Best Practices
This iterative process involves building a basic version of a product to test assumptions with real users before full-scale development.
What is creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
A deliberately deceptive UI element, like a hidden unsubscribe link or a pre-checked box for a newsletter you never wanted.
What is a dark pattern?
This law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
What is Hick's Law?
It's not an identity verification vendor; it's a fictional character created to represent a key user type.
What is a Persona?
The classic client feedback that sends shivers down a designer's spine, often accompanied by a request to "add more pizazz."
What is "Can you make the logo bigger"?
This simple, low-fidelity outline of a webpage or app is used to map out the structure and user flow before any visual design is applied.
What is wireframing?
This frustrating user experience is created when a critical action, like a password reset, is unnecessarily delayed for 1-4 hours by batch processing for server efficiency.
What is creating friction?
This law dictates that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target, which is why your buttons should be big and easy to reach.
What is Fitts's Law?
The scientific method for designers, where you show two versions of a screen to different users to see which one performs better.
What is an A/B test?
The classic six-word phrase that casually dismisses the complex process of research, iteration, and problem-solving, implying your job can be done in about ten minutes.
What is "Can you just mock that up?"
This interaction design pattern manages complexity by deferring advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn.
What is progressive disclosure?
This visual sin against usability involves plastering an interface with so many buttons, banners, and blinking doodads that users feel like they've walked into a digital Times Square.
What is a cluttered interface (or information overload)?
The principle that an average person can only keep about 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory, which is why you shouldn't have 15 items in your main navigation.
What is Miller's Magical Number 7
The term for how "real" a design looks, ranging from a simple napkin sketch to a fully polished, interactive mockup.
What is fidelity (as in low-fidelity vs. high-fidelity)?
The horrifying moment you receive critical design feedback as a marked-up screenshot pasted into a Word document, complete with comments in Comic Sans.
What is the worst possible way to receive feedback?
Not to be confused with building design, this is the foundational practice of structuring and organizing content in a product to help users find information and complete tasks.
What is Information Architecture (IA)?
This occurs when every stakeholder gets to add their favorite feature, resulting in a product that looks like a Swiss Army knife designed by a committee that has never met.
What is feature creep?
This law suggests users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know, meaning you should probably just stick to the familiar shopping cart icon.
What is Jakob's Law?
The tendency of a team to spend way too much time on a trivial, easy-to-understand issue (like the color of a bike shed) while avoiding more complex, important problems.
What is bike-shedding?
The soul-crushing phrase from a stakeholder who casually dismisses hours of user research and data with their own flawless, unbiased opinion.
What is "Well, I don't like it"?
A usability inspection method where an interface is judged against a set of 10 recognized principles, such as "visibility of system status" and "error prevention," developed by Jakob Nielsen.
What is a Heuristic Evaluation?
The act of shipping a beautiful, "pixel-perfect" mockup to developers, only to find out it shatters on every screen size except the exact one you designed it on.
What is ignoring responsive design?
A psychological rule stating that people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its most intense point and at its end, not on the average of every moment.
What is the Peak-End Rule?
A property of an object that suggests how it should be used, like how a button's shape looks like it needs to be pushed or a dropdown tells you it can be dropped.
What is an affordance?
The mythical creature, often spoken of but never seen, that supposedly contains the approved, unchangeable version of a design. Its siblings include Design_v2_final, Design_final_FINAL, and Design_final_for_real_this_time_v3.
What is a final design file?