UX terms every designer should know

UX designing is a booming industry and have an enormous market in near future. UX design is no different. It brings UX terms to the table, ones that you should know as an aspiring designer. It is easy to get lost if you are not well-versed in the design lingo or familiar with the core principles.

To make it easy for you to get a quick eye on common UX terms used in the industry, here is a list of 15 UX terms every designer should know :

1. End Users: - For a UX designer, end users are the people for whom you are designing. The people who are going to interact with your design to accomplish some specific task are known as your end-users. For eg, If I’m designing an app for a cosmetic brand then my end users will be people who are willing to buy the cosmetics.

2. User-centred design : - UCD is an iterative design process in which the designer solely focuses on the needs of their end-users in each design phase. Users are involved throughout the process to create highly usable and accessible for them.

3. Experience architecture: - It outlines the user path from starting of the task to the end of the intended task. Several processes are involved in this stage :

   • Information architecture: - information architecture is the creation of a structure for a website, application, or other projects, that allows us to understand where we are as users, and where the information we want is in relation to our position. Information architecture results in the creation of site maps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation, and metadata.
   • Interaction design:- the structure and behaviour of systems strive to create meaningful relationships between people and the products and services they use, from computers to mobile devices to appliances and beyond.”
   • Experience design: - working out how a design will function across multiple platforms.

4. Persona: - The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. A persona should include - Fictional name, Job titles and major responsibilities, Demographics such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status, The goals and tasks they are trying to complete using the site, Their physical, social, and technological environment, Casual pictures representing that user group.

5. Pain point:- Pain points are the problems users face that create friction in certain user flows. Once designers identify these, they can create a user-friendly design.

6. User journey: - A user journey is a path a user may take to reach their goal while interacting with a particular interface. User journeys are used in designing interfaces to identify the different ways to enable the user to achieve their goal as quickly and easily as possible.

7. UI Elements: - User Interface (UI) elements are virtual items on a website’s interface that allow users to engage with the design. Examples of such items include buttons, slider arrows, navigation bars, dropdown lists, message boxes, and anything that enables users to navigate through a website.

8. Wireframe: - A wireframe is a black and white line drawing that’s used in early-stage web design to provide stakeholders with a visual representation of a web page’s layout and information architecture.

9. Prototype: - A prototype is an outline of the proposed final product that is used for testing before launch. Low-level prototypes showcase a bare-bones sketch of how a design will look. High-level prototypes, on the other hand, add more details to the sketch but aren’t full-design mockups.

10. Breadcrumb: - This is a secondary type of navigation that reveals your location in a website or app. Breadcrumbs trace the path back to your original starting point.

11. Mockup: - A mockup is a realistic representation of how the design will finally look in the end. Bear in mind that a mockup looks exactly like the final product. This means that it is formed after all the revisions to the design have been made.

12. A/B Testing: - A/B testing is also referred to as split testing. It is the process that asks users to pick from two versions of your design. The products are presented side by side to a group of users to learn which they like better.

13. Data-driven design: - Design that is backed by data and helps understand the target audience better is known as data-driven design. Data helps prove, reveal, and improve your design. It proves that your work is on the right track, it reveals the users’ pain points and opportunities while unearthing new trends, and it improves your designs by adding objectivity to them.

14. Flat design: - Flat design is a UI design style that focuses on employing simple, two-dimensional elements with bright colours. Nick Babich of UX Planet calls flat design a “more sophisticated cousin of minimalism” as all the UI elements are based on simplicity.

15. Mood board: - A mood board is a collection of materials and assets that help define the specific style for a product (such as a website or an app) using images, text, colours, and other branding elements. It gives an insight into the voice, direction, language, and style of a particular project, design, or brand. Unlike most other step-wise data collection methods, a mood board is free-flowing by nature.

Hope you find this helpful!

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