Tactical Research & Discovery
This rapid tactical method asks users what they remember after looking at a screen for just a few moments.
What is a 5-Second Test?
Pressing Shift + A in Figma triggers this magical, time-saving layout feature.
What is Auto Layout?
This term describes the specific text instructions you give to an LLM to get a desired output.
What is a Prompt?
This law states that the time required to move to a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.
What is Fitts's Law?
"As a user, I want to [action] so that [benefit]" is the standard template for writing one of these fundamental agile requirements.
What is a User Story?
This bias occurs when participants answer questions in a way they think the researcher or designer wants to hear.
What is Social Desirability Bias?
This term refers to the complete set of design standards, documentation, and reusable UI components that act as a single source of truth for a product.
What is a Design System?
When an AI confidently invents a fake user persona, non-existent features, or incorrect data, it is called this.
What is a Hallucination?
This law points out that users spend most of their time on other sites, so they expect your site to work like all the others.
What is Jakob's Law?
This common agile ceremony is where the team assigns points to estimate the effort required for a ticket.
What is Sprint Planning (or Backlog Refinement)?
In user interviews, using this simple three-word phrase is often the best way to get a user to elaborate on a short answer.
What is "Tell me more"?
In Figma, creating these lets you update a single master element and have the changes propagate throughout your file.
What are Components?
This non-linear, spontaneous cognitive process is used to generate creative, diverse, and numerous solutions to a problem.
What is Divergent Thinking?
This psychological principle explains why people remember the first and last items in a list better than the items in the middle.
What is the Serial Position Effect?
This is an accumulation of design compromises, inconsistencies, and usability issues that build up over time in a product, usually as a result of prioritizing speed-to-market over design polish.
What is Design Debt?
This guerrilla testing method involves grabbing a non-designer colleague from another department to quickly test a user flow.
What is Hallway Testing?
This UI pattern involves hiding secondary or advanced information behind a "Read More" or "Advanced Settings" link to keep the screen uncluttered.
What is Progressive Disclosure?
This UX design framework ensures that a person reviews, edits, and approves an AI's output before a final action is taken, preventing the AI from acting autonomously.
What is Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)?
This rule suggests that the average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory at one time.
What is Miller's Law?
The commonly tracked metric abbreviation "NPS" stands for this.
What is Net Promoter Score?
This diagram maps a user's chronological steps, emotional states, and pain points across a specific scenario.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A "Ghost Button" is another common industry name for this specific type of button styling.
What is an Outlined (or Transparent) Button?
In prompt engineering, giving an AI a specific character to embody (e.g., "Act as a frustrated user with low tech literacy") is known as this technique.
What is Role-Prompting (or Persona Adoption)?
This principle states that for any system, there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced and must be absorbed by either the user or the system.
What is Tesler's Law (or The Law of Conservation of Complexity)?
This is a shared, actionable checklist used in Agile/Scrum to ensure product backlog items (PBIs) are sufficiently refined, understood, and actionable before development begins.
What is the Definition of Ready (DoR)?