Design Foundations
In this research method, participants arrange topics into groups that make sense to them, helping designers understand how users mentally organize information.
What is card sorting?
This Agile ceremony has a team discuss on what went well, what didn't, and what to improve — held at the end of each sprint.
What is a retro (or retrospective)?
This framework — used widely in design — captures customer interactions, emotions, pain points, and opportunities across a service.
What is a customer journey map?
This sign, posted at the entrance of one-way roads and highway off-ramps, features a single white horizontal rectangle centered on a red background, indicating to drivers they are about to make a serious mistake.
What is a Do Not Enter sign?
This Canadian-born host took over Jeopardy in 1984 and became so synonymous with the show that his death in 2020 prompted a years-long search for a permanent replacement.
Who is Alex Trebek?
This qualitative research technique involves observing people in their actual environment to understand context, behavior, and workarounds.
What is contextual inquiry (or ethnographic research)?
This design process model — diverge, converge, diverge, converge — is widely used to describe how designers move from problem to solution.
What is the Double Diamond?
OMB Circular A-11 Section 280 requires High Impact Service Providers to do this annually to measure customer experience.
What is conducting and reporting customer feedback surveys?
This orange sign, typically posted in construction zones, tells you that your planned route is no longer an option.
What is a Detour sign?
Meta paid $19 billion for this company in 2014 — its largest acquisition ever — in a deal that has never fully paid off in the way analysts expected.
What is WhatsApp?
Founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919 by Walter Gropius, this school unified fine art and functional craft under one roof, arguing that beauty and utility are inseparable.
This is the behind-the-scenes view of staff processes, systems, and policies that support a customer-facing service.
What is the backstage (or back of house)? Bonus: what is a service blueprint?
This acronym refers to the 35 federal agencies and programs designated to lead CX improvement efforts across government.
What are HISPs (High Impact Service Providers)?
This sign marks the terminus of a road and is sometimes confused with a No Outlet sign.
What is a Dead End sign?
In a celebrated 2016 episode of SNL's Black Jeopardy, this actor hosted the sketch as a MAGA hat-wearing contestant who kept getting the answers right, revealing unexpected common ground between Black and white working-class culture.
Who is Tom Hanks?
In typography, this term describes the space between individual letter pairs, adjusted to create optically consistent spacing — distinct from the uniform spacing applied across a range of text.
What is kerning?
This design research concept, introduced by Don Norman, describes the mismatch between how a designer intends a product to work and how a user actually understands it — often the root cause of usability failures.
What is the Gulf of Evaluation (or the Gulf of Execution)? Accept: Norman's gulfs of execution and evaluation.
This executive order, signed in December 2021, directed federal agencies to transform and improve the customer experience across government services.
What is EO 14058 (Transforming Federal Customer Experience)?
This yellow sign relies entirely on iconography to warn drivers, and its placement is determined not by road geometry, but by migration patterns and collision data.
What is a Deer (or other animal) Crossing sign?
In 2011, this IBM-built AI system defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy in a celebrated man-vs-machine match, marking a milestone in natural language processing.
What is Watson?
These six perceptual principles — including proximity, similarity, and closure — describe how the human eye groups visual elements into patterns and wholes of this principle.
What is Gestalt?
Borrowed from Japanese aesthetics, this concept holds that the space between things carries as much meaning as the things themselves — a principle that shows up in white space decisions, animation timing, and the rhythm of a user interface.
What is "ma"?
The federal Life Experiences initiative identified five priority journey areas. Name two of them.
What is... [any two of:]
- Having a child and early childhood
- Recovering from a disaster
- Facing a financial shock
- Transitioning from active-duty military service
- Approaching retirement
This triangular yellow sign with a red border and no text or symbols signals this simple message to drivers in Europe.
What is Danger?
Meta faced massive regulatory backlash in 2018 following revelations that the data of 87 million Facebook users was harvested without consent by this political consulting firm.
What is Cambridge Analytica?