UX Terms - In the Context of Design Process

When the first date I participated in the UX Bootcamp, I was given several links about the "UX terms/vocabularies" and I read that with a great passion. But soon I was felt lost as the more I studied on that, the more confusion I have. Now I have been working on my Bootcamp for 6 months when I looked back on these "terms", I realize where my confusion comes from. Undoubtedly, the articles tried to include more terms and provide a comprehensive look for the readers, but the terms are organized without context. I do believe it could be introduced in a better way of "when to use what". Therefore, the post today is to summarize the UX terms that frequently used and based on the order of the design process.

Warm-up

UX: UX stands for user experience when, what, where, why, and how peoples use the product and who the person is. 

UX Design: User Experience Design (UXD or UED) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.

Design Thinking: Design thinking is a person-centered approach to designing outcomes and experiences to delight the customer. The five stages include Discover/Empathize, Define, Ideate, Execute, and Validate.

Discover/Empathize - Understand the problem

Research Plan: A research plan is a document you will create that will list out your research goals, as well as the methods you intend to use to accomplish those goals.

Research Methods

• Generative research, which will help you to define your problem and generate ideas
• Secondary Research, which involves exploring existing data that relates to your product
• Competitive Research, which uncovers the strengths and weaknesses of other products (which can potentially identify opportunities for new designs)
• Quantitative Research, which involves working with an extensive dataset to test the validity of the conclusions you draw from your research
• Qualitative Research, which will help you to understand why users behave the way they do 
• Survey
• User Interview
• Diary studies
• Focus Group
• Stakeholders interviews

Define - Define the problem

Making sense of the data you collect while conducting research so that you can then move on to the ideation stage of the design process.

Affinity Mapping: Affinity Mapping is a practice used to organize ideas or insights. 

Empathy Mapping: An empathy map is a visual way to organize insights, observations, and quotes you’ve collected from a user interview to better understand your user’s pain points, goals, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

Persona: A persona is a representation of a particular type of user.

Problem Statement: Problem statements help you to make sure that you know what the problem is that you are trying to design a solution for.

Journey Map: A journey map is a visual map of how a person interacts with a product from start to finish and how that person feels about each step of the process.

Storyboard: A storyboard is a rough sketch of a scenario. A storyboard captures a UX designer’s vision of what a design will look like. 

Ideate - Generate as many ideas or potential solutions as possible.

Brainstorming: Brainstorm solutions to the problem you are trying to solve for your capstone project based on the research

Crazy 8: Crazy 8’s is a fast sketching exercise that requires the designer to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes.

Sketching: Sketching is a quick way to make your ideas tangible so that they can be tested and adjusted before you make higher fidelity versions of your designs.

User stories: User stories are used to identify the functional needs of your product but don’t explore how you'll actually design the product to meet those functional needs. The formula for user stories is simple: “As a <insert kind of user>, I want <insert feature or action>, to be able to <insert the desired outcome>.”

MVP: An MVP is a product that contains only the essential features an early customer would need to complete critical tasks.

Information Architecture: IA is what is used to organize and structure information so that you can easily find it and navigate through an app or website.

Wireflow: Wireflows is a design-specification format that combines wireframe-style page layout designs with a simplified flowchart-like way of representing interactions.

Card Sorting: Card sorting is a well-established research technique that’s used to discover how people understand and categorize information.

Mockup: A term that gets thrown around often in work environments, mockups are static representations of a product. You can’t click through them or interact with them.

Execute - Turning an idea into a tangible item

Edge Cases: An edge case is a user flow or interaction that occurs infrequently but could break the user experience if it does occur.

Moodboard: A mood board is a collection of images and visual artifacts you'd like to draw inspiration from when creating a visual language for a project.

UI Elements: User interface (UI) elements are all the different parts found on an interface we need to trigger specific actions or get around an app or website. 

Style Guide: A style guide is a set of rules for how your brand should be displayed.

Design System: A design system is a complete set of standards, documentation, and principles along with the components to achieve those standards. 

Prototype: Prototyping is the process of exploring an idea by building an interactive experience.

Validate - Test the solutions and generate user feedback

Usability Testing: Usability among UX design terms refers to the ease of navigating through a design.

A/B Testing: is also referred to as split testing. It is the process that asks users to pick from two versions of your design. 

Eye-tracking: the method employs tools to track the eye movements of the users to learn where they look at a design, website, or any other visual data. 

This post outlines the key UX terms that occur in each design stage and with the explanation. By understanding the design process and the methods used in each stage, it will eventually help you develop a framework to approach problems! Thank you!