UX Design

User experience design is the practice of shaping everything a person encounters while using a product or service, not just the screen they happen to look at.

A user need is the outcome a person is actually trying to reach, which is rarely the same as the feature they ask for or the metric the business tracks.

Design research is the disciplined effort to find out how people actually behave, so that design decisions rest on evidence rather than on the team's imagination.

A persona is a research-based description of a type of user, useful for keeping decisions grounded and widely criticized when it is invented rather than observed.

A user journey describes the whole sequence a person moves through to reach a goal, exposing the gaps between screens, departments and channels where experiences usually fail.

Information architecture is the structuring, labeling and organizing of content so that people can find what they need and understand where they are.

A wireframe is a deliberately unfinished drawing of a screen, used to settle structure, content and priority before anyone argues about color or typeface.

A prototype is a deliberately incomplete version of a design built to answer a specific question, letting a team learn from behavior before committing to construction.

Usability is how effectively, efficiently and comfortably specified people can achieve specified goals, which makes it a measurable property rather than a matter of taste.

Usability testing is watching representative people attempt real tasks with a design, in order to find the problems the team can no longer see.