A Product Design Glossary: 31 UX & Design Industry Terms
By Ryan Spanswick, former Director of Design at Praxent
Scroll through this glossary of 31 UX and product design terms for definitions of commonly used industry phrases.
Branding
The creation of a logo, color palette, fonts, patterns, and more to create a brand for a client, product, or similar.
Competitive Analysis
A review of direct competitors to a site, product, or similar to understand how they are solving similar problems, where there are opportunities, and what solutions can be reused.
Content Audit
Evaluation of overall content within a site or application.
Content Strategy
A recommendation of structured content, writing styles, tone, voice, labels and much more to provide the best content experience within an application, website or similar.
Contextual Inquiry
A researcher sits with a user on-site to see how they work in a product, feature or similar in their own environment. The recommended standard is to do this with five different users.
Customer Journey Mapping
A visual diagram that shows how a user experiences a product at a high level, typically done on a timeline.
Design Approach | Moodboards | Style Tiles
A grouping of photos, colors, illustrations and other things to help set a mood to inform the overall design approach.
Design Concepts
Early designs that are typically shared with stakeholders and tested with users to identify a preferred approach.
Design Key Screens
High fidelity visual designs of a product, workflow, feature set, etc. Typically complements low-fidelity wireframes.
Design Sprint
A 1-week facilitated workshop to identify a problem, solution, build a prototype and test with users in a rapid and highly effective manner.
Design Thinking Workshop
A 1-2 day facilitated workshop to identify a problem and potential solutions in a rapid manner.
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Empathy Map
An exercise that helps to identify important feelings, actions, behaviors of identified personas.
Heuristic Evaluation
An expert analysis of a feature, product or workflow to identify areas for improvement outside of user research findings.
Information Architecture
The process of analysis, research, and definition of how information is organized within a system to provide the best overall experience.
Interactive Prototype
An interactive representation of key experiences or workflows within a product. These can be low, medium or high fidelity depending on the project.
Kick-off Meeting
A critical meeting of the team and all stakeholders to align on the work, milestones, and problems to be solved.
Lightning Decision Jam
A 1-hour exercise to identify a problem, solution and action items that helps people understand the value of design thinking workshops and/or design sprints.
Lowfi Wireframes
Low fidelity representations of how key parts or workflows of a product will look and function.
Process Workflows
A representation of an application or features workflows to understand how a system works.
Proto Personas
Representations of key user types to help inform recruiting, research approach, and some early deliverables such as empathy mapping.
Research Plan
A plan of what research to conduct and how to conduct it based on the project requirements, personas, and objectives.
Research Report
A report of key insights gained from research methodologies as well as an appendix of detailed data findings.
Site Map
A representation of an entire application, website or similar to convey structure.
Stakeholder Interviews
Typically 1-5 one-hour interviews with key stakeholders to understand their motivations, objectives, challenges, and how they see the experience for their users.
Story Boards
Sketches or illustrations of workflows or concepts for a product or feature.
Style Guide | UI Kit
A detailed guide of the design approach, spacing, colors, typography and more to inform development, marketing and design on a brand and/or product.
Usability Test
Usability testing is the process of testing paper prototypes, wireframes, interactive prototypes or developed products with users to validate or invalidate assumptions and discover areas for improvement. The recommended standard is to do this with five different users.
User Flows & Journey Maps
User Journeys are diagrams that represent the larger workflow a user may experience within the product. User Flows are diagrams of specific tasks users execute within a project.
User Interviews
Typically 5-20 one-hour interviews with users that fit the persona targeted in the project to understand their needs, challenges, work-arounds, and other insights to fuel deeper research and ideation. The recommended standard is to do this with five different users.
User Survey
An online questionnaire of closed- and/or open-ended questions that is used to gather opinions, experiences, and feedback from a larger audience of target users
Validation Testing
The process of testing multiple design concepts to identify an approach that resonates with users and why they prefer it. The recommended standard is to do this with five different users.