UX Design From A-Z: Learn the Language of Designers

Looking to learn the language of UX designers and dive into the world of user experience design? If you’ve ever met with a UX designer, you know that they speak a unique language that can be confusing to the uninitiated. Consider this comprehensive glossary your initiation into an exclusive club where you'll learn the secrets of the trade and acquire knowledge few people have. Our UX design glossary is designed to help you navigate the design process with ease, providing you with all the necessary tools to guide you on the journey.

After all, customer experience is everything, and our goal is to help you provide a seamless and enjoyable experience for your online customers. Our certified UX designers have put hours of their skill into creating this glossary, complete with visuals that illustrate each definition in an easy-to-understand manner. So if you're ready to take your understanding of UX design to the next level, let's dive in!

The Purpose

Hours of work went into creating this extensive glossary of UX design terms, but what is the purpose of all this labor? The answer, in short, is you. We want to help you, our dear client, navigate the design process with ease. To do that, we aim to provide you with all the necessary tools to guide you on the journey.

Why is User Experience Design Important?

Customers are the most important people to any business, but with e-commerce, there are different considerations. Online customers or users have specific requirements and needs that are unique to the medium. Let’s take the example of a brick-and-mortar store to highlight what it means to create a great customer experience. Let’s say this store sells clothes. When customers pass by our clothing store, they’ll first see a mannequin or more dressed up in a stylish outfit sold inside. Sometimes they’ll have separate items, perhaps a dress, and very often, there will be accessories.

The idea here is to help the customer visualize themselves wearing the outfit. Even more importantly, the price is often displayed prominently to ensure the customer knows how affordable the item is or if there’s a discount. If the customer’s attention is piqued, they will enter the store. Once inside, if they find the following elements, they’re more likely to make a purchase:

• Ease of finding what they want.
• A comfortable fitting room.
• Helpful shop assistants.

This, in turn, can lead to repeat purchases in the future. As the saying goes, first impressions are everything.

With UX design, we aim to provide a smooth, seamless experience for customers, but this time, online. The experience your online customer or user has on your site can make or break your business. Just as customers in brick-and-mortar stores need to be able to find what they are looking for easily, it’s the same for online customers. They must be able to locate what they need with ease. In a brick-and-mortar store, you'll feel frustrated if you can’t get the item you want quickly, whether it’s behind a locked cabinet, on a high shelf, or otherwise difficult to find. It’s the same with online shopping. If a customer can’t find an item quickly, add it to their shopping cart, check out, and find answers to their questions, they will be frustrated and no longer want to shop at your store. While this explains the basic idea behind user experience, there’s a lot more to it than that, but you get the idea! UX design is essential in offering online customers a seamless online shopping experience.

You know you’ve got a great design when customers have such a smooth experience that they don’t even notice the design elements. Everything they seek is literally at their fingertips. It’s an enjoyable experience from beginning to end, where they encounter minimal or no glitches or annoyances. User experience design involves putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, imagining what they might be attracted to and what might repel them. You consider a user needs, and whether or not they have a disability or how to improve accessibility. In short, you take them from point A to B while ensuring they have a great experience.

Now that you understand what user experience is, let’s move on to the language of UX design!

It’s a whole other language

Like any other technical field, user experience design (UX) has its jargon and language, which can seem opaque to the uninitiated. Every UX designer at Arctic Leaf is certified by the Baymard Institute, among only 267 certified UX designers worldwide! We don’t like to toot our own horn, but our designers are among the best in the world (toot, toot!). As pros in their field, our UX designers created this glossary with our clients in mind to help them navigate the world of UX design. If you’re designing your first e-commerce website, you’ll probably need a roadmap to guide you. Our comprehensive UX terminology glossary is exclusively available to our clients to give you a leg up and help you understand the elements that make up the user experience, common issues, and best practices. 

Good communication is vitally important in our client relationships. Designing your e-commerce site is a smoother process when we all speak the same language. Our UX design glossary includes comprehensive descriptions of every facet of UX design, complete with visuals that illustrate each definition in an easy-to-understand manner, making it accessible to most users. After reading the glossary and familiarizing yourself with all the definitions, you’ll feel confident in any conversation about UX principles; it will give you a good base you can build on and how it applies to your business. We provide clear examples to illustrate the concepts in each entry.

As with everything, we considered the user’s experience when creating this glossary, ensuring that it’s easy to navigate and understand. We also hope that using this glossary provides you with an enjoyable learning experience, and that you acquire new knowledge that will help you in the future. By the time you finish browsing it, you’ll know much more about the nuts and bolts of UX design than you probably knew beforehand. You’ll join the ranks of the initiated into the cool kids’ club of people knowledgeable about UX design. 

Take it Further

Once you become familiar with the language of UX design, it’s time to take your site design to the next level. Reach out to us and we’ll be happy to do a full UX audit of your site and let you know how it stacks up. We also provide plenty of UX Design services including:

• Courtesy Navigation
• Category Taxonomy
• Sticky ToC

Rest assured, with our team of experts certified by the Baymard Institute, you’re in good hands!