The process of maintaining, updating, and improving a product or system after its initial deployment to ensure its continued functionality, performance, and relevance to users. Crucial for ensuring long-term user satisfaction, product reliability, and adaptation to changing user needs and technological advancements.
The tendency for people to defer purchasing decisions to a later time, often leading to procrastination. Important for understanding consumer behavior and optimizing sales strategies.
A cognitive bias where individuals believe that past random events affect the probabilities of future random events. Important for designers to understand user decision-making biases related to randomness.
Software that acts as an intermediary between different systems or applications, enabling them to communicate and function together. Crucial for integrating various components and ensuring seamless interaction within digital products.
The evaluation of products based on their ability to influence and shape user behavior. Useful for assessing how well a product guides and influences user actions and decisions.
An approach to design that actively involves all stakeholders (e.g., employees, partners, customers) in the design process. Crucial for creating designs that truly meet user needs and expectations.
The study of the practices and possibilities of music, covering elements like rhythm, melody, harmony, and form. Essential for understanding musical structure, composition, and performance.
The practice of designing and implementing processes, systems, or business solutions in a way that ensures their long-term viability, efficiency, and maintainability. Crucial for creating durable and efficient designs that remain practical and effective over time, ensuring the ongoing success and feasibility of digital products and operations.
The persistence of misinformation in memory and influence on reasoning, even after it has been corrected. Crucial for understanding and mitigating the impact of misinformation in design and communication.
The process of optimizing content and website structure to improve visibility and ranking in voice search results. Important for adapting to the growing use of voice search and ensuring content is accessible to voice queries.
A cognitive process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions, often contrasted with convergent thinking. Essential for fostering creativity and innovation in problem-solving and design.
A dark pattern where the user is required to do something in order to access certain functionality or information. Designers must avoid compulsory actions and provide optional choices to respect user autonomy.
Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks (GIST) is an agile planning technique to break down projects into manageable parts. Essential for organizing and executing agile projects effectively.
The main brand in a brand architecture that houses sub-brands or extensions. Crucial for providing overarching brand identity and consistency across sub-brands.
A rule-of-thumb or shortcut that simplifies decision-making and problem-solving processes. Essential for designing user-friendly interfaces that facilitate quick and efficient decision-making.
Statistical data relating to a particular population and groups within it. Crucial for market research and understanding target audiences.
The capability of a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components, ensuring that user experience is not significantly affected by errors or issues, similar to Postel's Law. Essential for designing reliable and resilient systems, such as a form that normalizes user input for compatibility rather than returning an error (e.g., unconstrained phone number format).
A user-centered design process that involves understanding users' needs and workflows through field research and applying these insights to design. Essential for creating designs that are deeply informed by user contexts and behaviors.
A phenomenon where the probability of recalling an item from a list depends on the length of the list. Important for understanding memory processes and designing effective information presentation.
Numeronym for the word "Observability" (O + 11 letters + N), the ability to observe the internal states of a system based on its external outputs, facilitating troubleshooting and performance optimization. Crucial for monitoring and understanding system performance and behavior.
A statistical rule stating that nearly all values in a normal distribution (99.7%) lie within three standard deviations (sigma) of the mean. Important for identifying outliers and understanding variability in data, aiding in quality control and performance assessment in digital product design.
The study of cooking techniques, ingredients, and the cultural significance of food, providing insights into creativity and innovation in other fields. Useful for drawing parallels between culinary arts and design, fostering creativity and innovation.
A cognitive bias where people prefer the option that seems to eliminate risk entirely, even if another option offers a greater overall benefit. Important for understanding decision-making and designing risk communication for users.
A creative thinking technique where the typical process is reversed to generate new ideas by considering the opposite of conventional assumptions. Useful for fostering innovation and challenging existing assumptions in problem-solving.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a strategic framework used to align an organization's business strategy with its IT infrastructure. Crucial for optimizing processes, improving agility, and ensuring that technology supports business goals.
A cognitive bias where individuals with low ability at a task overestimate their ability, while experts underestimate their competence. Crucial for designers to create educational content and user interfaces that accommodate varying levels of user expertise.
The SEO value or authority passed from one website to another through hyperlinks, influencing the search engine ranking of the linked site. Important for understanding and leveraging the impact of links on SEO performance.
The potential for a project or solution to be economically sustainable and profitable. Important for ensuring that design and development efforts align with business goals and market demands.
Conversational User Interface (CUI) is a user interface designed to communicate with users in a conversational manner, often using natural language processing and AI. Essential for creating intuitive and engaging user experiences in digital products.
Small bits of text in user interfaces, such as instructions, labels, and error messages, that help guide users through interactions. Essential for enhancing user experience and providing clear guidance.
Situation-Complication-Resolution (SCR) is a communication and problem-solving framework used to structure information clearly and logically. Crucial for effectively conveying complex ideas and solutions in business and design contexts.
A concept that humans make decisions within the limits of their knowledge, cognitive capacity, and available time, leading to satisficing rather than optimal solutions. Crucial for designing systems and processes that account for human cognitive limitations and decision-making processes.
The visual images, symbols, or modes of representation collectively associated with a subject, often used in design to communicate ideas quickly and effectively. Important for creating cohesive and meaningful visual systems.
Application Support Engineer (ASE) is a professional responsible for maintaining and supporting software applications, ensuring their availability and performance. Crucial for ensuring the reliability and user satisfaction of digital products through effective support and maintenance.
A cognitive bias where people favor members of their own group over those in other groups. Important for designing inclusive and equitable experiences for users.
A psychological phenomenon where people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. Crucial for designing engaging experiences that leverage task incompletion to maintain user interest.
The study of strategic decision making, incorporating psychological insights into traditional game theory models. Useful for understanding complex user interactions and designing systems that account for strategic behavior.
A strategy that focuses on identifying and addressing the specific problems or "pain points" of users in order to improve search engine rankings and attract more targeted traffic. Essential for creating content that directly addresses user needs and improves website visibility.
Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task (HEART) is a framework used to measure and improve user experience success. Important for systematically evaluating and enhancing user experience.
A technique used to evaluate a product or system by testing it with real users to identify any usability issues and gather qualitative and quantitative data on their interactions. Crucial for identifying and resolving usability issues to improve user satisfaction and performance.
The pursuit of a healthy relationship with technology, balancing its use to enhance well-being without causing harm. Important for promoting healthy technology use and designing user experiences that support well-being.
The use of algorithms to generate new data samples that resemble a training dataset, often used in AI for creating realistic outputs. Important for developing creative and innovative solutions in digital product design, such as content generation and simulation.
Information Visualization (InfoVis) is the study and practice of visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition. Crucial for transforming complex data into intuitive visual formats, enabling faster insights and better decision-making.
The percentage of users who continue to use a product or service over a specified period, indicating user loyalty and engagement. Essential for assessing the effectiveness of user retention strategies and improving user experience.
Data that provides information about other data, such as its content, format, and structure. Essential for organizing, managing, and retrieving digital assets and information efficiently in product design and development.
A metric used to rank leads based on their engagement with a brand, indicating their readiness to purchase. Crucial for prioritizing leads and improving sales efficiency.
The setting where software and systems are actually put into operation for their intended use. Essential for ensuring that products are fully functional and meet user requirements in a real-world setting.
A visual tool in agile project management that displays tasks to be done, in progress, and completed, often using columns and cards. Crucial for visualizing workflow and managing tasks efficiently.
A clear and concise list of criteria that a product or task must meet to be considered complete, ensuring alignment and understanding within a team. Essential for maintaining quality and consistency in agile project management.
The core principles that underpin agile methodologies, focusing on collaboration, flexibility, and customer satisfaction. Crucial for guiding agile practices and ensuring effective project delivery.
A statistical method used to identify underlying relationships between variables by grouping them into factors. Crucial for simplifying data and identifying key variables in research.
A dark pattern where it's easy to subscribe but very difficult to cancel the subscription. Awareness of this tactic is important to provide straightforward and user-friendly subscription management.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI approach that combines retrieval of relevant documents with generative models to produce accurate and contextually relevant responses. Essential for improving the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content.
The ability of a product or service to keep users engaged and returning over time, often measured by metrics such as retention rate. Crucial for evaluating user loyalty and the long-term success of a product.
A psychological phenomenon where people develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them. Crucial for designing user experiences that leverage familiarity to increase user comfort and satisfaction.
The study of how psychological influences affect financial behaviors and decision-making. Essential for understanding and influencing financial decision-making and behavior.
The degree to which a product or system can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use. Essential for creating products that are easy to use and meet user needs effectively.
A psychological principle where people are more likely to be influenced by those they like. Important for understanding social influences and improving user engagement and marketing strategies.
The tendency to believe that things will always function the way they normally have, often leading to underestimation of disaster risks. Important for understanding risk perception and designing systems that effectively communicate potential changes.
The planning and preparation to ensure that an organization can continue to operate in case of serious incidents or disasters. Crucial for minimizing disruptions and maintaining critical functions during and after unexpected events.