Empathy Map

A way of researching users and understanding their behaviour in the context of the product, helping designers in understanding users' needs and expectations and what motivates them to act.

Designers can use this type of research to understand better their users and what kinds of experiences they are looking for. And this will allow the designers better empathize with their users, making them a part of the learning cycle.

More terms you might want to know

Mock-up

A non-functional first draft of a design.

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.

Isolation Effect

A psychological principle which predicts that when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus which differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered. In other words, people tend to remember items in isolation more than those of a similar nature or objects in clusters. This phenomenon has been applied in designing websites and software with various levels of success.

Hard Return

When you need to break a line of text and start on a new line in a text box.

JPEG Image

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group, an international standards body that sets standards for creating and handling compressed digital images. The JPEG file format was designed to balance good visual quality and small file size, typically through lossy compression. The JPEG file format is widely used as a means of compressing digital images, particularly those produced by digital cameras.

Serif

The small decorative stroke at the end of a stroke in a letter, or a typeface.

Stem

The part of a letter, usually a vertical line, that rise above the x-height.

Avatar

A graphical representation of the user on a device, used to represent various users in different contexts. It can be a photo, image or drawing.

Prototype

Usually the first functional form of a new product, created to test a concept or prove out some aspects of design.

Copy

The written information that accompanies a design.

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