Techniques, Strategies and Tools
80/20 Rule
A principle for setting priorities: users will use 20% of the features of your product 80% of the time. Focus the majority of your design and development effort (80%) on the most important 20% of the product.
3 Click Rule
The three-click rule or three click rule is an unofficial web design rule concerning the design of website navigation. It suggests that a user of a website should be able to find any information with no more than three mouse clicks.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience — easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).
Iterative Design
The iterative design process is a simple concept. Once, through user research, we have identified a user need and have generated ideas to meet that need, we develop a prototype. Then we test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way. Then we take what you learned from testing and amend the design. Following that, we create a new prototype and begin the process all over again until we are satisfied that we’ve reached the best possible product for release to the market.
Call To Action(CTA)
Words that urge the reader, listener, or viewer of a sales promotion message to take an immediate action, such as “Write Now,” “Call Now,” or (on Internet) “Click Here.” A retail advertisement or commercial without a call-to-action is considered incomplete and ineffective.
Adaptive Web Design
Adaptive web design (AWD) promotes the creation of multiple versions of a webpage to better fit the user’s device, as opposed to a single version that other web design techniques use.
Accessibility
Accessibility refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people who experience disabilities.
Active Listening
Active listening is a communication technique. first developed by Carl R. Rogers and Richard Farson that is used in counseling, training, and conflict resolution. It requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said.
Agile
Agile software development describes a set of values and principles for software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self organising cross-functional teams.
AIDA
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. This classic advertising model says that an advertisement (and by extension, many effective user interfaces) ought to function by getting people’s attention, stimulating their interest, generating a desire, and then finishing with a call to action.
Atomic Design
Atomic design is a methodology composed of five distinct stages working together to create interface design systems in a more deliberate and hierarchical manner. The five stages of atomic design are:Atoms. Molecules. Organisms.
Branding
The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers’ mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.
Cognitive Load
Cognitive Load Theory was developed by John Sweller. “Cognitive load” relates to the amount of information that working memory can hold at one time.
Constraint
The concept of constraints in design can be defined as the practice of limiting user actions on a system. Constraints limit the actions that can be performed by the user, thus increasing the usability of the design and reducing the likelihood of operator error.
Content Strategy
Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content. Which not only includes the words on the page but also the images and multimedia that are used. Ensuring that you have useful and usable content, that is well structured, and easily found is vital to improving the user experience of a website.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a desired action. The archetypical example of conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who buy something on the site.
Collaborative Design
“Collaborative” means we’ll learn how to creatively solve problems and engage in project activities, management and coordination in both public and private organisations. … “Design” means we’ll graduate with a deep understanding of the process of design.
Liquid design
A design technique that automatically scales to fit the user’s browser.
Luminance
Subjective brightness, intensity of light in design.
Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map tells the story of the customer’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship.
Dark Patterns
Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn’t mean to.
Data Driven Design
Tailoring our products to our user’s preferences, goals, and behaviors make them far more engaging. The approach includes surveys, user testing, A/B testing, site analytics, and consumer research. Ideally, these should all come into play throughout the data-driven design process.
Error Analysis
Error Analysis is a lab testing method that can be used alongside, or simultaneous with, other lab tests. No matter how well we cover our bases when designing an app, users will encounter errors. A thorough Error Analysis allows you to identify the frequency and type of errors that occur so you can address their causes and prevent users from becoming frustrated with your product.
Fishbone Diagram
Fishbone diagrams are used in Six Sigma, lean, and process improvement techniques to identify root causes and communicate them with project teams.
Five Hat Racks
The Five Hat Racks was first developed by Richard Saul Wurman in his book Information Anxiety. In a nutshell, there are 5 ways to organise information: By Location, Alphabet, Time, Category and Continuum.
Graceful Degradation
When a site utilizes new technology, if disabled, the content maintains effectiveness for the users.
Heart Framework
Google’s HEART Framework helps measure the quality of user experience. Measures of user attitudes, often collected via survey. Identifying clear goals will help choose the right metrics to help you measure progress.
Job Stories
Job Story is a powerful way to facilitate team conversation and discovery when designing products. They are meant to cut right to the job to be done by eliminating distractions. The job story encourages the product’s design process to focus on context, causality and motivations instead of assumptions, subjectiveness, personas and implementations.
Kairos
Communicate to users in situations that are the opportune moments for change. Kairos represent situations of change. Situations of change are potentially valuable as users are here especially open and receptive to change or making a deal.
Kano Model
The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, which classifies customer preferences into five categories.
Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor, put simply, states: “the simplest solution is almost always the best.” It’s a problem-solving principle arguing that simplicity is better than complexity.
Omni-channel UX
Multichannel sales approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. The customer can be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, or by telephone, or in a bricks and mortar store and the experience would be seamless.
Paper Prototyping
Variation of usability testing where representative users perform realistic tasks by interacting with a paper version of the interface that is manipulated by a person ‘playing computer,’ who doesn’t explain how the interface is intended to work.
Pattern Library
A formal way of documenting a solution to a common design problem. The idea was introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander for use in urban planning and building architecture, and has been adapted for various other disciplines, including teaching and pedagogy, development organization and process, and software architecture and design.
Personas
In user-centered design and marketing, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.
Presentation
Presenting concept designs, presenting research findings, presenting usability testing results or simply giving a knowledgeshare, UXers are frequent presenters. And good presentation skills are very important because if you can’t communicate your ideas, your insights and your designs, they’re simply not going to gain traction.
Progressive Disclosure
Progressive disclosure is an interaction design technique often used in human computer interaction to help maintain the focus of a user’s attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. This improves usability by presenting only the minimum data required for the task at hand.
Progressive Enhancement
Progressive enhancement is a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic HTML markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies.
Prototypes
A simulation of the final product. It’s like an interactive mockup that can have any degree of fidelity. The main purpose of building prototypes is to test whether or not the flow of the product is smooth and consistent.
Lean UX
Lean UX is a set of principles that may be used to guide you to better, more desirable solutions for users. It’s not a process in which each tool is rigidly applied.
Learnability
Learnability refers to how easy it is for the user to learn to use the application and its features.
Mapping
A Customer Journey map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organisation, service, product or brand, over time and across channels.
Mobile First Design
The growth of mobile is a huge opportunity to reach more people than ever. By starting mobile first with your responsive website you are able to make the tough decisions about the content. The constraints of the mobile medium force us to focus on what really matters.
Mood boards
A collaborative collection of assets and patterns that will eventually evolve into a product’s visual style guide.
Rapid Prototyping
A cyclical approach towards design that focuses on quickly creating a functional, interactive prototype of a website or web application.
Service Blueprint
A map that displays all the touchpoints of the consumer with your brand, as well as the key internal processes involved in it. Useful to visualize the path followed by consumers across multiple channels and how you could improve the flow.
Sketch App
Sketch is built for modern designers, and it shows in every fibre of the app. From a flexible workflow with support for Multiple Pages and Artboards.
Skeuomorphism
The design concept of making items represented resemble their real-world counterparts. Skeuomorphism is commonly used in many design fields, including user interface (UI) and Web design, architecture, ceramics and interior design.
URL-First Design
URLs should be designed in the early stages of website development as users must be able to read, guess and edit them, and it helps designers to define site structure.
Use Cases and Scenarios
List of actions or event steps, typically defining the interactions between a role (known in the Unified Modeling Language as an actor) and a system, to achieve a goal.
User-Centered Design (UCD)
The design is based upon an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments. Users are involved throughout design and development. The design is driven and refined by user-centered evaluation. The process is iterative.
MVP
In product development, the minimum viable product (MVP) is a product which has just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development.
User Flow
A user flow is a collection of Web pages that define a logical task. It consists of a number of steps that need to be performed in order to complete the task.
Value Proposition
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered and acknowledged and a belief from the customer that value will be delivered and experienced. A value proposition can apply to an entire organisation, or parts thereof, or customer accounts, or products or services.
