Essential Terms to Know Flashcards
(37 cards)
Accessibility
Accessibility or accessible design is a design process that enables people with disabilities to interact with a product. This means designing for people who are color blind, blind, deaf, and people with cognitive disabilities, among others.
Adaptive Design
An adaptive interface is a collection of layouts designed specifically for different devices. It detects the device type being used and displays the layout designed for it. It means you’ll see a specific version of the website which has been optimized for mobile, desktop or tablet.
Affordance
On user interfaces, affordances help clearly communicate to users what can and cannot be done on a screen. Buttons on interfaces, for example, afford being pressed to trigger an action.
Agile
Agile is an incremental approach to software development. Instead of building the entire product at once, Agile breaks it down into smaller bits of user functionality and assigns them to two week cycles we call “iterations.”
API
Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are pieces of software that help different applications communicate with each other. Products develop APIs to let you access and read information on their server easily.
Backend Development
The back-end powers the front-end but we don’t necessarily see it. Think databases and servers.
Frontend Development
Think buttons, text, beautiful colors and the layer you see on your screen when interacting with a product.
Beacon
Beacons are small Bluetooth radio transmitters. They communicate with the user’s smartphone and are used to share information.
Card Sorting
In a card sorting exercise, we’ll give users topics, cards, and a Sharpie pen. We will then ask users to write down the topics on the cards and organize them in a way that makes sense to them. This exercises helps us understand and design the information architecture of a site.
Click Stream
When you land on a site, you click your way through it to complete a task. This is what a clickstream represents: the path of clicks you took on it to accomplish a goal.
Commits
Throughout the development process, developers create commits whenever they have reached a good point in their work. Commits are similar to drafts.
Customer Experience (CX)
This entire journey is what we call Customer Experience, or CX. It refers to all the different interactions a user has with a brand through its different channels and products, and how a user feels about them.
Data Science
Data Science focuses on making sense of these numbers or data and uncovering valuable insights that help us make better product decisions.
Design Thinking
- Empathize: Understand the challenge
- Define: Define the problem
- Ideate: Brainstorm potential solutions
- Prototype: Build your solutions
- 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, we place our user persona. We fill each quadrant with information we’ve collected through user research.
End User
Who are we designing the product for? This person is our end user.
Flow Charts
Flowcharts illustrate the steps a user can take to complete a task on a product.
Grid System
Grids systems are organizational tools that help us arrange content on a screen. They are made up of vertical and horizontal lines that create what we call columns and gutters.
Human Computer Interaction
HCI is a field of study concerned with the design and use of computer technology. It studies how we interact with interfaces and computers today.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the practice of arranging content in a product in an understandable manner. It involves organizing the content we interact with, as well as the different structures, such as the website’s navigation, we need in order to interact with it.
Interaction Design
Interaction Design, or IxD, is the practice of designing interactive digital products and considering the way in which users will interact with them.
Lean UX
Remember Agile? Lean UX, based on Agile, is a collaborative user-centric approach that prioritizes “learning loops” (building, learning, and measuring through iterations) over design documentation.
Material Design
Material Design, often called just Material, is a design language developed by Google used in Android devices.
Refactoring
Refactoring is the process of cleaning up and tidying code without affecting functionality, essentially increasing its quality. It isn’t done all at once but rather in small, incremental steps.
