end? That is an edge case, an unlikely-yet-potentially disastrous situation.
What is an Ethnographic Study?
A qualitative research method of observing users in their natural habitat to understand their behavior.
What is Eyetracking?
Eye tracking measures eye activity, like where a person looks, what they ignore and when they blink. Eye tracking devices and software are sometimes used in user research to
What is Front-end Development?
Front end development is the practice of implementing designs in code to be displayed on the web. Front end developers primarly use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to code designs. “Front end” refers to the “client side” - e.g. a user’s browser, so front end development is the management of what people see in their browser, and not what goes on the in background with data storage & management (hence “back end”).
What is a Full Stack Designer?
A professional well versed in the entire “stack” of the design discipline, including UX discipline, high fidelity UI design and code. A rare breed of designer able to implement her own designs in code. Product designers are often expected to be full stack designers Sometimes referred to as a design unicorn.
What is Graphic Design?
Graphic design is one of the best-known practices within the world of design and technology. It includes fundamentals of design like typography, color theory, illustration and even photography. Sometimes also referred to as communication design, the practice of developing and communicating media to target audiences.
Who is a Graphic Designer?
Graphic designers are visual communicators who produce work across both digital and print mediums such as posters, brochures, invitations, and business cards. A big part of the job involves creating assets in a way that can be applied consistently across the entire brand, such as creating a style guide. While they don’t need to code, graphic designers often create user interface assets like logos and icons for the web.
What is Hick’s Law?
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. Related to the ideas of cognitive load and the paradox of choice.
What is Human Factors?
The study of human behavior and capabilities to find the best ways to design products for maximum effectiveness, safety, and delight. Also known as ergonomics or, in the case of tech, human-computer interaction (HCI).
What is Hybrid Card Sort?
Hybrid card sorts allow for participants to both sort cards into predetermined, and also the option to create their own categories.
What is HTML?
HTML is the standard language for creating web pages and applications. HTML is used to specify whether your web content should be recognized as a paragraph, list, heading, link, image, multimedia player, form, or one of many other available elements or even a new element that you define.
What is Information Architect?
Professionals who design, organize and manage information to make data easy to access and understand. Also referred to as IAs, information architects leverage a variety of design tools and research to make sense out of messes, whether that’s creating a logical index of topics or ensuring that a site’s structure is easy for users to navigate through.
What is Information Architecture (IA)
Information architecture is the practice organizing and arranging information to make it understandable. If you had your own grocery store, where would you put carrots? Apples? Bread? It sounds pretty simple until you start getting into things like peanuts, jelly, cream cheese, cake mix, and so on. Information architecture is figuring out how to arrange things into something that can be understood by your user. This includes defining hierarchies, parent-child relationships and in general making sense out of an (informational) messes.
What is Interaction Design (IxD)
A discipline that focuses specifically on how users interact with products (both digital and analog). This could be buttons on a page, swipes on an app, or how to use a can opener that only has one handle.
Who is an Interaction Designer?
Since interaction design is an opinionated subfield of user experience design, interaction designers hold a more opinionated role compared to UX designers by focusing on the specifics of microinteractions, usability and accessibility. Because interaction designers are focused on creating key interactions for the product, they’re often expected to be able to create highly interactive and complex prototypes. For example, IxD’s would be more expected to create a end-to-end clickable prototype with detailed interactions (hover-overs, transitions) on Axure, whereas a UX generalist more likely to do high level screen-by-screen prototypes with Sketch+InVision. There’s also an expectation of being able to implement designs in code, or at the very least prototype with front-end code.
