UX by Example
Learn UX terms by doing them, not just reading them.
An interactive UX glossary. Every entry demonstrates its own concept - you learn each term by example, not by definition.
Showing all 36 entries
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interaction design Live
Progressive disclosure
Show people just what they need right now, and tuck the rest behind a clear next step. It keeps the first view simple without hiding anything for good.
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interaction design Live
Fitts's law
The time to hit a target grows as the target gets smaller and as it sits further away. Big, close things are fast; small, distant things are slow.
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interaction design Live
Affordance
An affordance is the visual hint that tells you what you can do with something - a raised button says "press me", underlined blue text says "click me". Strong cues make actions obvious; missing or false ones leave people guessing.
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cognitive psychology Live
Cognitive load
The total mental effort a task demands. Pile on too much and people slow down, make mistakes, or give up.
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cognitive psychology Live
Hick's law
The more choices you offer, the longer a decision takes - and it climbs with the logarithm of the number of options, not in a straight line. Choices carry a time cost, not just a space cost.
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design ethics Live
Dark patterns
Interface tricks that nudge people into choices they didn't mean to make - for the business's benefit, not theirs.
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cognitive psychology Live
Mental model
The picture in someone's head of how a thing works. When the interface matches it, everything feels obvious; when it doesn't, nothing does.
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research methods Live
Heuristic evaluation
A quick expert review that checks an interface against a short list of usability rules of thumb - before you ever test with users.
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visual design Live
Visual hierarchy
The order your eye travels a layout, set by size, weight, colour and space. It decides what gets noticed first - and what gets missed.
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cognitive psychology Live
Recognition vs recall
Recognising something you're shown is far easier than recalling it from a blank memory. Good interfaces show the options instead of making you remember them.
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cognitive psychology Live
Serial position effect
When you try to remember a list, the items at the start and the end stick, and the ones in the middle slip away. Position on the list, not just the item itself, decides what you keep.
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cognitive psychology Live
Chunking
Chunking is the brain's trick of grouping individual pieces of information into meaningful units, so instead of memorising twelve separate digits, you hold three groups of four. The chunk is the unit, not the items inside it.
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cognitive psychology Live
Von Restorff effect
When one item in a list is noticeably different from the others, it sticks in memory far better than its neighbours. Distinctiveness is a memory signal: the odd one out earns attention it didn't ask for.
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cognitive psychology Live
Miller's law
Working memory can hold roughly seven items, plus or minus two, at once. Exceed that limit and things start to fall out. The constraint isn't about intelligence; it's about the size of the mental workspace everyone is working with.
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visual design Live
Whitespace
Whitespace (or negative space) is the empty area between and around elements. It is not wasted room: it groups what belongs together, guides the eye, and makes a layout legible.
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laws & principles Live
Gestalt: proximity
Things placed close together are read as one group; things spaced apart are read as separate. Proximity is such a strong cue that the eye groups by distance before it even registers shape or colour.
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research methods Live
Five-second test
Show someone a design for five seconds, take it away, then ask what they remember. What survives that glance tells you what the layout is really shouting - and what it is quietly burying.
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cognitive psychology Live
Change blindness
We are surprisingly blind to changes that happen during a flicker, reload or blink. Without an unbroken motion cue, even a big change can sit in plain sight until you go hunting for it.
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interaction design Live
Feedback
Feedback is the interface answering back: a clear sign of what just happened and what to do next. Act without it and people are left guessing whether anything worked at all.
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research methods Live
First-click testing
First-click testing asks one question: where do people go first to get something done? That opening move matters out of all proportion - get it right and the task usually follows; get it wrong and it rarely recovers.
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research methods Live
Usability testing
Watching real people attempt real tasks with your design, to find where it trips them up. It is not asking whether they like it - it is handing them something to do and seeing what actually happens.
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persuasion Live
Social proof
People look to what others do to decide what is right, especially when they are unsure. In an interface, that means showing real evidence that real people use, rate and trust the thing.
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research methods Live
Leading questions
A question worded so it nudges you toward a particular answer - through a loaded word, a built-in assumption, or a scale that only points one way. It measures the wording, not the truth.
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interaction design Live
Microcopy
The small words inside an interface - button labels, hints, placeholders, error messages - that quietly guide, reassure and give it a voice. Tiny by word count, decisive by impact.
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laws & principles Live
Jakob's law
People spend most of their time on other sites, so they expect yours to work the same way. Familiar patterns are faster to use because visitors arrive already knowing them - you're borrowing every habit the rest of the web has taught them.
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cognitive psychology Live
Zeigarnik effect
We remember - and keep feeling pulled towards - tasks we've started but not finished. An open loop sits in working memory and nags for attention until you close it; the moment you complete it, the mind quietly lets go.
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laws & principles Live
Tesler's law
Every process has a baseline of complexity that can't be designed away - it can only be moved. The question is never whether to remove it, but who carries it: the person using the product, or the people building it.
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cognitive psychology Live
Peak-end rule
We don't judge an experience by averaging every moment of it. We remember it mostly by two points - how it felt at its most intense (the peak) and how it felt at the end - and we quietly discount how long it lasted.
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ui patterns Live
Tabs
Tabs slice one area of the screen into parallel panels and show just one at a time. They keep a page short by hiding all but the panel you've picked - which is the whole trick, and the whole risk.
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ui patterns Live
Accordion
An accordion is a stack of headed panels that each open and close on click, collapsing long content down to a list of titles you can expand on demand. This very demo is one - the panels below are the pattern.
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accessibility Live
Focus order
Focus order is the sequence the Tab key walks through a page. When it follows the visual order, tabbing feels invisible; when it doesn't, every press throws you somewhere you didn't expect.
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accessibility Live
Skip links
A skip link is a hidden link, revealed the moment you press Tab, that jumps straight past a repeated block - usually the navigation - to the main content. Sighted mouse users never see it; keyboard users would be lost without it.
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process & strategy Live
Double diamond
A model of the design process as two diamonds: the first explores then defines the right problem, the second explores then delivers the right solution. Each diamond opens wide (diverge) before narrowing to a point (converge).
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process & strategy Live
Design tokens
Design tokens are named values for the small decisions a design repeats - colours, spacing, corner radius, type sizes - stored once and referenced everywhere. Change the token and everything built from it changes at once.
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metrics Live
Time on task
Time on task is how long it takes someone to complete a specific task, measured from the moment they start to the moment they're done. It's the most common efficiency metric in usability testing - and one of the easiest to misread.
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metrics Live
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the share of people who complete a goal - buy, sign up, subscribe - out of everyone who could have. It's usually quoted end to end, but it's really the product of every step's survival rate along the way.
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