Eye-Tracking

A tool that allows user experience designers, or people who design products and websites with consumers in mind, to track where users look on the screen. Eye-tracking can measure users’ attention and the duration of time they spend on different areas of a website. With this information, websites can create user experience solutions such as buttons with varying colours designed to catch the eye.

More terms you might want to know

Microcopy

The small, non-essential text that appears on an interface. It has been set up specifically to be short and concise to draw attention to an essential user experience.

Card Sorting

A UX design technique in which you divide your users into groups, show them cards with different names for unrelated objects and ask them to categorise them.

User Scenario

An example of a typical user and the actions they take. Typically these are written in the form of a story.

Class

A selector that can be applied to any HTML element. Classes should be used when designing for multiple instances. For example, if you want all <h1> tags in the website to look blue, then you could use the class="blue-text" attribute.

Die Cut

A type of print/design created with a metal stamp to create a shape out of paper using a die cutting machine. Die cuts can be used in apparel, home decor and promotional products.

TIFF File

A Tagged Image File Format is a file format for storing images losslessly.

Small Caps

Small uppercase letters, generally about half as tall as regular uppercase letters.

Serif

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

Storyboard

A graphical representation of a scenario, usually created and presented in sequence.

Design Debt

A concept used in systems design to describe the negative consequences of making seemingly innocuous design changes. Shorthand for a product's delayed but inevitable need to be reworked due to earlier, seemingly trivial decisions not having been fully thought through in the original release.

Designers incur this "debt" by making quick and easy choices that save time in the present but cause more complex problems later on down the road when it becomes necessary to change or add something.

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