User Experience design (UXD) is huge topic in itself. UX covers itself with the subjects like Business, Psychology, Arts, Marketing, Design, Science, Human computer interaction(HCI) and many more.
In the process of creating experience of digital products, UX designers has to surpass and encounter many terminologies, process and phases. Here I have compiled some of the most frequently used terminologies in UXD process categorised with the branches they relate to. They are subdivided into three parts and are briefly described below,
User Testing and Research
5 Second Test
A usability test in which a participant is shown the user interface of a software application or website for five seconds. After the 5-second test, the participant is then asked what he can remember from the layout he has seen. This is a particularly useful method to see whether key visuals or call-to-action buttons have the right impact on the user.
Competitor Analysis
Identifying our competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of our own product or service.
A/B Testing
A/B testing (sometimes also commonly known as split testing) is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. You compare two web pages by showing the two variants (let’s call them A and B) to similar visitors at the same time. The one that gives a better conversion rate, wins!
Affinity Diagramming
A tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organises them into groupings based on their natural relationships. The Affinity process is often used to group ideas generated by Brainstorming.
Analysis Stage
The Analysis Phase is also the part of the project where you identify the overall direction that the project will take through the creation of the project strategy documents. Gathering requirements is the main attraction of the Analysis Phase.
Analytics
The discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance.
Anchoring
Incorporating a test-driven, semantic, live style guide into your process to establish, enforce, and evolve your design language.
Clickstream Analysis
On a Web site, clickstream analysis (also called clickstream analytics) is the process of collecting, analyzing and reporting aggregate data about which pages a website visitor visits — and in what order. The path the visitor takes though a website is called the clickstream.
Needfinding
The art of talking to people and discovering their needs — both those they might explicitly state, and those hidden beneath the surface. It is only in truly understanding people that we can gain meaningful insights to inspire and inform a final, impactful design.
Context Of Use Analysis
Collecting and analysing detailed information about the intended users, their tasks, and the technical and environmental constraints. The data for a context of use analysis can be gathered using interviews, workshops, surveys, site visits, artifact analysis, focus groups, observational studies, and contextual inquiry .
Cooperative Principle
People relate to computer interactions much like human conversation, so observing normal conversational rules is a useful design tactic.
Diary Study
A research method used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time. In a diary study, data is self-reported by participants longitudinally — that is, over an extended period of time that can range from a few days to even a month or longer.
Ethnography
Ethnographic field research involves the study of groups and people as they go about their everyday lives.
End Users
The person who actually uses a particular product.
Error Rate
Errors happen and unintended actions are inevitable.They are a common occurrence in usability tests and are the result of problems in an interface and imperfect human actions.
It is valuable to have some idea about what these are, how frequently they occur, and how severe their impact is.
Flexibility Usability Trade Off
A design principle maintaining that, as the flexibility of a system increases, its usability decreases. The tradeoff exists because accommodating flexibility requires satisfying a larger set of requirements, which results in complexity and usability compromises
Free Listing
Is a technique for gathering data about a specific domain or topic by asking people to list all the items they can think of that relate to the topic.
Heuristic Evaluation
A usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface (UI) design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles.
Laddering
UX Laddering is an adapted interview method and adapted data analysis process for investigating the user experience, adapted from Laddering in consumer research and based upon Means-end Theory. The goal of laddering -as with all means-end approaches- is to identify and understand the linkages between key perceptual elements across the range of attributes, consequences and values.
Participatory Design
Involvement of the stakeholders, designers, researchers and end-users in the design process in order to help ensure that the end product meets the needs of its intended user base.
Stakeholders Interviews
Stakeholder Interviews are conversations an individual conducts with his or her key stakeholder: customers, bosses, subordinates or peers both within and outside the organization. The interviews allow you to step into the shoes of your interviewees and see your role through the eyes of these stakeholders.
Task Analysis
Is a step-by-step analysis of the users’ task, from their perspective.
Think-Aloud Protocol
It’s a protocol used to gather data in usability testing in product design and development, in psychology and a range of social sciences (e.g., decision making, and process tracing, reading, writing, translation research).
Quantitative Survey
Questions that provide numbers as result. Quick and unexpensive way of measuring user satisfaction and collecting feedback about the product. It could indicate the need for a deeper qualitative test.
Usability
Web usability is the ease of use of a website. Some broad goals of usability are the presentation of information and choices in a clear and concise way, a lack of ambiguity and the placement of important items in appropriate areas.
Usability Testing
Is the best way to understand how real users experience your website or application. Unlike interviews or focus groups that attempt to get users to accurately self-report their own behaviour or preferences, a well-designed user test measures actual performance on mission-critical tasks.
User Stories
User stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.
Focus Group
A panel of people discussing a specific topic or question. Teaches about the users’ feelings, opinions and even language. Useful when the target audience is new or unknown for the team.
Interaction Design
Hover help or Tool tip / Tooltip
Usually a smaller box with information that appears or pops up if a user puts their mouse over a designated graphical element or text.
Likert Scale
A scale used to represent people’s attitudes to a topic
Low-Fidelity Prototype
A prototype that is sketchy and incomplete, that has some characteristics of the target product but is otherwise simple, usually in order to quickly produce the prototype and test broad concepts.
Mental/Concept Models
What users believe they know about a UI strongly impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.
Minesweeping
The activity of moving the pointer across icons to uncover ToolTips or rollovers in order to figure out what the icons represent. Such designs require the user to actively decipher the interface, probing and testing the meaning of each interface element, rather than the interface elements being self-apparent.
Storyboards
A storyboard is a technique for illustrating an interaction between a person and a product (or multiple people and multiple products) in narrative format, which includes a series of drawings, sketches, or pictures and sometimes words that tell a story.
Information Architecture
Chunking
Term referring to the process of taking individual pieces of information (chunks) and grouping them into larger units. By grouping each piece into a large whole, you can improve the amount of information you can remember.
Information scent
An important concept in information foraging theory referring to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website. As animals rely on scents to indicate the chances of finding food, so do humans rely on various cues in the information environment to complete their goals.
Wireframe
A rough guide for the layout of a website or app, either done with pen and paper or with wireframing software.
Ecosystem Map
An ecosystem is the term given to a set of products, services, and people that function together in a symbiotic way.
Focus Group
The main targeted users of the product
Folksonomy
Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organise the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organise information effectively for their users.
Information Scent
Also called information residue; cues (“scent”) used in an information display that help people locate and navigate to relevant information.
Legibility vs Readability
Users won’t read web content unless the text is clear, the words and sentences are simple, and the information is easy to understand. You can test all of this.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design, or a Web page that lists the pages on a Web site, typically organised in hierarchical fashion.
Taxonomies
An exploration around multiple ways to categorise and structure content and data.
