| Term | Definition |
| Aesthetic-Usability Effect | A visually appealing design is perceived to be easier to use. It doesn’t matter if it actually is easier to use. There is apparent usability and inherent usability Emotion affects our perception of usability. |
| Affordance | These are helpers that make it clear to users what an element will do. Giving users an idea of what something will do saves them time and mental effort. Buttons on interfaces, for example, afford being pressed to trigger an action. A person’s recognition of what something is supposed to do. It means the function that this object or UI element will perform is what the user expects. We might understand a door handle will do something but do we understand whether we should push or pull the door handle? The first part probably has a high affordance but the second part may or may not depending on how it was designed. |
| Agile Manifesto | Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.Working software over comprehensive documentationCustomer collaboration over contract negotiation.Responding to change over following a plan. That is, while there is value in the items on |
| Anchoring | The bias of relying on the first piece of information available as the anchor by which other items are judged. Placing the highest donation amount first on a charity site is likely to create higher donations than placing the lowest donation amount first. (aka. focalism) |
| Bandwagon Effect | This is group think at its worst. People will deny their own thoughts and decisions if they feel the group is right. They may feel if everyone else says so, they must be right. Or they may feel insecure in deviating from the popular opinion for fear of how they will be perceived by the other members of the group. |
| Choice Overload | Having too many choices might lead people to browse but likely won’t lead to a commitment by the end user. They become overloaded and walk away. A famous study showed choices of jams to people. When they used many choices, people stopped to browse more but were less likely to buy. Fewer choices led to more purchases. |
| Chunking | Combining similar items together in groups. Short term memory capacity is limited to around 7 items. Chunking allows us to combine like items into groups for better recall. |
| Cocktail Party Effect | People tune into conversations, options or choices that pertain to them. This supports the notion of personalization. Netflix gives users recommendations based on things like their history, demographics or other cognitive biases like polarizing images. |
| Cognitive Bias | Inherent flaws of judgement that shape user perceptions and behavior. The flaws are often caused by mental shortcuts based on past experiences. People make decisions based on a construct of reality not based in objective input. So cognitive biases may lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation.https://www.everybodyhatesyourbrand.com/blog |
| Cognitive Load | The burden on the short-term memory during complex tasks. |
| Delay Discounting | This is our inclination to choose immediate rewards over rewards that come later in the future, even when they are smaller. This is why someone might take a lottery payout up front over the lifetime incremental payments, even though the yearly payments would amount to more money in the end. Hyperbolic discounting is a from of delay discounting but the relationship between the delay and the reward is not even. In that case the desire to wait for a higher reward drops off quickly but as time increases, so does the inclination to wait for the bigger reward. |
| Design Thinking | This is a 5-stage methodology for problem solving.1. Empathize: Understand the challenge2. Define: Define the problem3. Ideate: Brainstorm potential solutions4. Prototype: Build your solutions5. Test: Test your solutions |
| Empathy Map | Empathy maps are collaborative tools that help us visualize user behavior, attitudes and feelings. They are split into 4 equal quadrants containing information about what the user is saying, thinking, doing and feeling. At the center, is our user persona. They are surrounded in each quadrant with information we’ve collected through user research. This map helps us understand the user’s pain and therefore, helps us empathize with them. |
| Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) | Thinking that someone else is getting or experiencing something you are not. This social anxiety is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected.”The perfect example, in this case, is social media. Being connected most of the time with everything and everyone on multiple social platforms, people have begun to develop irrational distress if they are not up to date with every piece of information available. Even after disconnecting, the desire to connect once more is striking.Common use cases:· Create time & quantity scarcity· Display the stock availability for items which have a low stock· Emphasize the buying behavior of other visitors (3 people are looking at this product/last in stock) |
| Five Hat Racks | Information can be arranged in 5 ways known as LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy(continuum). |
| Fogg’s Behavior Model | Three things are necessary for a user to take action: proper motivation, ability to carry out the task, and a trigger. |
| Gestalt Laws of Grouping | Often used in design to establish relationships between objects. The set of principles revolve around: proximity, similarity, closure, continuity, common fate. |
| Goal Gradient Effect | People are more motivated by how much is left to do than how far they have come. We want to see the finish line. Conversions can benefit from having a literal finish line in our UI design. This is why users like progress bars in applications. |
| Hick’s Law | As the number of options increases, so will the time it takes to make a decision on which option to go with. |
| Human Centered Design | |
| Ikea Effect | People feel a loyalty to those things they are invested in. The time invested in putting Ikea furniture together creates a loyalty to the product and increases the sense of value in that furniture. By finding places where we can increase ownership or investment in a brand or product will increase customer loyalty. |
| Mental Model | A mental model represents what the user believes to be true about a product’s functionality. The more a user’s mental model aligns with a product’s functionality, the easier it will be for them to use it. User’s bring with them past mental models from other products when evaluating your product. |
| Mere Exposure Effect | This principle states that increased exposure (familiarity) to something, increases preference for that thing. And given a choice of two options, they’ll choose the one they’ve been exposed to the most (even if it’s lower quality). Seeing the same Starbucks store everyday on a commute will increase the preference of Starbucks coffee, even if the person doesn’t drink coffee. https://choicehacking.com/2020/10/13/what-is-the-mere-exposure-effect/ |
| Miller’s Law | The average person can hold around seven objects (+/- 2) in working memory. This encourages chunking. |
| Mockup | A term that gets thrown around often in work environments, mockups are static representations of a product. You can’t click through them or interact with them. They are essentially a picture of what the product will look like. |
| NPS | Net Promoter Score is a guage of how a person or group of people feel about your brand or product. It is administered as a single question survey. “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or service to a friend or a colleague?” This is usually asked at the end of a task, process or interaction. A formula is used to find the “net” score. The score breaks people into three categories: Promoters (9,10), Passives (7,8) and Detractors (1-6). |
| Peak End Rule | People judge their experiences based on the peak and last (end) moments of their journey. We don’t create our memories based on the average of experiences with a brand but rather on two areas – the peak and the end. The peak is that experience that leaves the biggest impression on us. It could be good or bad and often has an emotional component to the experience. The second part is the end experience. As it sounds, that is the experience you exit the journey with. Maybe it is a delivery of a product or the checkout experience at a store or something else. It is the last interaction or the last thing you did with that brand and therefore the most recent memory. Therefore, the end has a bigger impact on your overall impression of a brand or experience than the many things that may have happened up to that point. |
| Prototype | A prototype is a preliminary model of our product used for testing. You’ll often build different fidelity prototypes during the product development process. During early stages, you can build paper prototypes (low-fidelity) with pencil and paper to validate concepts or flows. Later on, with flows and concepts validated, you can jump on design software, like Sketch, to build a high-fidelity prototype. Instead of looking like a doodle, prototypes will look like apps on your mobile device do and can be used to fine tune details on your UI. |
| Simplicity Effect | People want experiences that are easy to figure out and use, available, and in the moment. Mobile app banking users are more likely to become loyal users than their web or branch users because of the ease of access. This assumes the app experience is easy to use and provides what users need. |
| Site Map | A site map is a visual representation of a website’s pages and hierarchy. |
| Social Proof | Before taking a chance on something new, we want to see if others are doing it. We use trending and top 10 lists to help us limit our perception of risk. If everyone is doing something or recommending it, then we might too. |
| Storyboard | Storyboards are a visual representation of a user’s experience with a product or problem space. They are a film technique we’ve adopted and look a lot like comic strips. |
| Sunk Cost Fallacy | People are more likely to continue doing something if you are heavily invested in it already. |
| System Usability Scale (SUS) | This is a standardized test used to provide a numerical representation of user satisfaction with a product or task. It allows product teams the ability to compare future iterations or competitive products against that benchmark.Learnability questions 4 & 10.Additional Info: MeasuringU: Measuring Usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS) |
| Task Analysis | Task analysis is the process of listing tasks or the steps a user takes to complete any given goal from the user’s perspective. It is typically done during early stages of product development to help us identify and communicate problems in the user experience. |
| Temporal Distortion | Loss or lack of understanding of time passing. Businesses use temporal distortion to get people to spend more time in the store. They remove the cues or signs that time has passed. Like removing windows and clocks. |
| UI Pattern | UI patterns are reusable solutions to common usability problems in products or on the web expressed as a collection of UI elements. Think about a login screen. A common login UI pattern is made up of two input fields, one for a username and one for a password, and a button to submit these. We call this collection of elements a login pattern. |
| Unit Testing | The process of testing parts of an application to ensure they’re working properly. It can be done manually or can be an automated process. This is a test of the functionality of a product, not the experience. |
| Unity Principle | People are more easily persuaded to an idea or activity if they feel a connection to it. Being part of a community or belonging to a group makes us more accepting to something, even if it is a new experience. When meeting someone for the first time, if there is a connection to that person, they are more likely to be accepted into the group. If the new person went to the same school, likes the same football team, you will be more accepting of them than if there were no connection at all. This is why personalized content is so effective. If you can show someone an image that connects to something they know and love, you are more likely to sell them. |
| User Experience | User experience is the perception or feeling a person has after an interaction. It could be a simple interaction like signing up for a newsletter or something bigger like applying for a mortgage. Many things affect how humans experience something. But there are seven generally accepted areas that influence user experience. · Useful – This one is very subjective because a game that one person finds useful could be considered useless to someone else. You really have to understand your audience for this one.· Usable – There are some very beautiful websites out there with creative navigation but because they are so different than what we are use to seeing, they can be very difficult to use. Again, it is important to understand your user’s goals and provide the level of usability that is appropriate. There are many common study methodologies for usability.· Findable – Findability can refer to how easy your product is to find in the marketplace or how easy something is to find on your website or application. If a user is required to fill out a particular field in a form but the field is hidden from easy view, that would make it difficult to use. · Credible – This boils down to trust. Do people believe the product or service will do what it says.· Desirable – Digital experiences can be both usable and fun. Video games are a great example but it applies to things as mundane as web forms. We can make the process of going through these kinds of applications more enjoyable by putting a little more effort into them. This pays back in terms of leaving the user with an improved perception of the experience. · Accessible – This is a must have. If I was pitching a new product to sell and said I was going to cut out 20% of the audience right off the top, would that make sense? That is what happens when we don’t consider accessibility, we are excluding part of our audience.· Valuable – This one is pretty straight forward, if a product or service doesn’t bring value to our life, we won’t consider the experience to be very good. If you have ever paid for bad advice you understand this concept. |
| User Testing | Usability testing is a research method that lets us evaluate how easy a product is to use by testing it on a group of representative users. |
| User Journey Maps | User Journey Maps are narrative documents that help us visualize the process a user goes through in order to accomplish a goal. They document the stages the user goes through, the tasks executed during each stage, user emotions, and product opportunities. |
| User Stories | User Stories share actions different kinds of users can take in a product. The formula for user stories is simple:“As a <insert kind of user>, I want <insert feature or action>, to be able to <insert desired outcome>.” |
| Wireframe | And finally, think of wireframes as the blueprint of a screen. They are a low-fidelity representation of a website’s layout and content. |