Material Design

A design language developed by Google. The goal of Material Design was to create fluid, natural movement for users on any platform they happen to be using.

More terms you might want to know

Pixel

A pixel, or a picture element, is the smallest addressable element in a display device.

PNG Image

A PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file is a bitmap image format that has been designed to store images with an alpha channel. This format is primarily used for transparency so that it can be placed over other graphics in many design applications.

Sketching

A basic design tool that helps designers create and communicate ideas.

User Journey Map

A diagram that reflects the processes and steps a user would take when completing a certain task or goal. The User Journey Map also highlights the key activities, touchpoints, stakeholders, and benefits of an experience. In order to develop an effective strategy that helps guide users through the process of reaching their goals and objectives, the User Journey Map provides a comprehensive view of how your customers will navigate towards achieving their goals.

Design Thinking

An iterative process that designers use to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine the problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods.

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).

Crop Marks

Also called trim marks, are markings on artwork that tells the printer where to cut the page.

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.

Cool Colours

Colours on the opposite side of the colour wheel to warm colours. Typically bluish in tone, such as blue or green.

Bracket

The word "bracket" is often used to refer to parentheses and is written as either [] or () and used to delimit blocks of text, e.g. a set of instructions. Within brackets, items are arranged from left to right in order of precedence.

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