The process of adjusting the spacing between individual letters to improve or avoid particular visual distortions.
A psychological phenomenon that states that people tend to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
In handwriting and calligraphy, ball terminals are the end of a stroke that resembles a ball. They are also used in some typefaces like cursive or old-style typefaces.
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.
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.
The surface quality of an element.
The intensity of a color relative to its own brightness. Colours are said to be saturated when they have a strong hue and high intensity.
A prediction model used in human-computer interaction. It states that the time required to move to a target area rapidly increases as the distance to the target increases. The law was proposed by Paul Fitts, an American psychologist, in 1954 as a mathematical model of movement with limited cognitive capacity.
Fitts hypothesized that one would quickly select its first apparent target when reaching for an object before considering alternatives — a phenomenon called "target fixation." This tendency would increase progressively with increased distance between the subject and object until it eventually became exponential (i.e., too far away).
A brief snippet taken from the text of an article.
One or more words (typically at the end of a paragraph) that are separated from the rest of the text. Orphans are generally thought of as bad design, but it’s a matter of taste.
A series of slides that are positioned one after the other. As you scroll through the images, the next image in the sequence is automatically loaded. Once you scroll to the end of the carousel, it cycles back around like a horse on a circular track.