Basics
How a person interacts with the functions of a product.
What is user experience?
A way of tricking a user into completing a desired action.
Deceptive patterns
The way that text is formatted. Including size, spacing, and font choice.
What is typography?
The likelihood that users look for information that aligns with their own.
What is confirmation bias?
A fictional character that is meant to represent a user population.
What is a persona?
The look and feel of a product.
What is user interface?
A way of validating a design by testing prototypes with users.
Design research
A tool that helps designers space out elements consistently.
What are grids?
The psychological technique where exposure to one stimulus influences a subsequent response to another stimulus.
What is priming?
A technique where users test out a product and complete a series of tasks
What is a usability study?
Items on a webpage or application are organized from big to small to denote more important to less important.
What is Hierarchy?
A conversation with users to understand their needs, desires, and challenges that they encounter (pain points).
User interviews
How content is structured to make it as easy for users to navigate a system as possible.
Information architecture
Objects that are grouped together due to have like elements
What is similarity? (Gestalt Principle)
A basic outline for planning the layout and structure of a website or application.
What are wireframes?
The first stage of the design process. Can include competitive analysis and interviews with customers.
A tool for helping you organize insights from users.
Affinity diagram
Visuals that are used to communicate to the users different actions or objects.
What are icons?
When the brain fills the missing parts of the design or image to create a whole.
What is Closure? (a Gestalt Principle)
This type of diagram illustrates the discrete steps and logic users follow across an interactive process.
What is a workflow diagram?
The ability of a design to be used by everyone, including those living with a disability.
What is accessibility?
Users beliefs about an application that they are using.
What are mental models?
A method for identify challenges within a system (application, website, etc)
Heuristic evaluation
Objects that are near each other are thought to be related.
What is proximity? (Gestalt Principle)
This paper-based or interactive low-effort, low-fidelity tool models how the user moves through a process.
What is prototyping?