50 UI/UX Terms You Need to Know

UX design has more jargon per square inch than almost any other design discipline. This glossary defines 50 essential UI/UX terms across 6 categories: UX research, design principles, interaction and UI patterns, information architecture, testing and metrics, and accessibility. It is written for two audiences: practicing designers who need a reference, and clients who need to understand what their agency is actually saying in meetings.

If you have ever sat in a design review and heard someone talk about affordances, cognitive load, and Fitts' Law in the same breath, this glossary is for you. Every term below includes a plain-language definition, a real explanation of when and why it matters, and (where relevant) a note on how the term commonly gets misused.

You can read this UX terminology glossary straight through, bookmark it as a UX design glossary reference, or jump to whichever category is most useful right now. The categories reflect the real workflow of UX design, from research through launch.

The 6 categories of UX terms

The 50 terms are grouped into 6 categories that map to how UX work actually happens. Research comes first because good design starts with understanding users. Design principles follow because they inform every interface decision. Interaction and UI patterns come next, followed by information architecture, testing, and accessibility.

• Category 1: UX research terms (8 terms)
• Category 2: Design principles and heuristics (10 terms)
• Category 3: Interaction design and UI patterns (10 terms)
• Category 4: Information architecture and content (8 terms)
• Category 5: Testing, metrics, and analytics (8 terms)
• Category 6: Accessibility and inclusive design (6 terms)

UX research terms

Research is where UX work starts. These 8 terms cover the methods and artifacts designers use to understand users before designing anything.

1. Contextual inquiry

A research method where a designer observes users in their actual environment while they perform real tasks.

Contextual inquiry differs from a standard user interview because you watch the user do the work rather than ask them to describe it. People are notoriously bad at explaining their own behavior in the abstract, so seeing them in context reveals workarounds, pain points, and habits they would never mention in a survey. The output is qualitative and rich, but time-intensive to collect.

2. Ethnographic research

A deeper form of user research borrowed from anthropology, where researchers immerse themselves in the users' environment over an extended period.

Where contextual inquiry might last an hour or two, ethnographic research can span days or weeks. It uncovers cultural, social, and behavioral patterns that shorter methods miss. Common in enterprise UX, healthcare, and complex industries where the "why" behind user behavior matters as much as the "what."

3. Jobs to be done (JTBD)

A framework for understanding why users hire a product or service, focused on the underlying goal rather than the specific feature they use.

The classic example: people do not want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. In UX, JTBD reframes feature requests around the user's actual objective. If your product lets someone book a flight, the job to be done is "get me to my destination on time," not "let me select flight options." This reframing often changes what you build.

4. Persona

A fictional representation of a user segment based on real research, used to align teams around who they are designing for.

Personas are useful when they are anchored in research and dangerous when they are made up. A good persona includes goals, behaviors, and pain points. A bad persona is a stock photo with a name and a favorite coffee order. Some UX practitioners have moved toward Jobs to be Done specifically because bad personas were so common.

5. Journey map

A visual representation of a user's experience across every touchpoint with a product or service, showing actions, thoughts, emotions, and pain points at each stage.

Journey maps expose where users struggle, where they succeed, and where the product falls short of expectations. They work best when built from research rather than assumption. Our guide on user journey mapping walks through the components, types, and creation process in detail.

6. Empathy map

A four-quadrant tool used in research synthesis to capture what a user says, thinks, does, and feels about a product or experience.

Empathy maps are quick to produce and easy to share across teams. They are less comprehensive than journey maps but faster to create and often used earlier in the research process to align on what the team has learned.

7. Card sorting

A research method where participants group content or features into categories that make sense to them, used to inform information architecture decisions.

Card sorting comes in two flavors. In an open sort, participants create their own categories. In a closed sort, they place cards into categories the researcher provides. Open sorts reveal how users naturally think about content. Closed sorts validate whether a proposed structure works.

8. Tree testing

A research method that tests whether users can find specific content within a proposed site structure, without any visual design present.

Tree testing complements card sorting. Where card sorting builds the structure, tree testing validates it by asking users to find things. If users cannot navigate to a page in your site map, the design will not save them.

Design principles and heuristics

These 10 terms are the frameworks and rules designers actually cite in review meetings. Learn them and every design conversation becomes clearer.

9. Affordance

A property of an object that suggests how it should be used, coined by psychologist James Gibson and adopted into design by Don Norman.

A button "affords" pressing because it looks pressable. A link "affords" clicking because it is visually distinct from surrounding text. Affordances tell users what is possible without explanation. Broken affordances (a link that does not look like a link, a button that does not look pressable) are one of the most common UX failures.

10. Signifier

A visual, auditory, or textual cue that indicates an affordance is present, often used interchangeably with affordance but technically distinct.

Don Norman later refined the term because "affordance" alone was being used too loosely. Signifiers are what actually tells the user the affordance exists. An underline on a link is a signifier for the affordance of clickability.

11. Gestalt principles

A set of visual perception principles from Gestalt psychology that describe how humans group and interpret visual information.

The core Gestalt principles most designers use are proximity (things close together are perceived as related), similarity (things that look alike are perceived as related), continuity (the eye follows smooth paths), closure (the mind completes incomplete shapes), and figure-ground (foreground vs background separation). These principles govern how layouts feel organized or chaotic.

12. Fitts' Law

A predictive model stating that the time required to acquire a target is a function of its distance from the starting point and its size.

In practical terms: bigger, closer targets are faster to hit. This is why primary CTAs are large and prominent, why mobile tap targets should be 48 pixels or larger, and why the corners and edges of a screen are the fastest targets (they extend infinitely, effectively). Fitts' Law is one of the most-cited laws in UX.

13. Hick's Law

The time required to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices presented.

More options means slower decisions. This is why navigation should be pruned rather than expanded, why complex forms lose users, and why "less is more" is a design cliché that is actually rooted in cognitive science. Hick's Law explains why paradox-of-choice feels so real.

14. Jakob's Law

Users spend most of their time on other sites, so they prefer your site to work the same way as those they already know, coined by Jakob Nielsen.

Jakob's Law is why hamburger menus, shopping carts in the top right, and logos in the top left all work. Users have learned these conventions elsewhere. Deviating from them is not automatically bad, but you should have a strong reason. Radical originality usually costs more than it earns.

15. Peak-end rule

People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its most intense moment (the peak) and at its end, not by the sum of every moment.

This means the checkout confirmation, the error recovery flow, and the onboarding first-run experience all get outsized weight in how users remember the product. Small moments at the end matter more than long stretches in the middle.

16. Cognitive load

The total amount of mental effort required to use an interface, split into intrinsic (inherent to the task), extraneous (added by the interface), and germane (needed to learn) load.

Good UX minimizes extraneous cognitive load. Clear visual hierarchy, familiar patterns, and predictable behavior all reduce it. Overly clever or novel designs increase it. When users complain that a site "feels complicated," what they mean is that the extraneous cognitive load is too high.

17. Progressive disclosure

A design technique where information or options are revealed gradually as the user needs them, rather than shown all at once.

Progressive disclosure fights Hick's Law. Instead of overwhelming users with every option upfront, you show the essentials and reveal advanced options on request.

Common in settings menus, complex forms, and any product with a range of user skill levels.

18. Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics

A set of 10 broad principles for interface design published by Jakob Nielsen in 1994 and still widely used for expert heuristic evaluation.

The 10 heuristics are: visibility of system status, match between system and real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, help users recognize and recover from errors, and help and documentation. Learning them gives designers a shared vocabulary for critique.

Interaction design and UI patterns

These 10 terms describe common UI components and interaction patterns. Every designer and developer will use them regularly.

19. Microinteraction

A small, contained interaction that provides feedback, communicates state, or adds delight, coined by Dan Saffer.

The heart icon that fills and animates when you like something. The pull-to-refresh gesture. The password strength meter that updates as you type. Microinteractions are small in scope but disproportionately impactful on how a product feels to use.

20. Hover, focus, and active states

The distinct visual states a UI element can be in based on user interaction, particularly on desktop with mouse and keyboard.

Hover state (mouse over), focus state (keyboard-focused for accessibility), and active state (currently being clicked or pressed) each need distinct visual treatments. Skipping focus states in particular is a common accessibility failure since keyboard users cannot tell where they are without them.

21. Skeleton screen

A placeholder UI shown while content is loading, resembling the shape of the eventual content, used instead of spinners. Skeleton screens make loading feel faster than spinners even when the actual load time is identical. The user's eye starts building the mental model of the content before it arrives. Facebook, LinkedIn, and most modern content-heavy apps use them.

22. Modal or dialog

A UI overlay that appears above the main content and requires user interaction before returning to the main flow.

Modals are appropriate for critical decisions, confirmations of destructive actions, or focused tasks that require full user attention. They are misused when they interrupt the primary flow (newsletter sign-ups on landing pages, for example) because they force interaction the user did not ask for.

23. Toast or snackbar

A brief, temporary notification that appears and dismisses automatically, used for non-critical feedback.

Toasts confirm actions ("Message sent"), report status ("Connection restored"), or provide time-limited info without blocking the interface. Different platforms name them differently: "toast" in Android and web, "snackbar" in Material Design, "notification banner" in iOS. All refer to the same pattern.

24. Empty state

The version of a screen or interface shown when there is no content to display, either because the user is new or because they have cleared all items.

Well-designed empty states teach users what to do next, set expectations for what the screen will eventually show, and reduce first-run confusion. Badly designed empty states just say "No items" and leave the user stuck.

25. Ghost button

A button styled with only a border and text, no fill color, giving a lighter visual weight than a solid button.

Ghost buttons are used for secondary actions when a solid primary button already exists in the same view. They help establish visual hierarchy between actions. Overused, they weaken the interface because nothing stands out.

26. Sticky element

A UI element that remains in a fixed position on screen as the user scrolls, most commonly navigation bars, headers, or CTAs.

Sticky headers reduce navigation friction on long pages. Sticky CTAs improve mobile conversion. But sticky elements consume screen real estate, especially on mobile, so they should earn their space. When in doubt, test with and without.

27. Infinite scroll vs pagination

Two competing patterns for showing large lists of content: infinite scroll loads more content as the user scrolls, while pagination breaks content into discrete pages.

Infinite scroll suits open-ended browsing (social feeds, image galleries). Pagination suits goal-directed search where users need to return to specific results. Choosing the wrong pattern for the content type is a common mistake.

28. Dark pattern

A user interface designed to trick or manipulate users into actions they would not otherwise take, coined by Harry Brignull.

Common dark patterns include: hidden costs revealed at checkout, forced continuity (auto-renewing subscriptions with no cancellation reminders), confirmshaming ("No thanks, I don't want to save money"), and roach motels (easy to sign up, impossible to cancel). Increasingly regulated in Europe and California, and universally bad for long-term brand trust.

Information architecture and content

These 8 terms cover how content and structure get organized before visual design happens.

29. Information architecture (IA)

The practice of organizing, structuring, and labeling content so users can find and understand it, coined in this sense by Richard Saul Wurman.

Good IA is invisible. Users find what they need without thinking about the structure. Bad IA is why users end up on the wrong page, why search queries return nothing useful, and why big websites feel confusing to navigate. Card sorting and tree testing are how IA gets validated.

30. Sitemap

A visual representation of a website's page structure and hierarchy.

Sitemaps exist in two forms: XML sitemaps for search engines and visual sitemaps for design and stakeholder alignment. Both matter, but they serve different purposes. Confusing the two is a common client-communication issue.

31. Wireframe

A low-fidelity structural blueprint of a page or screen, showing content hierarchy, layout, and functionality without visual design.

Wireframes strip out visual noise so decisions can be made about structure and priority without color, typography, or imagery getting in the way. They range from rough sketches to detailed grayscale layouts. The word "wireframe" is often misused to describe anything that is not final visual design.

32. Prototype (low-fi vs high-fi)

An interactive mockup used to test flows, interactions, and design decisions before development.

Low-fidelity prototypes (paper, clickable wireframes) test flow and concept. High-fidelity prototypes (Figma, Framer, or similar) test visual design, interaction detail, and near-final experience. Confusing the two leads to expensive redesigns because teams treat low-fi feedback as final decisions.

33. Design system

A comprehensive set of reusable components, patterns, principles, and guidelines that ensures consistency across a product or brand.

Design systems reduce design and development time, improve consistency, and make cross-team collaboration easier. Building a design system into a website from day one is one of the reasons scalable responsive web design services outperform template-based builds over time. Popular examples: Google Material, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, IBM Carbon, Shopify Polaris.

34. Component library

The set of reusable UI components that live within a design system, from buttons and inputs to more complex patterns like data tables.

Component libraries can exist in design tools (Figma, Sketch), in code (React, Vue, Web Components), or both. The strongest design systems have design and code libraries that stay in sync so what designers build is what developers ship.

35. Design token

A named, reusable value that stores design decisions like colors, typography, spacing, and animation, used across a design system.

Design tokens let a design system update globally by changing one value. Rename a token from #0055FF to blue-primary and every component using it updates when the token changes. Tokens are foundational to scalable design systems in 2026.

36. Content model

A structured representation of the content types, relationships, and fields that make up a product or website.

Content models sit at the intersection of UX, IA, and CMS architecture. A well-designed content model makes it easy to add new content, hard to enter bad data, and clean to display across contexts. Content-heavy products (publishing, ecommerce, education) live or die on their content model.

Testing, metrics, and analytics

These 8 terms cover how UX gets measured, validated, and improved after launch.

37. Usability testing

Observing real users completing tasks with a product to identify usability problems and areas of confusion.

Usability testing is one of the highest-value UX activities and one of the most under-used. Five users can uncover roughly 85% of usability problems, per research from Jakob Nielsen. Modern remote testing tools (UserTesting, Maze, Lookback) have made it faster and cheaper than ever, but many teams still skip it.

38. A/B testing

An experiment where two versions of an interface are shown to different user groups to measure which performs better on a defined metric.

A/B tests work well when the change is meaningful and the traffic is high enough to reach statistical significance. They fail when teams test tiny changes on low-traffic pages and act on noise. Good A/B testing requires statistical literacy that most teams do not have.

39. Multivariate testing

An experiment that tests multiple variables simultaneously to identify which combination performs best.

Multivariate testing requires significantly more traffic than A/B testing because the number of combinations grows quickly. Best suited for pages with heavy traffic and clear conversion goals. Not appropriate for pages with under 10,000 visitors per month.

40. System Usability Scale (SUS)

A 10-question survey developed by John Brooke in 1986 that produces a single usability score between 0 and 100.

SUS is one of the most-used usability metrics because it is standardized, well-researched, and easy to administer. Scores above 68 are considered above average. It works across products, industries, and countries, which is why it remains the go-to quantitative usability instrument.

41. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A metric based on the question "How likely are you to recommend this to a friend or colleague?" answered on a 0-10 scale, with respondents grouped as Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.

NPS is widely used in business but criticized in UX and research communities. The criticism: it does not measure usability, it correlates weakly with actual retention or growth, and it is easily gamed by asking at the wrong moment. Understand it because clients will bring it up, but use it carefully.

42. Task success rate

The percentage of users who successfully complete a given task in a usability test.

Task success rate is one of the cleanest quantitative usability metrics. It is easy to define, easy to measure, and directly ties to user outcomes. Track it over time and across design iterations to measure real improvement.

43. Time on task

The time taken by a user to complete a specific task, measured in seconds or minutes.

Time on task pairs well with task success rate. A task that users complete successfully but slowly reveals a different problem than a task users cannot complete at all. Both metrics together give a fuller picture of usability.

44. Heatmap and session recording

Visualization tools showing where users click, tap, scroll, or move on a page (heatmap), and video-like replays of individual user sessions (session recording).

Both are pattern-detection tools rather than validation tools. They surface where users are struggling but do not tell you why. Use them to generate hypotheses, then validate with usability testing. Tools include Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, FullStory, and Mouseflow.

Accessibility and inclusive design

These 6 terms cover accessibility and inclusive design, which are related but distinct concepts every designer should know.

45. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

The international accessibility standard maintained by the W3C, defining how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities.

WCAG is organized into 4 principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) with 3 conformance levels (A, AA, AAA). Most legal accessibility requirements target Level AA compliance. The current version is WCAG 2.2, with 2.3 in development. Building accessibility in from the start is far cheaper than retrofitting, which is where thoughtful UI/UX design services prove their value.

46. Screen reader

Assistive technology software that reads on-screen content aloud for users who are blind or visually impaired.

The three most-used screen readers in 2026 are JAWS (Windows, paid), NVDA (Windows, free), and VoiceOver (macOS and iOS). Screen readers depend heavily on semantic HTML and proper ARIA attributes. Sites built with divs and spans that do not communicate meaning are effectively invisible to screen reader users.

47. Semantic HTML

HTML markup that uses elements according to their intended meaning rather than for visual styling.

<button> for buttons, <nav> for navigation, <article> for articles, <h1> through <h6> for headings in order. Semantic HTML is foundational to accessibility because assistive technology depends on it. It also happens to be foundational to SEO.

48. Contrast ratio

A numerical measure of the difference in luminance between text and its background, expressed as a ratio.

WCAG AA requires 4.5:1 contrast for normal body text and 3:1 for large text. Insufficient contrast is one of the most common accessibility failures. Free tools like WebAIM Contrast Checker make it easy to verify combinations before finalizing designs.

49. Focus indicator

The visual cue (typically an outline or highlight) that shows which element currently has keyboard focus.

Focus indicators are essential for keyboard users, including anyone who cannot use a mouse. Removing them via outline: none in CSS without providing a replacement is one of the most common and damaging accessibility mistakes. If your team removes default focus indicators, they must be replaced with something equally visible.

50. Inclusive design

A design methodology that considers the full range of human diversity from the start, including ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference.

Inclusive design and accessibility overlap significantly but are not the same thing. Accessibility is often framed as compliance with standards for users with disabilities. Inclusive design is broader: designing for the widest possible range of users from the outset, which has the effect of improving accessibility but goes further. Both matter.

UX acronyms cheat sheet

A quick reference for common acronyms that show up in UX conversations.

Terms you'll hear misused

Five UX terms get misused more than any others. Knowing the distinctions helps you communicate more clearly and spot when someone else is confused.

UX vs UI. UI is a subset of UX. UI is the visual interface. UX is the entire experience, including UI but also research, information architecture, content, and post-launch measurement. Non-designers use them interchangeably. Designers should not.

Wireframe vs prototype. A wireframe is a static structural blueprint. A prototype is interactive and testable. They serve different purposes at different fidelity levels. Calling a high-fidelity prototype a "wireframe" muddles conversations about what stage of design the team is in.

Persona vs user segment. A persona is a qualitative, research-based representation of a user type. A user segment is a quantitative grouping (age, geography, behavior data). Both are useful. Confusing them leads to teams treating personas as market segments or vice versa.

Usability vs UX. Usability is a subset of UX, specifically the ease-of-use component. A product can be highly usable but still deliver a poor UX (think of a checkout that works flawlessly but sells the wrong product). Treating them as synonyms flattens the discipline.

Accessibility vs inclusive design. Accessibility is compliance with standards for users with disabilities. Inclusive design is designing for the full spectrum of human diversity. Accessibility is a component of inclusive design, not the whole thing.

Conclusion

UX design has a vocabulary problem, and it runs in both directions. Designers sometimes use jargon to signal expertise. Clients sometimes nod along rather than admit they do not follow. Both habits produce the same outcome: misalignment, expensive revisions, and products that do not serve the people using them.

The 50 terms in this glossary are not credentials to collect. They are a shared language for doing better work. When a designer says "we need to address the cognitive load on this screen" and a client understands exactly what that means and why it matters, the conversation gets sharper, the feedback gets more useful, and the product gets better.

A few things worth remembering as you use this reference:

The terms evolve. Inclusive design was a niche concept a decade ago. Design tokens barely existed five years ago. The vocabulary grows as the discipline does. Bookmark this glossary, but also expect it to change.

The terms are tools, not outcomes. Knowing what a journey map is does not mean every project needs one. Knowing Fitts' Law does not mean every button needs to be enormous. Good UX judgment is knowing which tool fits the problem, not demonstrating that you know the name of every tool.

Plain language almost always wins. When you can say the same thing without the jargon, say it without the jargon. The goal is a product that works for the people using it, explained in terms that everyone building it can act on.

That is what good UX terminology is for.