Glossary of User Experience (UX) Design Terms

Introduction
General UX Terms
Design Methods

Introduction

There are many useful User Experience (UX) Glossaries on the web. I've listed a few below for your reference. However, because there is a lot of vocabulary in this course, and due to time constraints I will have to go through it quickly, I have created this glossary of terms I will be introducing in the User Experience (UX) Design course for your easy reference.

Other, more comprehensive, UX design glossaries:

General UX Terms

User Experience

Comprehends all aspects of digital products and services that users experience directly—and perceive, learn, and use—including products’ form, behavior, and content, but also encompassing users’ broader brand experience and the response that experience evokes in them. Key factors contributing to the quality of users’ experience of products are learnability, usability, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal.

- by Pabini Gabriel-Petit, published on UX Matters

User Experience (UX) Design

A holistic, multidisciplinary approach to the design of user interfaces for digital products, defining their form, behavior, and content. User experience design integrates interaction design, industrial design, information architecture, information design, visual interface design, user assistance design, and user-centered design, ensuring coherence and consistency across all of these design dimensions.

- by Pabini Gabriel-Petit, published on UX Matters

User-Centered Design (UCD)

Essentially an older term to refer to what we now tend to call UX Design, User-Centered design's main tenant is that we are designing for users, and their needs/desires/understandings should come first and foremost in the design experience. As with UX design, this typically means that users are brought into the design process at the earliest possible stage.

Participatory Design (PD) (USA)

Collaborative Design (Co-Design) (Europe)

Two terms that refer to the same design practice, PD or Co-Design involves putting users onto the design team with the same status, power, and responsibilities as the rest of the designers on the design team. PD is typically employed in workplace, healthcare, or other professional settings, and its practice stems from the understanding that the workers in the workplace are experts in their job duties and the requirements of their work, in the same way that computer scientists are experts in computer programming and designers are experts in design. Thus, workers are brought onto the design team from the very beginnings of the design process. While more popular in Europe, especially in Scandinavia, PD is less popular in the USA both because it is expensive, and because managers often employ design companies to streamline work in such a way that jobs are eliminated, whereas in PD, jobs are typically just restructured.

Rapid Iterative Design

A pragmatic approach to design typically used in UX design where designs are incrementally improved in a cycle of build-test-build. The premise behind Rapid Iterative Design is that one cannot know ahead of time what the "best" or "correct" or even what a "good" design is. Therefore, what is more important is to build something that works, even if it only partially works, and then test it out with real people, ideally potential users. By seeing where the partially build design fails, one can then iterate the design by building something better, which in turn is tested with real users, and then iterated, and so forth. By following this cycle of build-test-build, the end product ends up being a much better design because all of the major failings of previous design ideas have already been discovered and overcome. This method works best when as many cycles of build-test-build are conducted as possible, thus the emphasis is on how quickly (rapidly) one can build a minimally working prototype.

Rapid Prototyping

By far the most common version of Rapid Iterative Design, for all intents and purposes, the terms can be considered synonyms in most contexts of use. Rapid prototyping in particular focuses on building discardable prototypes that function as proof-of-concept, but rarely scale to large-scale adoption. The idea is that by quickly building and discarding, one can quickly iterate the design. Rapid prototyping is itself an umbrella term as well, encompassing a number of different techniques including paper prototyping, wireframing, and a number of other prototyping methods.

Where rapid prototyping sometimes breaks down is that unless people can use a particular design "for real", for example, to support their daily work activities, they are unable to discover all of the design flaws in any current implementation. Thus, especially in mid to late stage design, sometimes discardable prototypes are replaced by longer lasting functional prototypes, which still might end up discarded, but are built to be more sustainable. Whether this approach is rapid enough to still be considered rapid prototyping is a debate best left to others.

Usability

How easy or difficult a particular design is to use, or how easy/difficult it is to figure out how to use it.

Design Methods

User Test: User tests encompass a broad range of activities which all have in common that potential users of the design being developed are brought in by the design team to test out the current version of the design to find bugs, design flaws, and other problems with what currently exists. Typically user tests are structured activities where potential users are given a series of tasks to complete, and the users are carefully observed and times as they struggle to complete the tasks. Designers are prevented from giving the user any kind of help or feedback as they struggle to complete the tasks so as to reveal how good or bad the design happens to be, sometimes to the extent of being concealed behind one-way mirrors or remotely viewing video of the user test. The users are asked to use the Talk-Aloud Protocol, which basically means they should do their best to narrate their thoughts as they attempt to navigate and use the design in question so the designers can better understand what they are thinking and why when they interact with particular interface components. The only interaction the designers can have with the users during the first part of the test is to prompt them to keep using the Talk-Aloud Protocol, since it is easy for people to forget to keep narrating their thoughts. After this "unadulterated" part of the user test is complete, then the designers can come and help the users figure out the interface, and get feedback from them about how they thing the interface should be improved.
Paper Prototyping: A design method where designers make rough sketches of interfaces and interface components on paper, post-it notes, or index cards, and then put them together into a low fidelity (lo-fi) "working" prototype. They then recruit a potential user to test out the prototype by using it as if it were a real interface. One of the designers plays the role of the computer by moving around the pieces of paper to simulate the user interface changing in response to the input by the user. Otherwise, these simulations are conducted much like user tests where the user is asked to use the talk-aloud protocol and the designers refrain from giving the user any hint or explanation until the first run-through is completed. This allows for quick discovery of potential flaws with the design, and allows the design team the ability to quickly iterate the interface by redrawing it on new pieces of paper.
Personas: A design method where designers construct user personas complete with names, pictures, personal information, and personality, in order to simulate the potential users of a particular design. The goal of the personas is to represent various characteristics of actual users in all their peculiarity and imperfection, and thus move away from conceptions of the "generic user" who wants to do anything the designers wish him/her to do. Final personas are best generated by creating many different user personas that together cover all the different characteristics of actual users (typically as discovered through ethnographic research), and then combining them to eliminate redundancy and overlap so that only core personas remain. These personas should be realistic in that they could be and feel like real people, but their characteristics should be as orthogonal as possible. Personas are used by testing interfaces against them. Instead of "the user clicks on this button and then reads this paragraph", it becomes "Mary is irritated by having to click too much and gives up on the interface".
Scenario-Based Design (SBD): There are many different ways of effectively crafting and using scenarios for scenario-based design, but at their best, scenarios are meant to be a story or narrative that depicts actual, realistic user experience of using an envisioned design. The idea behind scenarios is to craft stories that are believable given our experience as humans. Any interface that requires actions which stretch credulity are probably interfaces that will fail when built. Scenarios can also be productively used to test out personas. Is the scenario-story of Thomas using the new Android app believable? Or would he react differently than we scripted?
Bodystorming: A design method similar to paper prototyping, but either instead of or in addition to drawing interface components on paper, the primary focus of this method is on creating physical artifacts that represent the interface, and interacting with them in a physical space or carrying them around a physical space. Thus, mobile devices might be represented by blocks of wood, an airplane might be represented by rows of chairs, etc. The idea is to physically interact with the objects and see how the physical constraints will affect the interface requirements and final design.
Storyboarding: A design method that uses methods of storyboarding developed for film work to simulate the experience of a user of a particular technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction

General UX Terms

Design Methods