Glossary
Every term and acronym the unit uses, in one alphabetical list.
86 of 86 terms
- A/B testing
An online method to choose between two design alternatives, where users are unaware they are part of an evaluation.
- Affinity diagram
A bottom-up tool for identifying themes: data is written on Post-it notes and grouped by the team as groupings emerge.
- Between-subjects designdifferent-participants design
Participants are randomly allocated to one condition each. Needs many participants to minimise individual differences.
- Blooming
Light colours on dark backgrounds appear larger, so light text on dark seems larger than dark text on light.
- Brain-computer interfaceBCI
A communication pathway between a person's brain waves and an external device, working by detecting changes in neural functioning.
- Co-presence
Technology that supports people interacting in the same physical space, such as tabletops, whiteboards and public displays.
- Cognitive walkthrough
An inspection focused on ease of learning, where experts step through a scenario asking whether the correct action is obvious, instructions are understood and the machine response is interpreted correctly.
- Colour contrast
The difference in luminance or brightness between two colours, typically foreground and background. Higher contrast makes content easier to read.
- Command-line interfaceCLI
A text-based interface driven by typed commands. Granular and scriptable, but needs expertise and has a steep learning curve.
- Conceptual model
A high-level description of how a system is organised and operates (Johnson and Henderson, 2002). Lets designers straighten out their thinking before laying out widgets.
- Contextual inquiry
A combination of interview and observation guided by four principles: context, partnership, interpretation and focus.
- Counter-balancing
Varying the order of conditions across participants to reduce ordering effects in a within-subjects design.
- Dark pattern
A design that tricks people, championing stakeholder value over user value.
- Dependent variable
The variable influenced by the independent variable, such as task completion time or error rate.
- Design guideline
Recommendations and best practices, often technology-oriented, that promote consistency among similar products. Examples: iOS Human Interface Guidelines, Material Design, Nielsen heuristics.
- Design pattern
A generative collection of common practice describing a problem, a solution and where the solution has been found to work. Not necessarily good practice.
- Design principle
An abstract rule derived from theory, experience and common sense, applicable to many design situations, with low authority. Examples: visibility, consistency, affordances, feedback, constraints, mapping.
- Design standard
A design rule that governs large communities. Low generality and high authority. Example: ISO 9241-11:2018.
- Direct manipulationDM
Interaction style introduced by Ben Shneiderman: continuous representation of objects, rapid reversible incremental actions with immediate feedback, and physical actions instead of complex commands.
- Distributed cognition
An external framework that visualises how information propagates across representational states, for example a drive-through order passing between staff.
- Double Diamond
A UX design process with four phases: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.
- Effectiveness
A usability goal: the product must be able to do what it is designed to do.
- Efficiency
A usability goal: the product supports users in carrying out their tasks, so that once learned they can sustain a high level of productivity.
- Envisionment
Making design ideas visible and externalising thoughts, to represent design work to ourselves and others.
- Ethnography
Interview and observation in which the researcher immerses in the culture studied, with participation ranging from full participant to full observer.
- Field study
An evaluation carried out in natural settings to see how people use technology in the real world. An "in the wild" study has a prototype used freely in those settings.
- Fitts Law
Predicts movement time to a target as a function of its distance D and width W, plus device-specific constants a and b: T = a + b log2(D/W + 1).
- Gestalt laws
Seven laws of perceptual grouping in Lecture 2: proximity, similarity, common fate, continuity, closure, symmetry and figure/ground.
- GOMSGoals, Operators, Methods, Selection rules
A cognitive task analysis model: goals the user wants, operators (basic actions), methods (sequences of subtasks and operators) and selection rules for choosing between methods.
- Groupwareshareable interfaces
Technology supporting collaboration, classified in a time/space matrix by when and where interaction takes place.
- Gulf of evaluation
The amount of effort required to determine the system state and whether the goal has been met.
- Gulf of execution
The distance between the user's goals and the means of achieving them through the system.
- Haptics
Sensory and/or motor activity based in the skin, muscles, joints and tendons (ISO 9241-910:2011), covering tactile sensing and kinaesthesis.
- Heuristic evaluation
An inspection where a small set of evaluators judge an interface against recognised usability principles such as Nielsen's ten heuristics.
- Hi-fi prototype
A prototype close in look and feel to the final product, used for detailed evaluation of content, visuals, interactivity and functionality.
- Hierarchical task analysisHTA
A graphical task structure chart with the goal at the top and subtasks beneath, left to right, annotated with plans.
- Horizontal prototype
A prototype offering a wide range of functions with little detail (Hartson and Pyla, 2019).
- Hotspot
An area of a screen the user can interact with. Hotspots link screens together in a clickthrough prototype.
- Human-Computer InteractionHCI
A discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use, and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them (ACM SIGCHI, 1992).
- Independent variable
The variable the researcher manipulates in an experiment, for example the test conditions.
- Informed consent
Formal, signed permission from a participant to use the data gathered within stipulated limits, built on a PIS and a signed PCF.
- Interaction type
What the user is doing when interacting with a system: instructing, conversing, manipulating, exploring or responding.
- Interface metaphor
An interface designed to resemble a physical entity while having its own properties, based on an activity, an object or both. Example: the desktop metaphor.
- Interface type
The interface used to support an interaction, such as command, menu-based, gesture or voice. Not the same as interaction type.
- Learnability
A usability goal: users can learn the system through self-exploration of the interface.
- Lo-fi prototype
A quick, low-commitment prototype capturing early design thinking, such as sketches, index cards or Wizard of Oz.
- Matched-participant designpair-wise design
Participants are matched in pairs on characteristics such as expertise and gender, then each pair is randomly allocated to conditions.
- Memorability
A usability goal: users can remember how to use the system once learned, especially for infrequent tasks.
- MoSCoW
Prioritisation into Must have, Should have, Could have, and Want to have but will not have this time round.
- MSQ scoring rule
With k correct options, each correct tick is +1/k and each wrong tick is -1/k, with the question score floored at 0.
- Object/operation analysis
A list of user-visible object types (nouns from a scenario), their attributes, and the operations users perform on them (verbs). Excludes buttons, menus and buffers.
- PACT frameworkPeople, Activities, Contexts, Technologies
A series of questions to analyse a design problem: people use technologies to undertake activities in certain contexts.
- Peripheral awareness
Keeping an eye on things in the periphery of vision, and overhearing and overseeing, to track what others do without explicit cues.
- Persona
A rich description of a typical user synthesised from user research, with a name, goals and background. Not a specific person and not idealised.
- PIS and PCFParticipant Information Statement, Participant Consent Form
The two parts of informed consent. The participant reads both and signs the PCF before the session.
- Post-WIMP interface
An interface with at least one interaction technique not dependent on classical 2D widgets such as menus and icons (van Dam, 1997).
- Probabilistic sampling
Sampling with a known probability of selection: census, random and stratified sampling.
- Reality-based interaction
A framework (Jacob et al., 2008) with four themes: naive physics, body awareness and skills, environmental awareness and skills, social awareness and skills.
- Recognition versus recall
Two retrieval routes from long-term memory. Recognition (identify what you see) is easy and recall (retrieve with no cue) is hard, so interfaces should promote recognition.
- Redundant coding
Conveying information with colour plus another cue such as a label, pattern, icon or outline, so colour-blind users are not excluded.
- Safety
A usability goal: the product protects users from dangerous conditions, limits possible errors and lets users recover from them easily.
- Scenario
A narrative describing the tasks a persona performs, answering who, what triggers it, what happens and the outcome.
- Seven stages of action
Norman's model: form a goal, form the intention, specify an action, execute it (execution); perceive, interpret and evaluate the outcome (evaluation).
- Situational awareness
Awareness of what is happening around you so you understand how information and your actions will affect ongoing and future events.
- Situationally-induced impairment
A temporary limit on interaction caused by the situation, such as cold, noise, stress or ambient light (Sears and Young, 2003).
- Social presence
The degree of awareness, feeling and reaction to other people who are virtually present in an online environment.
- Storyboard
A sequence of sketched scenes of the actions or events the user and product go through to reach a goal. A user journey uses 3 to 7 scenes from a scenario.
- System Usability ScaleSUS
A ten-item usability questionnaire. Odd items score rating minus 1, even items 5 minus rating, sum multiplied by 2.5 for a score out of 100. 68 is average.
- Tangible interface
An interface where physical objects both control and represent digital information.
- Telepresence
Attending a remote location through technology, for example by controlling a robot there.
- Triangulation
Looking at data from more than one perspective, using more than one data type or method, for example quantitative experiments plus qualitative interviews.
- Turn-taking rules (Sacks et al., 1978)
Rule 1: the current speaker chooses the next. Rule 2: another person starts speaking. Rule 3: the current speaker continues.
- Usability
The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
- Usefulness
Requires both sufficient usability and sufficient utility. An easy product lacking the needed functions, or a powerful but hard-to-use one, is not fully useful.
- User experienceUX
The quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific design. ISO 9241-210: a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use of a product, system or service.
- User story
A short requirement in the form: as a role, I want a behaviour so that I get a benefit. Common in agile development.
- User-centred designUCD
Design built on Gould and Lewis (1985) principles: early focus on users and tasks, empirical measurement, and iterative design.
- Utility
The extent to which a product provides the right kind of functionality, so users can carry out all their tasks in the way they want to.
- Vertical prototype
A prototype offering a lot of detail for only a few functions (Hartson and Pyla, 2019).
- Web analytics
Interaction logging that analyses user activity on a website: number of visitors, length of stay, content visited.
- WIMPWindows, Icons, Menus, Pointing device
The classical GUI paradigm. Intuitive for everyday tasks but reduces interaction to the visual channel.
- Wireflow
A series of wireframes combined with a flowchart showing the pages, logic and actions needed to complete a goal.
- Wireframe
A view of a single screen outlining its structure and layout. A lo-fi wireframe has no images, colours or typography.
- Within-subjects designsame-participants design
All participants perform in all conditions. Needs counter-balancing to reduce ordering effects.
- Wizard of Oz
A technique where the user believes they interact with a computer but a human is generating the responses.
- Working memory
Short-term store with three elements: central executive (decision making), visuo-spatial sketchpad (visual) and articulatory loop (auditory). Contents decay without rehearsal.
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