User Experience Design (UXD) Terms (WIP)

Functions Associated to UXD:

HCD A framework that integrates practices to understand users' needs, wants, behaviors, and contexts

UCD A concise version of HCD that focuses on a specific target user and has deeper analysis of them

UX How a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service

CX A customer's holistic perception of their experience with a business or brand

Introduction and Notes to UXD Terms

Here are some terms associated to User Experience Design.

It is a summarized list by By Gabriel Belisiario, posted to Medium (https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/fact-based-ux-ux-terms-f6f85a6e4fc6).

Accessibility

Accessibility refers to how easily and effectively a product or service can be accessed and used by people with varying abilities/disabilities. It encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.

Agile Methods

Agile development methodologies include Extreme Programming, Scrum, and the Crystal Family. They are designed to flex and support the needs of the project and organization.

Agile Manifesto

Representatives from several disciplines of software development got together in 2001 and created the Agile Software Development Manifesto. It outlined four major values and twelve broad principles.

Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb navigation allows users to quickly skip to distinct levels of the website and can be useful to orientate users when they have arrived via search engines.

Briefing

Briefing is an evolutionary process of understanding an organization's needs and resources, and matching these to its objectives and mission.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

A call to action should instruct the user what to do, and should be written with active verbs; it should reflect the action that the visitor needs to take, rather than the technical function that is performed.

Card Sorting

Card Sorting is a method for organizing content, names, icons, objects, ideas, problems, tasks, or other items into piles that are similar in some way.

Customer Experience (CX)

The customer experience is the subjective aspect of any interaction that an individual has with a business, its products, or services.

Dark Patterns

Dark Patterns are patterns in user interface design that steer users towards making decisions favorable not to themselves, but to the site employing the dark pattern.

Dashboard

An information dashboard is a visual display of data organized in ways easy to read and interpret. It reveals trends and directions of the measured metrics.

Dashboards are popular business tools that visually summarize the most valuable information and point to deviations from targets.

Design Sprint

A Design Sprint is an intense effort conducted by a small team that sets the direction for a product or service.

Design Sprints are a Lean and Agile build process that gets people aligned around innovative ideas, creates more ownership and buy-in, and gets innovative ideas to prototype and launch more quickly.

A Design Sprint consists of five discrete phases:

0. Prepare (Get ready)

1. Understand (review background and user insights)

2. Diverge (brainstorm what’s possible)

3. Converge (rank solutions, pick one)

4. Prototype (create a minimum viable concept)

5. Test (observe what’s effective for users)

6. Iterate… to another design sprint, or a Lean and Agile build process such as Scrum or Continuous Delivery/Extreme Programming

Design System

Design Systems are shared principles and practices that help to guide the design and development of a product's user experience.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is the methodology used by designers to solve problems and provide the perfect alternative solution.

Desk Research

Desk Research in former times involved going through libraries and record offices to extract information, but today it involves accessing vast amounts of data and information at the click of a mouse.

Diary Studies

Diary studies are longitudinal research methods often used in market research and product development analysis.

Double Diamond

- Discover phase involves generating new knowledge and insights.

- Define phase involves defining people-centered design briefs

- Develop phase involves developing several ideas.

The design process has four phases:

1. Discover - generating new knowledge and insights through exploration and research.

2. Define - defining people-centered design briefs.

3. Develop - developing several ideas through co-creation and design ideation processes.

4. Deliver - selecting ideas to take forward and delivering outputs in the form of prototypes, services, ideas, or guidance.

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of another person. It is the ability to put yourself in the other person's shoes through imagination.

Designers often overrate empathy, because no one can assume the real experiences that other people go through in their skin, in their lives, in their roles and in their positions.

Ethnographic Research

Is scientific? Is investigative?Uses researcher as primary tool of data collectionUses rigorous research methods and data collection techniquesUses both inductive and deductive approaches

Ethnographic research takes place in the field, rather than a laboratory, and involves studying people in their natural settings.

Focus Group

Focus groups are research techniques used to collect data through group interaction on a topic. They involve people, have an experience or interest in common, and are focused.

Focus groups are useful for obtaining direct user feedback on their opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. The moderator can probe and follow-up on participant comments as necessary.

Heuristic

Heuristic evaluation is a method for assessing the quality of a design decision in an existing interface, and is best used as a cost and time effective evaluation technique.

Human Centered Design (HCD)

Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment, make things visible, and follow natural mappings between intentions and required actions.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Methodologies and processes for designing interfaces, methods for implementing interfaces, techniques for evaluating and comparing interfaces, and descriptive and predictive models and theories of interaction.

Information Architecture

The structural design of shared information environments is an emerging discipline focused on bringing principles of design to the digital landscape.

Insight

Insight is the ability to inspect and manipulate a mental representation of some part of the world, when away from any opportunity to see it directly.

In-Depth Interview

In-depth interviews are used in qualitative research to understand the experience of other people and the meaning they make of their experience. They allow researchers to get "deep" answers to their questions from "experts" on the issue.

Lean Startup

Lean Startup focuses on using the least amount of resources while inching toward a solution that adresses the customer's most pressing problems significantly better than competing alternatives.

Lean UX

A process change for designers and product teams, and a culture change to be more inclusive, collaborative, and transparent.

Metrics

Metrics are quantitative measures that are used to track and assess the status of a specific process.

Mind Map

A Mind Map is a way of organizing information in a circular, nonlinear way, and is an excellent way to hone in on a specific topic.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

An MVP can be used to reduce risk and make faster progress by eliciting necessary learning before investing in costly design, production, and infrastructure.

Mockup

A mockup is a visual draft of a web application or page. It is created using a web page of graphics development tools and is much faster and cheaper to create than a working prototype.

Persona

Personas are used to understand the needs of users when developing a new product, whether it is a digital product or a nondigital product.

A persona is a profile that describes the ideal target audience in categorical terms. It is further reinforced by giving the persona a name and a profile photograph.

Proto-Persona

Proto-personas are inspired by personas, but are created using whatever data is available and with the help of the team. Proto-personas can be updated using data gathered in usability testing, but should be updated to true design personas at the earliest opportunity.

Prototype

A prototype is a manifestation of an idea into a format that communicates the idea to others or is tested with users, with the intention to improve that idea over time.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research is explaining phenomena by collecting numerical data and analyzing it using mathematically based methods.

Questionnaire

A good user experience questionnaire can help to spot issues early on, clarify the goals behind the design, and think about what work still needs to be done.

Readability

Readability is the ease with which something can be read. A high degree of readability improves the usability of the website, and has a significant impact on user experience.

Responsive Design

Responsive Design is a way to make websites that can be easily viewed and used on any type of device and size of screen.

Scrum

Scrum is an agile approach for developing innovative products and services that continuously evaluates the product and adapts the process to work more efficiently.

Service Blueprint

A service blueprint builds on a customer journey map by showing how activities by a customer trigger service processes and vice versa.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a basic diagram illustrating the grouping of related content as well as the hierarchical structure of a website, thus how the pages within the website relate to one another.

Storyboard

Storyboards allow the design team to understand the context of the experience, build empathy with users, and evaluate ideas. They are a low-cost way to show consumers a concept.

Style Guide

A style guide is a document that describes standard practices and requirements for the development of user interface elements.

A style guide should list each class of element and specify attributes such as font typeface, font size, color, spacing, and so on.

Taxonomy

Taxonomies are used to group, label, prioritize, and tag information to allow for greater findability, readability, and overall usability.

Usability Test

Usability tests are used to evaluate whether a product is usable and how the users experience its use. They are conducted with people who might use the product.

Usability

The concept of usability was first discussed by Shackel (1984), who defined it as the capacity of a product, system, or service to be used easily and effectively by humans.

User Flow

A User Flow can help a client understand the process of creating an account, by describing the steps involved.

User-Centered Design (UCD)

User-centered design (UCD) is a design philosophy that focuses on the user's wants, needs, and limitations to create the best possible end product.

User Flow

User flows are similar to user scenarios, except they are visual frameworks that describe the specific journey a user takes from point A to point B.

User Interface (UI)

User Interface Design is a subset of human-computer interaction (HCI). It has two components: input and output.

1. Input is how a person communicates needs and desires to the computer, and output is how the computer conveys the results of its computations and requirements to the user.

2. A User Interface (UI) is a conversation between users and a product to perform tasks that achieve users' goals. A well-designed UI allows users to focus on the information and task at hand.

User Journey

A User Journey is analogous to a physical journey, with a starting point and multiple potential routes. A user can get lost in an interactive system, and can abandon an interactive journey at any point.

User Scenarios

The user needs to know what information is required before starting a task, and what the user needs to do to accomplish the task.

UX Research

User research is used to make the difference between a product that is useful, usable, and successful, and one that is an unprofitable exercise in frustration for everyone involved.

User Story

User Stories are short narratives describing features or capabilities needed by a user in a specific work role. They are used as an agile UX design "requirement" (HARTSON and PYLA, 2018).

UX Writing

UX Writing is the process of creating the words in user experiences, such as titles, buttons, labels, instructions, descriptions, notifications, warnings, and controls.

Waterfall

Waterfall development is a process that flows from requirements to design to implementation to validation. UX activities happen before development starts.

Wireframe

A wireframe is a skeletal depiction of what a product should look like. It shows how the entire system hangs together to create a complete, interconnected structure that stands together.

Wow Factor

The wow-effect is an emotional based feeling of something positively unexpected. It has three major components.