UX Glossary
199 terms · A to Z Practice#
A
- A/B Testing 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.
- Above the fold The content on a webpage that doesn’t require scrolling to experience
- Accessibility (a11y) Designing products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. Accessibility is just one aspect of inclusive design
- Accordion A vertically stacked list of headers that each expand to reveal or collapse associated content, letting users scan a page and open only the sections they need.
- Adaptive Design Adaptive design refers to graphical user interface (GUI) design that adapts to different screen sizes.
- Advertising Agencies Teams of creatives hired by clients to build marketing campaign
- Affinity A feeling of like-mindedness or compatibility toward something or someone
- Affinity Diagram A method of synthesizing that organizes data into groups with common themes or relationships
- Affordance A visual or physical cue that suggests how an element can be used — like a raised button that looks pressable or an underlined word that looks clickable.
- Agile An iterative approach to building products in short cycles, releasing small increments often and adjusting based on feedback rather than following one fixed long-term plan.
- Alt Text A written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown when an image fails to load, so people who can’t see it still get the meaning.
- Apprenticeships Provides on-the-job training to help people develop real skills
- ARIA Accessible Rich Internet Applications — a set of HTML attributes that describe the role, state, and properties of interface elements to assistive technologies like screen readers.
- Assets Everything from the text and images to the design specifications, like font style, color, size, and spacing
- Atomic Design A methodology by Brad Frost for building design systems from the smallest parts up: atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages.
B
- Baseline Grid A horizontal grid that aligns the bottom of every line of text to a consistent rhythm, keeping vertical spacing even across a layout.
- Basic Grid Intersecting lines that divide pages into small squares, which allows you to easily lay out elements in a design
- Bias Favoring or having prejudice against something based on limited information
- Big Picture Storyboard A series of visually rendered panels that focus on the user’s experience
- Borders A method of containment that uses continuous lines that often form shapes, like squares or rectangles, to break up sections of a page
- Bottom Sheet A surface that slides up from the bottom edge of a mobile screen to present secondary content or actions without leaving the current context.
- Brand Identity The visual appearance and voice of a company
- Breadcrumb A row of links showing the user’s location within a site’s hierarchy, letting them see where they are and step back up the path.
C
- Call-to-Action (CTA) A visual prompt that tells the user to take action, like to click a button
- Card Sorting A research method where participants group labeled cards into categories that make sense to them, revealing how people expect content to be organized.
- Carousel A rotating set of slides or items shown one or a few at a time in the same space, navigated by swiping, arrows, or dots.
- Case study 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
- Chip A small, compact element that represents an input, attribute, filter, or action — often used for tags, selections, or removable filters.
- Close-Up Storyboard A series of visually rendered panels that focus on the product
- Cognitive Load Cognitive load is the mental processing power needed to use a product
- Cognitive Walkthrough An evaluation method where reviewers step through a task as a first-time user would, checking whether each action is obvious and its outcome clear.
- Color Contrast Ratio The measured difference in luminance between text and its background, used to check legibility. WCAG asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal body text.
- Common Region The principle that elements located within the same area are perceived to be grouped together
- Competitive Audit An overview of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
- Containment 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
- Contextual Inquiry A field research method where you observe and interview users in their own environment while they perform real tasks, gathering context you can’t get in a lab.
- Conversion Rate Measures the percentage of users who complete a desired action
D
- Dark Pattern An interface deliberately designed to trick users into doing something they didn’t mean to, like hidden costs, forced continuity, or hard-to-find opt-outs.
- Dashboard A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives
- Data-Driven Design 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.
- De-Identification Removing any identifying information from a users’ data that is collected during a research study
- Design Critique Session A planned period of time where UX designers present their work to team members and listen to feedback
- Design Culture Design culture is an organizational culture focused on approaches that improve customer experiences through design.
- Design Debt The accumulated cost of inconsistent or shortcut design decisions that make a product harder to maintain and evolve, similar to technical debt.
- Design Principle Design principles are widely applicable laws, guidelines, biases and design considerations which designers apply with discretion
- Design Research 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
- Design Sprint 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
- Design Sprint Brief The sprint brief will act as a guidepost for the team throughout the sprint.
- Design System A series of reusable elements that allow teams to design and develop a product following predetermined standards
- Design Thinking A way to create solutions that address a real user problem and are functional and affordable
- Design Token A named, reusable value for a design decision — a color, spacing unit, font size, or radius — stored centrally so it stays consistent across platforms.
- Design-To-Code 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
- DesignOps The practice of streamlining how design teams work — their processes, tools, workflows, and rituals — so designers can focus on the craft instead of the overhead.
- Diary Study A longitudinal research method where participants log their activities, thoughts, or frustrations over days or weeks, revealing behavior that unfolds over time.
- Direct Competitors Have offerings that are similar to your product and focus on the same audience
- Dividers A method of containment that uses single lines to separate sections of a page
- Domain Address of your website
- Drop-Off Rates The number of users who abandon the experience
E
- Edge Case 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
- Elements Building blocks for creating a design
- Elements of Design Design elements are the fundamentals to all designs: form, shape, line, texture, color, space, movement.
- Empathy Figuring out pain points, behavior, wants, and much more about the user before making any design decisions.
- Empathy Map An easily understood chart that explains everything designers have learned about a type of user
- Emphasis A way of attracting attention to text, a button, or another object in a design
- Empty State What a screen shows when there’s no content yet — a first-run, cleared, or error state — used to orient, reassure, and guide the user toward a next step.
- Equity-focused design Equity-focused design seeks to build products that meet the needs of specific individuals in groups who have been excluded in the past
- Eye Tracking A research technique that records where and how long people look on a screen, showing which elements draw attention and which get ignored.
F
- F-Shape 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
- Facilitator The person who runs the design critique and guides the process
- Feedback Asking for or receiving ideas about what is or isn’t working in a product design
- Fidelity How closely a design matches the look and feel of the final product
- Fill A method of containment that assigns colors to borders and shapes
- Fitts’s Law A model predicting that the time to reach a target depends on its size and distance — bigger, closer targets are faster and easier to hit.
- 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
- Focus State The visible indication that an element is selected via keyboard or assistive tech, such as an outline or ring, essential for accessible navigation.
- Font The size, thickness, and emphasis of characters of text
- Foundational Research Answers the questions: What should we build? What are the user problems? How can we solve them?
- Framework Creates the basic structure that focuses and supports the problem you’re trying to solve, like an outline for a project
- Freelancers Designers who work for themselves and market their services to businesses to find customers
- Friendliness Bias The tendency of people to agree with those they like in order to maintain a non-confrontational conversation
G
- Generalist 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 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
- Gesture Any method of interaction a user has with information on their device using touch
- Goal Statement A goal statement describes the product you plan to create and how it will help your users, aligning the team on the intended outcome.
H
- Handoff The stage of the design process where designers transfer assets, designs and documents to the developers to code
- Happy Path An ideal situation where everything happens perfectly as the designers were expecting. We also call it "Ideal case" or "Ideal path"
- Heatmap A visualization that uses color to show where users click, tap, scroll, or look most on a page, surfacing patterns of attention and interaction.
- Hero image The hero image is the large banner at the top of a website
- Heuristic Evaluation A method where experts review an interface against a set of usability principles, like Nielsen’s heuristics, to spot problems without involving users.
- Hick’s Law The principle that the more choices a person faces, the longer they take to decide — a reason to reduce or group options in an interface.
- Hierarchy A visual design principle that orders elements on a page and classifies them by their level of importance
- High-Fidelity 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 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.
- Hypothesis Statement 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.
I
- Implicit Bias The collection of attitudes and stereotypes associated with people, without one’s conscious knowledge
- Inclusive Design 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
- Information Architecture Information architecture is the framework of a website, or how it's organized, categorized, and structured
- Insight An observation about people that helps you understand the user or their needs from a new perspective
- Interactivity Makes the prototype functional
- Interviews 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.
- Iterate Revise the original design to create a new and improved version
J
- Jakob’s Law The observation that users spend most of their time on other sites, so they expect yours to work the same way as the ones they already know.
- Journey Map A visualization of the steps, thoughts, and emotions a user goes through to accomplish a goal, exposing pain points and moments that matter across the whole experience.
K
- Kerning The adjustment of space between individual pairs of letters to make text look evenly spaced and readable.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Critical measures of progress toward an end goal
- Keyboard Navigation Operating an interface using only the keyboard — Tab, arrows, Enter, Escape — which many people with motor or vision disabilities rely on.
L
- Landing Page A standalone page built around a single goal, usually where visitors arrive from a campaign or link, focused on one clear call to action.
- Layout Grid A series of columns and alleys that allow you to organize elements in a design
- Layouts Ways to arrange elements on a page
- Lorem Ipsum Placeholder text of scrambled Latin used to fill a layout before real copy exists, so designers can judge the visual shape without reading along.
- Low-Fidelity A design that has a lower amount of complexity and is less refined or polished; called “lo-fi” for short
M
- Mental Model A person’s internal belief about how something works, formed from past experience; interfaces feel intuitive when they match the user’s mental model.
- Methodology The steps to take to conduct research, collect data, and analyze data
- Microcopy The small bits of text throughout an interface — button labels, hints, error messages, empty states — that guide, reassure, and give a product its voice.
- Microinteraction A small, contained moment of feedback or animation around a single task, like a toggle flipping or a like button bouncing, that adds clarity and delight.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP) The simplest version of a product that delivers real value and can be released to learn from users, avoiding overbuilding before validating the idea.
- Mockup A high-fidelity design that represents your final product, without the interactivity of a prototype
- Modal A window that appears over the main content and blocks interaction with the rest of the page until the user acts on it or dismisses it.
- Motion A way to animate static design elements to focus the user’s attention and tell stories
N
- Negative/White space The gaps between elements in a design
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) A metric based on one question — how likely you are to recommend a product — used as a simple, comparable gauge of user loyalty.
- Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) A contract that gives one party legal protection against another party stealing their ideas or revealing proprietary information before a product is launched
- North Star Metric The single measure that best captures the core value a product delivers to users, used to align a team around what really matters.
- Notetaker The person who captures all of the ideas and feedback from the reviewers during a design critique
- Nudge A subtle design cue that steers people toward a helpful choice without restricting their options, like a smart default or a gentle reminder.
O
P
- Pain Points 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
- Persona 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.
- Presentation A group of slides, where each slide has new information
- Presenter The designer who is sharing their work with others in the design critique session
- Primary Research Primary research is research you conduct yourself. Information from direct interactions with users, like interviews, surveys, or usability studies, are considered primary research.
- Problem Statement 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.
- Progressive Disclosure Showing only what a user needs at each moment and revealing advanced or secondary options gradually, to reduce clutter and cognitive load.
- Progressive Web App (PWA) A website built to behave like an installed app — working offline, loading fast, and sending notifications — using modern web capabilities.
- Proportion The balance or harmony between elements that are scaled
- Prototype A prototype is an early model of a product that demonstrates functionality, like a wireframe, but a lot more advanced
- Proximity A Gestalt Principle that describes how elements that are close together appear to be more related than elements that are spaced farther apart
Q
- Qualitative research 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 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?”
R
- Rapid Prototyping Quickly building rough, testable versions of a design to explore ideas and gather feedback early, before investing in polished production work.
- Research Understand audiences and learn about their backgrounds: demographics, like age and location, motivations, pain points, emotions and life goals
- Research Report A document to share research insights in detail, with few visuals
- Research Study A step-by-step examination of a group of users and their needs, which adds realistic context to the design process
- Responsive Design An approach where a layout fluidly adapts to any screen size using flexible grids, images, and breakpoints, so one design works across devices.
- Reviewer Someone who gives feedback about the design and offers clear actions to take during a design critique session
S
- Scalable Describes a system that’s able to maintain performance levels when workload increases
- Scale Concept that’s used to explain the size relationship between a given element and the other elements in the design
- Screen Reader Assistive software that reads on-screen content aloud or outputs it to a braille display, used by people who are blind or have low vision.
- Secondary Research 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.
- Serial Position Effect 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
- Shadows A method of containment that creates dimension in combination with borders or fill
- Signifier A perceivable cue that signals where and how an action can be taken — a button label, an underline, an arrow, a scrollbar. Where an affordance is what an element makes possible, a signifier is what communicates that possibility to the user.
- Similarity A Gestalt Principle that describes how elements that look alike are perceived to have the same function
- Skeleton 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.
- Skeuomorphism A design style where digital elements mimic their real-world counterparts — like a notes app that looks like paper — to feel familiar.
- Social desirability bias The tendency for people to answer questions in a way that will be viewed favorably by others
- Specialist A specialist dives deep into one particular UX design role, like interaction, visual, or motion design
- Sticky Navigation A menu or bar that stays fixed in place as the user scrolls, keeping key actions and wayfinding always within reach.
- Storyboard A storyboard in UX is a tool that visually predicts and explores a user's experience with a product.
- Synthesize Combine ideas to draw conclusions
- System Usability Scale (SUS) A questionnaire used to measure the usability of designs
T
- T-Shaped Designer A T-shaped designer specializes in one kind of UX design and has a breadth of knowledge in other areas
- Tab Bar A row of top-level destinations, usually at the bottom on mobile, that lets users switch between the main sections of an app with one tap.
- Task Analysis Breaking a user’s goal into the individual steps and decisions required to complete it, to understand and streamline the flow.
- Think-Aloud Protocol A usability technique where participants voice their thoughts as they use a product, revealing expectations, confusion, and reasoning in real time.
- Thumb zone Graphical representation of the product areas (using the color spectrum) that are easiest or hardest to click with the thumb
- Time On Task The amount of time it takes for a user to complete a task
- Tooltip A small pop-up label that appears on hover or focus to explain an element or give a hint, without permanently taking up space.
- Touch Target The tappable area of an interactive element. Guidelines recommend at least around 44×44 pixels so it’s easy to hit with a finger.
- Tree Testing A research method that tests a site’s navigation structure on its own, asking users to find items in a text-only hierarchy to check if labels and grouping work.
- Type Classification A general system to describe styles of type, like serif and sans serif
- Typeface The overall style of text, distinguished by stroke weight, shape, type of serif, and line lengths
- Typography The technique of arranging letters and text to make the language readable, clear, and visually appealing
- Typography Hierarchy The ordering of typefaces and fonts in a layout to create divisions that show users where to focus and how to find information
U
- UCD 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.
- Unity Measures how well elements of your design work together to communicate an idea
- Universal Design Universal design is the process of creating one product for users with the widest range of abilities and in the widest range of situations
- Usability How easily and effectively people can use a product to reach their goals, commonly judged by learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction.
- Usability Study 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.
- Use of navigation vs. Search The number of people who use a website or app’s navigation compared to the number of people who use the search functionality
- User A user is any person who uses a product
- User Error Rates Indicate the parts of a design that cause users to make errors
- User Experience User experience is how a person, the user, feels about interacting with or experiencing a product
- User Experience Evaluation When it comes to evaluating user experience, there are a few key questions to examine
- User Flow The path a user takes through a product to complete a task, mapped as a sequence of screens, actions, and decision points.
- User Story 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.
- User-Centric Design 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
- UX Research UX Research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation and feedback.
V
- Value Proposition A clear statement of the benefit a product gives its users and why it’s better than the alternatives — the reason someone would choose it.
- Visual Balance The sense that a design is equally weighted on both sides of its emphasized center
- Visual Design How a product or technology appears to users
- Visual Weight A measure of the force that an element exerts to attract the eye
- Vulnerable Populations Groups of people who have limited ability to provide their consent or have special privacy concerns
W
- WCAG Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — the international standard defining how to make web content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for everyone.
- Wireframe 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
- Wizard of Oz A research method where a human secretly powers responses behind a seemingly automated interface, letting teams test an idea before building the real system.
Z
- Z-Pattern A layout pattern following the way eyes scan a sparse page — left to right, then diagonally down and across — used to place key elements along the path.
- Zeigarnik Effect The tendency to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones, which progress bars and checklists use to keep users engaged.