Accessibility
Make your products more accessible.
A glossary of terms referenced throughout this site.
Make your products more accessible.
Affinity diagram is a tool to help you see patterns in the raw data you collected.
Generally describes an iterative product development process most often found in teams working on software, sometimes applied elsewhere.
Google’s mobile operating system.
Use subtle animations to improve usability and orientation.
Map the high-level overview of the interfaces and flows of an app.
See Competitive Analysis.
Use visual and linguistic cues to express and position a product or company in a market.
Money makes the world go ’round.
How will your design work help grow or improve the business?
Method used to identify how people organize and look for information, helpful for making navigation decisions.
People are hard.
Use color to add personality, meaning, and dimension to designs, while maintaining legibility and accessibility.
Desk research done to gather information about strengths and weaknesses of competitors, to aid in making better product decisions.
The arrangement of elements on the screen (or page).
The raw material of a digital product, generally what someone is there to find.
A detailed process for identifying and cataloging pages in a content-heavy website.
Organizing, planning, and scheduling content.
A control allows users to change something using the interface that they are interacting with.
Cascading Style Sheets are used to provide suggestions to web browsers about how content should be presented visually.
See Motion.
A CSS specification for grid-based layouts in web browsers.
When the user can modify their experience or interface in some way.
A general way of planning and executing design work.
An overarching set of high- to low-level design decisions documented in some way to maintain coherency and ease ongoing design decisions.
Describes a mindset and way of approaching problem-solving, generally in a human-centered way.
A useful way of thinking about design as a series of divergent and convergent processes.
A CSS specification for simple layouts in web browsers.
At some point, most interfaces need to gather information from a user. Generally this is done with a form.
“Rules of thumb” used to guide analysis of existing systems and the evaluation of new ones. Best practice not to think of these as “best practices”—different heuristics may serve you better in different contexts.
HyperText Markup Language, used to write, uh, web pages.
Organize the structure of digital products to improve navigation and management of content.
Steal like an artist.
Conversations with people to surface evidence about their needs.
A way of thinking about products from the perspective of user goals. What does someone hire the product to do?
See Agile.
Bits of text used in interfaces to guide, support, and inform.
Collection of visual inspiration to help establish look and feel for a brand or product.
Use motion to clarify interactions.
An application built to run on a specific platform, such as iOS, Android, Windows, or Mac. The term is used to differentiate from a web-based app, or “web app”.
How a user gets around in an app or website.
Observe users to gather behavioral evidence.
A distillation of findings from user research into an fictional individual representing a realistic user of a product.
Adapting the interface or content of a product based on information about the user.
A collection of work samples showcasing work product, skills, services offered, and often process.
Ranking according to some criteria, commonly to determine relative value of various features in a system.
Gaining clarity over what problem(s) to address lends focus to our work and gives us criteria by which to make and evaluate decisions.
Succinctly describe the problem your work is trying to address. Should serve as a tool to keep your work on task, assess your results against, and communicate to other stakeholders what your work’s purpose has been.
A strategy for hiding lower priority elements in an interface, which can be revealed when needed, in an effort to reduce clutter.
Make cheap drafts of products and features to determine quickly what ideas are worth pursuing.
Generally used to describe websites which adapt their layouts based on available screen size.
A context and situation in which someone would use a product. Typically paired with a persona.
An overview of all the pages in a website, typically organized in a tree diagram.
Sketch is a vector graphics editor specialized in the design of User Interfaces.
In a longer process, it may be useful to break things up into steps to reduce clutter and overwhelm.
A collection of type, color, texture, and interface styles used to explore visual options early in a digital project. Especially helpful when working with clients.
Use surveys to understand some basic information about users and their needs, as well as gather preferences and attitudinal data.
Break down how people currently accomplish certain tasks to thoroughly understand needs and identify opportunities to simplify workflows.
Testing products and designs can be useful at many stages of the design process to generate ideas, evaluate options, and identify pain points.
Use type to lay out information and interfaces, with a focus on clarity.
Interfaces often convey some type of state, such as active or inactive, empty or full, successful or not, etc.
Is the user able to figure out what it does and how to use it?
When planning a product or feature, a use case outlines a particular goal users should be able to accomplish, usually broken down into steps.
The point of contact between the user and the technology.
Maps a person’s experience with a service, typically across multiple touchpoints, usually visualizing their level of happiness and frustration.
Who are our users? What do they need? How can we serve them better?
“As a [type of user], I want to [do something] so I can [motivation].”
Brevity is the soul of wit.