Visual Design
Affordance
Norman’s use of the term: According to Norman (1988) an affordance is the design aspect of an object which suggest how the object should be used; a visual clue to its function and use. He writes:
“…the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.”
Grid
A grid is a structure (usually two-dimensional) made up of a series of intersecting straight (vertical, horizontal, and angular) or curved guide lines used to structure content.
Aesthetic Integrity
A principle that advocates that a design should be visually appealing and should follow common principles of visual design: consistency, a clear identity, a clear visual hierarchy, good alignment, contrast, and proportions, etc.
Aesthetic Usability Effect
Nielsen Norman Group defines aesthetic-usability effect as, aesthetic-usability effect refers to users’ tendency to perceive attractive products as more usable. People tend to believe that things that look better will work better — even if they aren’t actually more effective or efficient.
Anti-Pattern
An anti-pattern is a frequently used design pattern that either outright doesn’t work or is counter-productive. You’ll see them in web applications and websites, anywhere where a user needs to perform an action in some way, whether it’s logging in, providing information, or reading information in order to make decisions.
Chromostereopsis
A phenomenon of visual perception: different wavelengths of light focus at slightly different depths in the eye. Thus, it is difficult to focus on an image that combines two colors because each color is fuzzy when the other color is in focus. This is especially a problem for images with red and blue.
Colour Theory
With colors you can set a mood, attract attention, or make a statement. You can use color to energize, or to cool down. By selecting the right color scheme, you can create an ambiance of elegance, warmth or tranquility, or you can convey an image of playful youthfulness. Color can be your most powerful design element if you learn to use it effectively.
Design Pattern
UX design patterns are repeatable solutions to recurring design problems. If you are designing a new website, or the wireframes for that site, you will want to figure out the easiest way that users can interact with your site.
Entry Fields
A text box, text field or text entry box is a graphical control element intended to enable the user to input text information to be used by the product.
Style Tiles
Style Tiles are a design deliverable consisting of fonts, colors and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand for the web.
Styleguide
A style guide (or manual of style) is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organisation, or field. (It is often called a style sheet, though that term has other meanings.)
Typography
Communication plays a vital role in design. Whether you design websites, mobile apps, or wearable UIs, your creations have to clearly communicate their intent and purpose. And since text does a lot of the heavy lifting in communicating purpose, you need a solid understanding of typography.
The Fold
There is no fold. Period. There, I said it.medium.com
One of the time-honored guidelines in web design is to keep the most important content “above the fold”. Originally used to refer to the upper half of a newspaper page, the term came to mean “the part of the page visible without scrolling”
Visual Weight
The notion that design elements have varied weights; that is, some objects, even on a two-dimensional medium, can appear to be heavier than others. Visual weight is a powerful concept that allows us to create visual hierarchy, symmetry, balance, and harmony in designs.
Psychology:
Cognitive Bias
Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioural economics.
Fitt’s Law
This scientific law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target.
Fog’s Behavioural Model
The Fogg Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.
Gestalt Law Of Grouping
Gestalt principles, or gestalt laws, are rules of the organization of perceptual scenes. When we look at the world, we usually perceive complex scenes composed of many groups of objects on some background, with the objects themselves consisting of parts, which may be composed of smaller parts, etc.
Hick’s Law
Hick’s law, or the Hick–Hyman Law, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has: increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.
Hook Model
A four-step process companies use to hook users and form habits among them. The four parts of the model include: trigger, action, investment and variable reward.
Reciprocity
Humans tend to return good deeds: use this social psychology law in user interface design to gain users’ trust and motivate engagement with your site or app.
Recognition over Recall
Showing users things they can recognise improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
Law Of Triviality
What is Parkinson’s law of triviality (bikeshedding)? — Definition from WhatIs.com
Parkinson’s law of triviality is an observation about the human tendency to devote a great deal of time to unimportant…
Parkinson’s law of triviality is an observation about the human tendency to devote a great deal of time to unimportant details while crucial matters go unattended.
Millers Law
It instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.
Tunnelling
B.J. Fogg coined the term tunnelling as one of his seven tools of persuasion. Tunnelling, also known as Guided Persuasion, is when you lead users through a series of pre-defined steps.
All navigation, content and functionality that could distract the user are eliminated, decreasing the user motivation required to complete a task and increasing the likelihood of task completion. For example, software installation wizards typically applies tunnelling techniques.
