Affordance

Affordances describe a relationship between the environment and an animate object, classified as either positive or negative.

Items, such as a car that leads to movement, have a positive affordance. Things like stairs that lead upwards have a negative affordance because they will not allow for any other form of movement other than up or down if used accordingly.

More terms you might want to know

Conversion Rate

The number of visits that result in a purchase or some other goal. It can measure any conversion event, such as download, registration, purchase, etc.

Onboarding Flow

The process of a new user being brought in to a new product. The design for this process aims to have an effective, efficient, and engaging user experience.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A term that means the smallest amount of work that can be done to move a project forward.

Ellipsis

Also known as a suspension point, is a series of dots (…) that is used either as a substitute for some text that has been omitted from a sentence or when the author does not wish to pause in their writing.

Mood board

A collage consisting of images, colours and text that is assembled to convey an idea or theme.

Glassmorphism

The use of light or dark objects positioned over colourful backgrounds. Blurred backdrops allow bright colours to come through and convey a sense of frosted glass.

Gestalt Theory

A theory in psychology that discusses the general idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's based on a human need to search for stability and meaning, which leads to organic movements towards wholeness. Gestalt Theory assumes there are inherent flaws in how we perceive forms and patterns, and it holds that this innate tendency transforms into an active process of looking for order in reality.

Left-aligned

Text that flows from left to right and is the default reading direction of a page with its content aligned on the left margin.

Persona

A sample of the target audience for which a product or service is intended.

Serial Position Effect

A phenomenon in psychology in which recalling items in a list imposes an order on the list, with the first and last items remembered best. That is, if given a list of words to remember like "dog apple tree", people will tend to recall "dog" as being at the beginning of the sentence and "tree" as being at the end of it.

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