Negativity Bias
The tendency to give more weight to negative experiences or information than positive ones. Crucial for understanding user behavior and designing systems that balance positive and negative feedback.
372 topics found for:
“user interface design”
Defaulting
The practice of setting defaults in decision environments to influence outcomes, often used in behavioral economics and design. Crucial for creating user experiences that encourage beneficial behaviors through preselected options.
Gutenberg Diagram
A design principle that suggests a pattern for how people read a webpage, dividing it into four quadrants and emphasizing the importance of the top-left and bottom-right areas. Essential for creating effective layouts that align with natural reading patterns.
Onboarding
The process of guiding new users through the initial stages of using a product or service, helping them become familiar with its features and benefits. Essential for enhancing user retention and satisfaction by ensuring a smooth introduction to the product.
Theming
The process of applying a consistent style, motif, or brand identity across a piece of work, design, or user experience to create coherence and enhance the overall aesthetic. Essential for ensuring visual consistency, reinforcing brand identity, and providing users with a unified and engaging experience.
Density Independence
The principle that ensures user interface elements maintain their size and proportion across different screen densities. Essential for creating a consistent user experience across various devices.
Information Scent
The cues and hints that users follow to find information online, based on perceived relevance and usefulness. Important for designing intuitive navigation and content structures that align with user expectations.
Component Adaptation
The ability of a UI component to adjust its appearance and behavior based on different contexts or devices. Crucial for responsive design and ensuring a consistent user experience.
Walkthrough Modal
A guided, interactive overlay that introduces users to features or tasks within an application. Crucial for onboarding new users and enhancing user understanding of complex features.
Functional Fixedness
A cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. Important for designers to foster creative problem-solving and innovation.
Framing Bias
A cognitive bias where people's decisions are influenced by how information is presented rather than just the information itself. Crucial for designers to minimize bias in how information is presented to users.
Continuous Reinforcement
A schedule of reinforcement where a desired behavior is reinforced every time it occurs, promoting quick learning and behavior maintenance. Important for designing systems that encourage consistent user behavior.
Introspection Illusion
A cognitive bias where people wrongly believe they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. Important for designing experiences that account for discrepancies between user self-perception and actual behavior.
Executive Function
A set of cognitive processes that include working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control, crucial for planning, decision-making, and behavior regulation. Crucial for designing interfaces and experiences that support users' cognitive abilities.
Squint Test
A technique used to assess the visual hierarchy of a design by squinting to see which elements stand out the most. Essential for evaluating the effectiveness of a design's layout and emphasis.
Breakpoint System
A structured set of breakpoints used to create responsive designs that work seamlessly across multiple devices. Important for maintaining consistency and usability in responsive design.
Scannability
The ease with which users can quickly find and understand information on a webpage or document, often enhanced by design elements like headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs. Crucial for improving user experience and ensuring that content is accessible and easy to navigate.
Perky Effect
A phenomenon where vivid mental images can interfere with actual perception, causing individuals to mistake imagined experiences for real ones. Important for ensuring that marketing and product design set realistic user expectations to avoid disappointment and maintain brand integrity.
Information Processing
The series of actions or operations involved in the acquisition, interpretation, storage, and retrieval of information. Crucial for understanding how users handle information and designing systems that align with cognitive processes.
Choice Architecture
The practice of organizing the context in which people make decisions to influence the outcomes, often used to nudge users towards certain behaviors. Crucial for designing user experiences that guide decision-making and improve outcomes.
Declarative Memory
A type of long-term memory involving information that can be consciously recalled, such as facts and events. Important for understanding how users retain and recall information in design.
External Consistency
The degree to which a product's elements are consistent with external standards or other products. Important for ensuring compatibility and user familiarity across different systems.
Parallelism
The use of parallel structures in writing and design to create balance and rhythm, enhancing readability and aesthetic appeal. Crucial for creating clear, coherent, and visually appealing content and interfaces.
Screen Density
The number of pixels per inch (PPI) on a display, affecting the sharpness and clarity of visual elements. Crucial for optimizing visual content for different devices.
Decision Theory
The study of how individuals make choices among alternatives and the principles that guide these choices. Important for designing decision-making processes and interfaces that help users make informed choices.
Multimodal Theory
A theory that explains how information is processed through different sensory modalities, such as visual, auditory, and tactile. Important for designing user experiences that engage multiple senses for better interaction and understanding.
Reification
A key aspect of Gestalt psychology describing the mind's ability to fill in gaps to create a whole object from incomplete elements. Crucial for designing creative and engaging visuals that are both pleasing to the eye and cleverly satisfying to the mind.
CTA
Call to Action (CTA) is a prompt that encourages users to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. Crucial for guiding user behavior and increasing engagement or conversions on digital platforms.
Principle of Choices
The Principle of Choices is an information architecture guideline that emphasizes providing users with meaningful options to navigate and interact with a system. Crucial for enhancing user experience by ensuring users can easily find what they need without being overwhelmed.
a11y
Numeronym for the word "Accessibility" (A + 11 letters + Y), designing for ease of use by all people, ensuring equal access to those with disabilities. Crucial for ensuring inclusivity and compliance with accessibility standards.
Nudging
The act of designing and implementing subtle interventions to influence behavior in a predictable way. Crucial for guiding user behavior effectively without limiting freedom of choice.
Feature Bloat
The excessive addition of features in a product, often leading to complexity and reduced usability. Crucial for maintaining simplicity and usability in product design.
Repetition Blindness
A phenomenon where people fail to recognize a repeated item in a visual sequence, impacting information processing and perception. Important for understanding visual perception and designing interfaces that avoid repetitive confusion.
Recognition Heuristic
A cognitive shortcut that relies on the recognition of one option over another to make a decision, often used when individuals have limited information. Crucial for designing interfaces and experiences that facilitate quick and effective decision-making.
Ego States
A concept in transactional analysis that describes three different aspects of the self: Parent, Adult, and Child, each influencing behavior and communication. Important for designing communication strategies and interfaces that resonate with different user states.
Multistability
A key aspect of Gestalt psychology that explains the tendency for ambiguous images to pop back and forth unstably between alternative interpretations in the mind. Important for understanding visual perception and designing interfaces that avoid ambiguity.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
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.
Queuing Theory
The mathematical study of waiting lines or queues. Useful for optimizing user flow and reducing wait times in user interfaces.
Design Audit
A comprehensive review of a brand's design assets and practices to ensure consistency and effectiveness. Important for maintaining a cohesive and effective brand identity.
5-Second Test
A usability test where users are shown a design for 5 seconds to measure recall and initial reactions. Important for designers to test how well key information and elements are conveyed quickly to users.
Illusion of Control
The tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events. Important for understanding user behavior and designing experiences that manage expectations.
CUI
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.
Heuristic Evaluation
A usability inspection method where experts review a user interface against a set of heuristics to identify usability issues. Crucial for identifying usability problems early in the design process.
Hidden Subscription
A dark pattern where users are unknowingly signed up for a recurring subscription. Awareness of this tactic is important to ensure transparent subscription services and prevent deceptive charges.
Privacy Zuckering
A dark pattern where the user is tricked into publicly sharing more information about themselves than they intended. Designers must avoid this deceptive practice and ensure clear, consensual data sharing to respect user privacy.
Omission Bias
A cognitive bias where people judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions). Important for understanding user decision-making and designing systems that mitigate this bias.
Attention Bias
The tendency for people's perception to be affected by their recurring thoughts at the time. Important for understanding how current thoughts influence user perception and decision-making.
Horn Effect
A cognitive bias where one negative trait of a person or thing influences the perception of other traits. Important for designing experiences that counteract or mitigate negative biases in user perception.
Social Proof
A psychological phenomenon where people follow the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. Essential for designing interfaces and experiences that leverage social influence to guide user behavior and increase trust and engagement.
Usability Testing
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.
Wizard
A step-by-step guide that helps users complete a complex task by breaking it down into manageable steps. Crucial for improving usability and ensuring users can successfully complete multi-step processes.
Illusory Truth Effect
A cognitive bias where repeated statements are more likely to be perceived as true, regardless of their actual accuracy. Crucial for understanding how repetition influences beliefs and designing communication strategies for users.
Illusory Superiority
A cognitive bias where individuals overestimate their own abilities, qualities, or performance relative to others. Important for understanding user self-perception and designing systems that account for inflated self-assessments.
Decision Paralysis
A state of overthinking and indecision that prevents making a choice, often due to too many options or uncertainty. Important for designing interfaces that simplify decision-making processes for users.
Paradox of Choice
The phenomenon where having too many options leads to anxiety and difficulty making a decision, reducing overall satisfaction. Important for designing user experiences that balance choice and simplicity to enhance satisfaction.
Hostile Attribution Bias
A cognitive bias where individuals interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign. Important for understanding user interactions and designing experiences that mitigate negative interpretations.
Common Fate
A Gestalt principle stating that elements moving in the same direction are perceived as a group or a single entity. Crucial for creating visual designs that effectively convey movement and relationships.
Constancy
The perception of objects as unchanging despite changes in sensory input, such as changes in lighting, distance, or angle. Important for understanding user perception and designing stable visual experiences.
POUR
Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR) are the four main principles of web accessibility. These principles are essential for creating inclusive digital experiences that can be accessed and used by people with a wide range of abilities and disabilities.
Hidden Costs
A dark pattern where additional costs are only revealed at the last step of the checkout process. It's essential to avoid this tactic and promote transparent pricing to build user trust.