404
Error pages are unsung opportunities.
In internet speak, the 404 error page not found message indicates that the browser was able to interact with a specified server, but the server could not find what was requested.
Aha Moment
When you can practically see the lightbulb turning on
An Aha Moment is where a previously incomprehensible problem or concept is suddenly understood. It’s when you have a sudden insight or realization at a certain point in time, during an event, or during an experience.
Analyzing
A design method for discovering behavioral patterns in apps and websites.
Analyzing is the process of breaking down a complex topic or website into smaller parts to get an understanding of behavioral patterns. Although analysis as a formal concept is a recent development, it has been used in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle.
Back Button
Don't underestimate the usefulness of the back button
The back button is an interface icon that returns a user to the previous page or screen, usually with an arrow pointing to the left.
Balance
Harmonize tension and equilibrium in your designs.
Balance in design is the distribution of elements. Balance can be seen as an interpretation or representation on gravity, where large-looking and heavy objects appear to have more weight than smaller ones do because they are closer together on a page for example without it being too much density from one area.
Beta
Is it ok to launch a product in beta mode?
The term “beta software” refers to apps undergoing testing and have not been officially released. Generally speaking there will be multiple versions during this time frame which can change at any given moment based on user feedback or other factors.
Black Swan
An unpredictable event, typically one with extreme consequences
The Black Swan Theory is a metaphor for events that come as surprises. These unpredictable, major effect-generating occurrences are often inappropriately rationalized with hindsight. That’s because they can’t be predicted beforehand and their negative outcomes weren’t expected.
Brainstorming
A design method for creative problem-solving that helps teams unstuck and generate ideas.
Brainstorming is a group creativity technique that involves gathering a list of ideas from the group’s members in order to come up with a solution to a specific problem.
Call to Action
Getting users to follow through with primary objectives.
Any design that prompts an immediate response or encourages an immediate sale is referred to as a call to action in marketing. A call to action (CTA) is a set of words or phrases that can be used in sales scripts, advertising messages, or web pages to compel the audience to take a specific action.
Card Sorting
A design method to figure out how people perceive information and divisions in a system.
Card sorting is a user experience design technique that involves testing a group of subject experts or users to create a dendrogram or folksonomy. It’s a good way to think about information architecture, workflows, menu structure, and website navigation paths.
Color
Properties of light are the last step between our products and our users.
Colors can attract users and help you communicate your message more effectively. Colors are likely to be mentioned prominently in any UI Design guidelines and establish a brand’s or product’s basic mood, tone, concept, and connotation.
Composition
Captivate and entice users with designed elements
The way you arrange and place design elements on a page is referred to as composition. It can be thought of as the arrangement of elements according to design principles. The composition can refer to any aspect of a website or product’s design that is organized with conscious thought, ranging from music to writing to photography.
Concept Testing
A design method that gets us real data, real fast.
Concept testing is the process of evaluating consumer feelings and acceptance of a new product idea prior to its introduction to the market using surveys and qualitative methods.
Confidence Intervals
A range of values that allow you to confidently estimate your untested population.
A confidence interval (CI) is a set of numbers that is likely to include a population value with a high degree of certainty. When a population mean falls between two intervals, it is commonly expressed as a percent.
Constraints
Imposing hard rules can help spark wild creativity.
Though most people believe unrestricted resources drive innovation, the best ideas emerge from creative constraints. These are known as creative constraints, and they are the requirements and limitations that must be met in order to achieve a goal.
Contrast
Opposites attract the attention of your users.
Contrast can be defined as a difference between two or more elements in a composition in the context of visual design. The greater the difference between the elements, the easier it is to compare and understand them, and this is when they are said to have contrasted.
Critiquing
A design method for evaluating a set of existing ideas to identify changes or improvements.
Critiquing is the process of examining a design and providing feedback on whether or not it achieves its goals. A design critique usually takes the form of a group discussion aimed at improving a design. It isn’t just a matter of evaluating a design.
CSS
Computer markup language to make your content a consistent beauty contestant.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML. Along with HTML and JavaScript, CSS is a key component of the World Wide Web.
Culture Fit
The culture fit of an employee can be more important than skills.
It’s not just a good idea to make sure you hire the right person for your company, it is also important that they fit in and enjoy working there. Understanding what makes people happy at work can help boost morale as well!
Customer Lifetime Value
The net present value of the cash flow relationship with a customer.
Customer lifetime value refers to a customer’s total value to a company over the course of their relationship. It’s a crucial metric because keeping existing customers costs less than acquiring new ones, so increasing the value of your existing customers is a great way to drive growth.
Customer Profile
The first commandment of marketing: thou shalt know thine customers well.
A customer profile is a thorough description of your current customer created by identifying purchasing behaviors, pain points, psychographic data, and demographic data with the goal of targeting similar customers in your sales and marketing campaigns.
Design Leadership
It's easier to lead when you've worn designers' shoes
Design leadership generates innovative design solutions, as well as making a difference in leading through design, maintaining design leadership over time, and gaining recognition for accomplishments through design.
Design Management
The way you react says a lot about your business
Design management is a field of study that combines project management, design, strategy, and supply chain techniques to manage the creative process, foster a creative culture, and establish a design structure and organization.
Design Patterns
Ideas without aesthetics, patterns are conventions that give designers a head start.
Design patterns are general, reusable solutions to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It’s not a finished design that can be turned into source or machine code right away.
Design Process
A look at our lifecycle flow to help you develop better products.
A design process is a series of activities carried out by a designer, which may include the use of design methods. A design can be simple (a quick sketch) or complex (a lengthy process involving extensive research, negotiation, reflection, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design).
Design Strategy
The school of thought that lets the customers' needs move to the top of the list
Design Strategy is the intersection between business profitability and value for people. Design strategy helps businesses operate with a sustainable competitive advantage by identifying what they’re good at, but also how their offerings can benefit customers in ways other companies cannot match.
Design Strategy Framework
Our diagram for designing products that meld our business goals and users’ needs.
A design strategy framework is created by understanding the business needs of your customer and aligning it with what they want. The process can then be tailored around their expectations, too!
Design Thinking
The kind of thinking you need to do when you actually want to get something done.
Design thinking is a problem-solving method that prioritizes the needs of the customer above all else. It is based on observing how people interact with their surroundings with empathy and using an iterative, hands-on approach to develop innovative solutions.
Devils Advocate
The team member who challenges every idea on the table.
An effective devil’s advocate frames the most important questions that must be addressed before a disruptive innovation is attempted at scale. The advocate also oversees the process, ensuring that the appropriate level of uncertainty is eliminated at each stage.
Drop Cap
The first letter in a block of text can be the most important.
A drop cap is a decorative feature at the start of a paragraph or section that is made up of a huge capital letter. A drop cap is generally two or more lines in length.
Em Space
A responsive unit of measurement for elements at a given point size.
An em space is a typographical space with a width of one em. An em spacing is traditionally the width of a capital letter M in a typeface that employs the Latin alphabet. An em spacing is frequently smaller than a capital M in current digital typography, which strives to standardize measures for different languages and alphabets.
Getting things done in a digital world means using email effectively.
Email, short for Electronic mail, is a method of sending and receiving messages between persons who use computers or other electronic devices. In the 1960s, email started to become widely used, albeit only between users of the same computer.
Enroll
An app that allows you to test your assumptions early.
The nuts and bolts: Enroll is a place to make the web a better place. You can see what real companies are working on right now and let them know what you think. You’ll be the first to get sneak peeks behind the screen.
Fail Fast
Failing is inevitable. Might as well get it over with quickly.
The nuts and bolts: Fail fast is a philosophy that emphasizes extensive testing and incremental development in order to determine whether or not an idea has merit. Failing fast aims to de-stigmatize the word “failure” by emphasizing that the knowledge gained from a failed attempt increases the likelihood of subsequent success.
Feedback
Constructive criticism that moves our projects forward.
The nuts and bolts: Feedback communicates the results of any exchange or interaction, making it both visible and understandable. Its job is to give people a signal that they (or the product) have succeeded or failed at performing a task. This might also include suggestions for new approaches.
Font, Type Family, Typeface
Three terms that describe typography.
The nuts and bolts: The art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed are referred to as typography. Selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, as well as adjusting the space between pairs of letters, are all part of the type arrangement process.
Forms
Forms challenge designers’ mettle with user interactions.
The nuts and bolts: On a web page, a form allows a user to enter information that is then sent to a server for processing. These forms may include checkboxes, radio buttons, or text fields.
Framework
A collection of reusable code and design patterns.
The nuts and bolts: A framework is an abstraction that allows generic software to be selectively changed by user-written code, resulting in application-specific software. A CSS framework, in particular, is a library that uses the Cascading Style Sheets language to make web design easier and more standards-compliant.
Front-End Code
Universal languages allow you to design across browsers.
The nuts and bolts: Front-end development is a type of computer programming that concentrates on the coding and creation of parts and functions of a website that are visible to the user. It’s all about making sure a website’s visual elements work properly. The “client side” of an application is often referred to as the front end.
Goal Mapping
A method that lets us set customer-centric business goals in the short- and long-term.
The nuts and bolts: A goal map is a visual representation of your customer’s journey. It’s a single document that lays out all of their goals in detail. A goal map covers all aspects of their journey, from physical to social, from desktop to mobile, from screen to voice and so on.
Graceful Degradation
Adapting websites to less-than-ideal situations is a short-term strategy.
The nuts and bolts: Graceful degradation is a design philosophy that focuses on creating a modern website/application that works in the latest browsers, but falls back to a less-than-optimal experience in older browsers that nevertheless provides critical content and functionality.
Grid System
With so many different devices on the market and a multitude of platforms, it's time to rethink the grid system.
The nuts and bolts: Grid systems are invisible structures in web design that connect all of the components on a page…. a two-dimensional structure made up of a set of intersecting straight (vertical, horizontal, and angular) or curved guide lines used to structure content.
Hierarchy
Build a more meaningful design based on your content.
Hierarchy is a visual design theory that designers use to manipulate features to convey their importance on each screen. Things like size allow users to more likely notice larger components, and vibrant colors tend to draw more attention than muted colors.
Highlighter
Accent sketches with purpose
Highlighters are used to illuminate an area or a spot in a drawing, especially significant or interesting detail or event.
Homepage
The homepage is always a battle and full of controversy in companies, what can you do?
A home page is the main web page of a website. It also refers to one or more pages always shown in an internet browser when you start up your application, and it got its name ‘home’ because pressing “Home” on any keyboard returned us back here at any time.
Information Architecture
Goal-centric structures trump old-fashioned charts.
Information architecture is the craft of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities, and software to improve usability and findability. It’s a burgeoning community of practice dedicated to integrating design, architecture, and information science ideas into the digital realm.
Interviewing
A design method for engaging customers on what they think about your products.
User interviews are when you ask users questions and capture their answers. Interviews are a great way to get insight into what people think of your product. They can help you investigate its usability and experience, as well as learn more about demographics or ethnicity by asking questions specifically for those purposes during an interview.
Is Will Should
What you get when you overlap Drucker and Design Thinking.
Peter Drucker writes in The Essential Drucker about asking what your business is, will be, and should be in order to avoid wasting your time defending yesterday.
Iteration
A cyclical process to improve the quality and function of design.
Iteration is a design methodology that involves prototyping, testing, evaluating, and refining your product or process in cycles. You change your design based on how well it works.
Kerning
Kerning is the space between individual characters in a line of text.
Kerning is the practice of changing the spacing between characters in a proportional typeface to produce an aesthetically acceptable outcome in typography. Kerning alters the spacing between individual letterforms, whereas tracking adjusts spacing across a range of characters evenly.
Layered Complexity
Simple isn’t always better, sometimes you have to selectively layer complexity into your products.
Software can be divided in many ways, but through experience and convention, we’ve discovered that layering the complexity broadens a system’s appeal to a greater number of users.
Leading and Line-Height
Leading, a.k.a. line-height in digital circles, is the space between baselines in a block of text.
The gap between adjacent lines of type in typography is known as leading. In CSS, the line-height property specifies the amount of space between inline elements.
Legibility
Polish communication with typographic clarity.
The ease with which a reader can decode symbols is known as legibility. In design, legibility is typically separated from readability, which is when a reader can follow and understand words, phrases, and paragraphs.
Lorem Ipsum
Dummy text is for dummies. Stop relying so much on lorem ipsum.
Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text often used in design to display the visual shape of a document or typeface without relying on significant content. It’s a lazy way to design before the final copy is available.
Mobile First
An adaptive, future-friendly solution for website design
Mobile First is a style of thinking about web design, app design, mobile websites, and the user experience by working from the smallest to the largest screen size choice. It’s all about making websites more mobile-friendly and building a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes.
Mobile Icons
The more we use symbols in design, the more users understand their meaning.
The majority of mobile apps, as well as most mobile phones, use similar iconography and are quite uniform. Taping these symbols on a touchscreen device functions as a button to execute a specific job or action.
Mobility
Taking the world with you, wherever you may go.
Mobile-friendly design implies that the information on your website — photos, texts, videos, and links – is easily and quickly accessible across all platforms, especially on the considerably smaller screens of smartphones and tablets.
Modular Scale
A tool that helps to build consistency, harmony, and rhythm in your designs.
A modular scale is a set of numbers that are meaningfully related to one another. By multiplying by 1.618 to get the next highest number, or dividing by 1.618 to get the next lowest number, we can get numbers for a modular scale using the golden ratio.
Navigation
Find your way around pages and sites with ease.
Navigation design entails developing, assessing, and implementing methods that enable users to navigate across a website or app. The way people engage with your content and goods is heavily influenced by navigation.
Negative Space
Empty space that creates site rhythm.
Negative space is the empty, blank areas in designs or “holes” where the page shows through between the main design elements. It can be seen as white between design elements and has been referred to by many different names such as “negative” or just “white space’.
Observing
A method for seeing how people will actually use a product out in the wild.
Observing is a research method of spending time with a user and watching their behavior with the product as they use it in day-to-day life. An observer records their observations which provide qualitative outputs.
Open Source
One of the most effective ways to facilitate user education and innovation is through open sourcing.
Open source is software that is distributed under a license that allows users to use, study, modify, and distribute the program and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source computer software may be created in a public, collaborative environment.
Opportunity Sketch
Opportunity sketches are rough drawings that allow us to explore ideas and concepts in a quick, simple way.
The nuts and bolts: An opportunity sketch represents a focused idea about the product, and it can be something to tackle within the timeframe of a release, or a piece that can serve as a reference for a further release. Opportunity sketches are rough drawings that allow us to explore ideas and concepts in a…
Pixel
When it comes to designing responsively, the pixel is dead.
A pixel is the smallest addressable element in a raster image or the smallest addressable element in an all points addressable display device. It’s the tiniest, most controllable part of a picture on the screen.
Progressive Enhancement
Start small, grow big when planning and designing websites.
Progressive enhancement is a web design method that prioritizes online content, enabling everyone to access the basic information and functionality of a web page while those with more advanced browser features or quicker Internet connectivity get the enhanced version.
Prototyping
A design method to test our products and services to make them more awesome and make us better designers.
A prototype is a pre-production sample, model, or release of a product designed to validate an idea or method. A prototype is typically created by designers to assess a new design in order to improve the result.
Proximity
Proximity is the practice of using space to make certain items appear related.
Proximity implies that items that are close together are regarded as a unit. Related content is displayed near together on your web page or on your profile, forming a visual unit.
Psychological Noise
Good design can reduce psychological noise by balancing business goals with user needs.
Physiological noise is a distraction that occurs as a result of a physiological process and interferes with communication. Any element that interferes with the interpretation of information from the design to the receiver is referred to as noise.
QA Testing
A design method for ensuring the quality of our products and services.
QA testing is the process of validating and verifying the artifacts and behavior of the software. Software testing may also give a business an objective, unbiased picture of the software, allowing them to grasp and comprehend the risks associated with a software release.
Responsive Web Design
Keep your page looking spick-and-span on any and all web-enabled devices.
Responsive web design, also known as responsive design, is an online approach to design that assures usability and user satisfaction by rendering web pages properly, across a number of devices and window or screen sizes ranging from small to large.
Rule Of Odds
People are more attracted to uneven numbers in a composition and we can use that to make our interfaces subtly more interesting.
When incorporating a collection of subjects in your design, the law of odds asserts that an odd number, rather than an even number, will make a more intriguing and visually beautiful composition.
Rule Of Space
Objects in motion need a little lead room — space into which they appear to move.
The rule of space says that you should have more space in front of the subject than behind, thus giving the subject space to move into within the picture.
Rule Of Thirds
People’s eyes are attracted to the areas one- and two-thirds of the way from the edges of the canvas in a photo or illustration.
The Rule of Thirds is a way to look at the layout of a design by placing a simple grid overlay, divided equally into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, on the space to be used for the design.
Run Fast
Run fast, bite hard, and fear nothing
Try some stuff and break things. And if you’re going to fail, run fast. The celebration of failure is one of the things that built the tech industry and Silicon Valley.
SaSS
Make more elaborate CSS faster and easier.
Sass is a cascading style sheet (CSS) extension, which is a language for defining the layout and formatting of HTML documents. Sass also allows developers to build more efficient code by supporting nested rules. Sass is an acronym for “Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets.”
Scrum
A snappy, stand-up meeting that doesn't put us to sleep.
Scrum is a way for developing, delivering, and sustaining software products in a complex environment. It’s also used in other fields including research, sales, marketing, and advanced technologies.
Shader
Shaders Add Depth and Volume to Your Sketches
Shaders are professional-quality markers that are highly regarded for their smooth application. Shaders can be layered and blended, they’re streak-free, and they’re permanent, which makes them a wonderful tool for designing.
Sharpie
Sharpies: Our greatest communication tools
The sharpie marker is a low fidelity tool to sketch and visualize screen interfaces without having to focus on element details.
Site Map
An organizational tool, not a workflow tool
A site map is a list of pages on a domain’s website. A site map can be one of three types: a plan designers use in the layout of a website, human-readable lists of a site’s pages in a hierarchical order and structured listings for search engine web crawlers.
Sketching
A design method that helps us quickly get ideas out there, work through problems, explain interaction, and build products.
A sketch is a quick and rough drawing that provides a summary or broad outline of something. Sketching is a short freehand drawing that isn’t normally intended to be a final product, but it’s a fantastic tool for designers to quickly conceptualize various design possibilities.
Skeuminimalism
'Less' and 'more' can coexist in responsive web design.
Skeuomorphism is the idea that developers and designers use lifelike elements in their designs. The goal is to make sure people have a similar online experience as they would if it were offline, with everything from colors to textures mimicking those of an actual object or person’s appearance.
Source Order
How pages are written doesn't have to reflect the way they're displayed.
The underlying mark-up that users rely on to navigate and access content is the source order of a web page.
Survey
A method for getting a decent sample size so we can quickly draw conclusions about user behavior or expectations.
A survey is a set of questions designed to gather specific data from a group of individuals in human subjects research. Surveys can be performed via the phone, by mail, on the internet, or on the street corners, or at shopping malls.
Texture & Shading
Bring more than color to your designs.
Texture and shading are elements of design that define the surfaces of digital shapes and forms. The texture that a designer recreates on a flat surface is called visual texture.
Timeboxing
Lost for time? Timeboxing makes time work for you.
Timeboxing allocates a fixed and maximum unit of time to an activity within which planned activity takes place.
Touch Targets
Touch targets are the tappable areas that define links on mobile devices.
The sections of the screen that respond to human interaction are known as touch targets. They go beyond an element’s visible boundaries.
Tracking
Tracking is the space between a range of letters.
Tracking, also known as letter spacing in typography, is an optically consistent shift in the distance between letters to vary the apparent density of a line or block of text.
Typographic Voice
Don’t let your type choices speak poorly of your work.
The personality of the typeface (or font) that is being utilized, or how it delivers the message, can also be thought of as the voice of typography/type.
Unmoderated User Testing
A time-efficient and cost-effective method to test end-users.
An unmoderated user test allows the participant to complete tasks and answer questions at their own pace, on their own time, and at a time and location of their choosing. You can ask a user to think aloud, but there is no one to remind her if she forgets.
User Experience
The responsibility of everyone on the team, not just one designer or group of designers.
A user’s interaction and experience with a product, system, or service is referred to as the user experience. It encompasses a person’s views on usefulness, usability, and efficiency.
User Interface
Good interactions guide users through actions.
The user interface (UI) is the point of interaction and communication between humans and computers. Display screens, keyboards, mice, and the appearance of a desktop are all examples of this. It can also refer to the way a user interacts with a program or a website.
User Testing
A method for engaging would-be customers to learn whether our designs work in the wild.
User testing is the process of putting a website’s, app’s, product’s, or service’s interface and functions to the test by having real users do certain tasks in realistic situations.
Visual Weight
Building balance with the use of contrasting elements.
The visual weight of an image is described as the visual force that arises as a result of light contrast among the visual elements that make up the image.