User Experience (UX) is a blossoming field and there are common terms and theories to grasp. Discover the most common terminology and theories that are encountered during the product development lifecycle.
UX Glossary
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Aesthetic-Usability Effect - Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as a design that’s more usable.
Affinity bias - Tendency to be favorably biased toward people most like ourselves.
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C
Confirmation Bias - Tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, and discredit information that does not support the initial opinion
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Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge.
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False Positive - a result that indicates a given condition exists when it does not.
Fitts Law - The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
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Hindsight bias -Tendency to view past events as being predictable. Also called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect.
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Jacob’s Law - Users spend most of their time on other apps. This means that users prefer your app to work the same way as all the other apps they already know.
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Law of closure - Humans tend to perceive objects as complete rather than focusing on the gaps that the object might contain
Law of common fate - States that objects are perceived as lines that move along the smoothest path.
Law of continuity (also known as the law of good continuation) - states that elements of objects tend to be grouped together, and therefore integrated into perceptual wholes if they are aligned within an object.
Law of Prägnanz - People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images in the simplest form possible because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of the user.
Law of past experience - implies that under some circumstances visual stimuli are categorized according to past experience.
Law of proximity - when an individual perceives an assortment of objects, they perceive objects that are close to each other as forming a group.
Law of similarity - elements within an assortment of objects are perceptually grouped together if they are similar to each other.
Law of symmetry - the mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point.
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MVP - version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
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P
Peak-End Rule - People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
Performance anxiety - also known as stage fright is an anxiety or phobia that occurs in a person when required to perform in front of an audience
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Recency bias - a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones; a memory bias. It gives "greater importance to the most recent event
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Self-serving bias - Tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than for failures.
Serial Position Effect - Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
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U
User Experience (UX) - how a user interacts with and experiences a product, environment, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency.
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Von Restorff Effect - predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
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X
Y
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Zeigarnik Effect - occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled.
