Empathy

A type of understanding that is achieved by taking the perspective of another individual. Different people's perspectives often have different needs and values, so empathy can help you understand those differences.

More terms you might want to know

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.

User Research

A field of study that aims to understand the user experience of a product or service. Conducting UX research includes interviewing, observing, and surveying users. Understanding the user experience is important because it helps designers understand how to design a better product that will be more appealing and usable for people.

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.

Thumbnail Sketch

A quick and rough sketch of what you are about to work on. Good for getting the ideas out of your head and onto the page while you're still in that creative phase.

Terminal

The end (straight or curved) of any stroke that doesn’t include a serif. Some typefaces feature ball terminals on letters such as the ‘f’, ‘a’, and ‘c’.

Font Case

The way characters are capitalised within a word or phrase. Common font cases are uppercase, lowercase, capitalised (or title case) and sentence case.

Body Copy

The main text of an advertisement or editorial as opposed to headings and subheadings.

Proximity

The placement or otherwise of a thing in relation to other things. In design, proximity may be considered as the distance between two items in space or their relative location to each other.

Affinity Diagram

A data visualisation tool that can be used to explore and group people's thoughts or reactions to a set of concepts. Affinity diagrams are often used in user research and design thinking as an experimental technique for generating new ideas or solutions.

The emergent patterns in these visual representations can help identify which aspects your audience will respond well to, thus enabling decisions on the information architecture and next steps in the process.

It is important to note that affinity diagrams were initially developed for qualitative research but have since been adapted for quantitative research (though they are not typically used with statistical data).

Pilcrow

Also called a paragraph mark, a paragraph sign or section marker, is a typographical character for separating paragraphs. It looks like a "¶".

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