User Design

Advertising agencies

Teams of creatives hired by clients to build marketing campaigns

Apprenticeships

Provides on-the-job training to help people develop real skills

Assets

Everything from the text and images to the design specifications, like font style, color, size, and spacing

Design Agency

A one-stop shop for the look of brands, products, and services

Empathy

The ability to understand someone else's feelings or thoughts in a situation

Freelancers

Designers who work for themselves and market their services to businesses to find customers

Generalist

A UX designer with a broad number of responsibilities

Graphic designers

Create visuals that tell a story or message

Information architecture

The framework of a website or how it's organized, categorized, and structured

Interaction designers

Focus on designing the experience of a product and how it functions

Internship

A short term job with limited responsibility

Motion designers

Think about what it feels like for a user to move through a product

Product

A good, service, or feature

Production designers

Make sure first and final designs match in the finished project materials and that the assets are ready to be handed off to engineering team

Prototype

An early model of a product that demonstrates functionality

Specialist

A designer who dives deep into one particular type of user experience, like interaction design, visual design, or motion design

Startup

A new business that wants to develop a unique product or service and bring it to market

T-shaped designer

A designer who specializes in one kind of user experience (e.g., interaction, visual, motion) and has a breadth of knowledge in other areas

UX designers

Focus on how users interact with a product

User experience

How a person, the user, feels about interacting with, or experiencing, a product

UX engineers

Translate the design's intent into a functioning experience

UX program managers

Ensure clear and timely communication so that the process of building a useful product moves smoothly from start to finish

UX research

Understand users and learn about their backgrounds, demographics, motivations, pain points, emotions, and life goals

UX researchers

A type of researcher that conducts studies or interviews to learn about the users of a product and how people use a product

UX writers

Create the language that appears throughout a digital product, like websites or mobile apps

Visual designers

Focus on how the product or technology looks

Wireframe

An outline or a sketch of a product or a screen

UI Design

Designing intuitive layouts, navigation menus, and interactive elements for digital products

Graphic Design

Creating visually appealing and east-to understand marketing materials and signage

Product Design

Conceptualizing and creating products that meet user needs and solve specific problems

UX Design

Enhancing the overall user experience by conducting research and usability testing

Experiential Design

Creating immersive and memorable experiences for users

Service Design

Improving the quality and delivery of services to meet customer needs

The Bauhaus movement

Which design movement celebrated minimalism and the marriage of form and function, influencing a global design ethos?

How does African design primarily convey cultural narratives and identity?

Through intricate patterns and symbols inspired by nature and community

Hick's Law

decision time increases with the number of choices

Fitts's Law

emphasizes that larger targets and shorter distances result in faster and more accurate movements.

principle of proximity

states that objects close to each other are perceived as a group

Equity-focused design

Designing for groups that have been historically underrepresented or ignored when building products

PLatform

The medium that users experience your product on

Iteration

Doing something again, by building on previous versions and making tweaks

Switch

An assistive technology device that replaces the need to use a computer keyboard or a mouse

Accessibility

The design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities.

Alternative text (alt text)

Text that helps translate something visual, such as an image or graph, into a description that can be read by screen readers

Assistive technology

Any products, equipment, or systems that enhance learning, working, and daily living for people with disabilities

Brand Identity

The visual appearance and voice of a company

Call-to-action (CTA)

A visual prompt that tells the user to take action, like to click a button

Color modification

Features that increase the contrast of colors on a screen, like high-contrast mode or dark mode

Digital Literacy

A user's level of ability related to using digital information and technologies

Equality

Providing the same amount of opportunity and support

Framework

Creates the basic structure that focuses and supports the problem you're trying to solve

Ideation

The process of generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic, with no attempt to judge or evaluate them.

Inclusive design

Making design choices that take into account personal identifiers like ability, race, economic status, language, age, and gender

Insight

An observation that helps you understand the user or their needs from a new perspective

Iterate

Revise the original design to create a new and improved version

Responsive web design

A design approach that allows a website to change automatically depending on the size of the device

Screen reader

Software that reads aloud any on-screen text, interactive elements, or alternative text

Speech to text

Software that allows users to compose text by speaking into their device

Switch device

An assistive technology device that replaces the need to use a computer keyboard or a mouse.

Universal design

The process of creating one product for users with the widest range of abilities and in the widest range of situations.

User

Any person who uses a product

User-centered design

Puts the user front-and-center

Voice control

Allows users to navigate and interact with the buttons and screens on their devices using only their voice

The design thinking framework involves the following phases:

empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

Define

The phase of design thinking that involves leveraging the insights gained during the empathize phase to identify the problem you'll solve with your design

Design Sprint

A time-bound process, with five phases typically spread over five full 8-hour days. The goal of design sprints is to answer critical business questions through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users

Design thinking

A UX design framework that focuses on the user throughout all five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test

Empathize

The phase of design thinking that involves getting to know your user through research

Ideate

The phase of design thinking that involves brainstorming all potential solutions to the user's problem

Retrospective

A collaborative critique of the team's design sprint

Sprint Brief

A document that you share with all your attendees to help them prepare for the sprint

Test

The phase of design thinking that involves facilitating and observing user tests with your design prototypes

Primary Research

research you conduct yourself. Information from direct interactions with users, like interviews, surveys, or usability studies

qualitative research

primarily collected through observations and conversations. based on understanding users' needs and aims to answer questions like "why" or "how did this happen?

quantitative research

focuses on data that can be gathered by counting or measuring. based on numerical data that's often collected from large-scale surveys. This type of research aims to answer questions like "how many?" and "how much?"

surveys

help you collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from a large sample size of users. They're quick and affordable

secondary research

relies on data from books, articles, and independent studies to back up your own primary research

usability studies

help you see how users interact with a product first-hand, but often require time and a large budget

Bias

Favoring or having prejudice against something based on limited information

Confirmation Bias

Occurs when you start looking for evidence to prove a hypothesis you

have

Design Research

Answers the question: How should we build it?

False consensus bias

The assumption that others will think the same way as you do

Foundational research

Answers the questions: What should we build? What are the user

problems? How can we solve them?

Implicit bias

The collection of attitudes and stereotypes you associate with people without

your conscious knowledge

Interviews

A research method used to collect in-depth information on people's opinions,

thoughts, experiences, and feelings

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Critical measures of progress toward an end goal

Post-launch research

Answers the question: Did we succeed?

Primacy bias

Remembering the first user more than others

Primary research

Research you conduct yourself

Qualitative research

Focuses observations on why and how things happen

Quantitative research

Focuses on data that can be gathered by counting or measuring

Recency bias

Most easily remembering the last thing you heard

Secondary research

Research that uses information someone else has put together

Sunk cost fallacy

The idea that the deeper we get into a project we've invested in, the harder

it is to change course

Surveys

An activity where many people are asked the same questions in order to understand