UX Terms Flashcards
When you test two different versions of online content with users to see which one they prefer.
A/B Testing
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.”
Agile Development
A mobile operating system developed by Google
Android
How computers and web applications share information with each other.
API (Application Programming Interface)
When a QA uses an automation tool to do tests on a software application.
Automation Testing
The embodiment of a person or idea. Refers to a character that represents an online user. Mainly used in gaming and online communities.
Avatar
Engine room of a website.
Back End
A buildup of work that is due to be completed.
Backlog
Beacons are small Bluetooth radio transmitters. They communicate with the user’s smartphone and are used to share information.
Beacon
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.
Accessibility
A collection of layouts designed specifically for different devices. it detects the device type being used and displays the layout designed for it. This does not mean it is a different website—it means you’ll see a specific version of the website which has been optimized for mobile, desktop or tablet.
Adaptive Interface
Clues that tell us what an element can do to us
Affordance
Measures human behavior on a site. They help us better understand and interpret patterns of behavior on the products we use.
Analytics
Material Design
Design language developed by Google in 2014
Navigation systems help users understand their location in a website or app. They’ll show a sequence of steps users have take to get where they are.
Breadcrumb
Mistakes in software that can cause a product to glitch, behave in unintended ways, or even crash.
Bug
Allows for parts of software to be developed in parallel. This is so that code they are writing and code that is completed can be kept separate.
Branch (development)
A memory lets you store and save data temporarily for later use. You’ll often find usernames, recent searches and websites in your _____ memory.
Cache
In a _____ ______ 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.
card sorting
Let you ask the system questions via a chat interface. You can find them everywhere these days. They are a popular customer service tool and resemble the experience of texting a friend.
Chatbot
When you land on a site, you click your way through it to complete a task.
Clickstream
Throughout the development process, developers create _____ whenever they have reached a good point in their work. They are similar to drafts
Commits
A product or site is the percentage of users who complete a desired action.
Conversion Rate
A software systems help manage business processes, like sales, data, and customer interactions.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
A style sheet programming language used to define how a website should be styled.
CSS
Customer Experience: 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.
CX
It’s a computer application that creates and manages digital content.
CMS (Content Management System)
Numbers can tell us an awful lot about our users and their needs, and can help us define how to best meet them. ____ _____ focuses on making sense of these numbers or data and uncovering valuable insights that help us make better product decisions.
Data Science
A design system made up of elements and features that will need to be cleaned up later on. The efforts made to quickly set them in place eventually generate more work down the line.
Design Debt
A 5-stage method for creative problem solving. The 5 stages are:
Empathize: Understand the challenge Define: Define the problem Ideate: Brainstorm potential solutions Prototype: Build your solutions Test: Test your solutions
Design Thinking
Qualitative research method is used to collect information about users over time. Participants are asked to write about their everyday lives in a journal over a defined period of time.
Diary Study
focuses on fast technology delivery through the use of agile development. They focus on people and culture. It seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams.
Dev Ops
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.
Empathy Map
Who are we designing the product for? This person is our
End User
Lets us measure user eye activity with specialized tools, showing us where users look and in what order.
Eye Tracking
Creates the visual front end of an app or website. They create features that are viewable by the user.
Front End development
A minimalist user interface design style. It is characterized by simple, two-dimensional elements and vibrant colors.
Flat Design
Illustrate the steps a user can take to complete a task on a product.
Flowchart
The process of integrating game-design elements and principles into products in an effort to drive user engagement.
Gamification
A web-based service used by developers. It is a way of using a central hub to work on collaborative coding projects.
Github
A never ending loop of images or video clips.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
An 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.
Grid System
The physical parts parts of a product or computer are called
Hardware
A quick solution that solves a problem, but not particularly well, or in a particularly good way.
Hack
This is when the digital team take a day or more out, to come up with innovative ideas. The aim of this is to encourage creativity to get people to think outside the box.
Hack Day/ Hackathon
Set of markup codes inserted in a file for display on the web
Hypertext Markup Language. HTML
A graphical representation of the areas on your product that receive the most user attention.
Heat Map
A field of study concerned with the design and use of computer technology. It studies how we interact with interfaces and computers today.
HCI
mobile apps combine both native and web technologies. They’ll often use a combination of technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and will live inside a native container that lets it access device capabilities.
Hybrid App
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.
Information Architecture
The practice of designing interactive digital products and considering the way in which users will interact with them.
Interaction Design
A unique address that identifies a device on the internet or local network.
IP Address
A mobile operating system designed and developed by Apple.
iOS
The practice of breaking down development into small parts.
Iteration
The 3rd cornerstone, defines how both the HTML and CSS should behave. Think of it as the language that helps us make elements on a page interactive.
JavaScript
Measurable values that help us understand and track how well a product is doing. As a UX designer, you’ll often work with this like task success rate, user error rate, and time on task.
KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
Any page a user lands on. Often tied to ads and search results and are designed to meet specific conversion goals. Not only are they the page a user lands on, but they are also a crucial part of marketing campaigns.
Landing Page
Based on Agile, is a collaborative user-centric approach that prioritizes “learning loops” (building, learning, and measuring through iterations) over design documentation.
Lean UX
Represents what the user believes to be true about a product’s functionality.
Mental Model
The small bits of text you see on apps or websites that help you navigate it. Think labels on buttons, error messages, placeholder text in input fields and text on tooltips. Small bits of text, big impact on your product’s UX.
Microcopy
Refers to accessing the internet from smartphones.
Mobile Web
A static representations of a product. You can’t click through them or interact with them. They are essentially a picture of what the product will look like.
Mockup
A device that enables a computer to transfer data over telephone or cable lines.
Modem
Refers to the essential set of features we can launch a product with to get the ball rolling. It’s a way of developing a new product (e.g. a website) with acceptable features to suit the users. More features are only developed after considering feedback from the initial users.
MVP, or Minimum Viable Product
It’s a way of transferring data wirelessly to a mobile device from another device. Tap and pay services like Apple pay work this way.
NFC means Near Field Communication
Software that is available to anyone.
Open source software
When two programmers work together. One writes code, while the other reviews it. The two programmers often switch roles.
Pair programming
A representation of our target user. They aren’t necessarily a real individual but are constructed using real information and data based on real users.
Persona
Developers tell others about code changes they’ve pushed to GitHub.
Pull Requests
These little guys are the smallest controllable units on our screens. Tiny squares used to construct the images we see on our device displays.
Pixel
A preliminary model of our product used for testing. You’ll often build different fidelity prototypes during the product development process.
Prototype
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.
Refactoring
Allows your website to adapt to the device your users are viewing it on.
Responsive
When the team looks back on an iteration to improve the process for the next iteration.
Retrospective/Retro
A way to deliver applications over the internet. Instead of installing and maintaining software, you access it via the internet. This frees you from complex software and hardware management.
SAAS
An iterative agile software development framework for managing product development.
Scrum
A software package that contains the tools required to develop products for a specific platform or operating system. They help expedite the development process by providing “parts” developers can use instead of having to write the code for them from scratch.
SDK
The process of increasing a website’s visibility in free, or organic, search results. It often involves writing useful content on a website around words and phrases users use in searches related to the brand’s product or service.
SEO
A set period of time which set work has to be completed.
Sprint
A visual representation of a website’s pages and hierarchy.
Site map
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.
Storyboard
A development work that cannot be estimated until a development team runs a trial. The result of this is an estimate of the time it will take to do the work.
Spike
Scalable two-dimensional graphics that can be manipulated and animated with code.
SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics
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.
Task Analysis
Products accrue tthis whenever an easy but messy development solution is favored over a better yet more time consuming alternative. Eventually, the messy solution will need to be cleaned up, generating work.
Technical Debt
Where parts of an application are tested to find out if they are good to use.
Unit Testing
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.
UI Elements
Patterns are reusable solutions to common usability problems in products or on the web expressed as a collection of UI elements.
UI Pattern
Research method that lets us evaluate how easy a product is to use by testing it on a group of representative users.
Usability Testing
An iterative design framework in which users and their needs are always kept at the center of every decision.
User-centered design or UCD
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.
UX (User Experience)
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.
User Flow
A set of visual components a user needs to interact with a product, made up of UI elements (see below).
User Interface
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.
User Journey Maps
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.
User Scenario
In software _______ 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.
Waterfall Development
Common in tech job interviews, ________ interviews are designed to assess a candidate’s communication and problem solving skills. In it, candidates are given a problem and whiteboard to develop the solution on.
Whiteboard
The blueprint of a screen. They are a low-fidelity representation of a website’s layout and content.
Wireframe
Allows you to create a secure connection to another network over the Internet.
VPN, Virtual Private Network
