The act of gathering qualitative data about a person's thoughts and feelings related to a product.
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.
A generic term for adding colour to an image. A tint can be applied by darkening a colour to create different shades or lightening the saturation, creating a washed-out look.
The feeling or mood created by a design.
An imaginary line on which most letters "sit". As such, it equals the height of an em square. The expected result of a baseline is to reference the height with which text is aligned. The alignment ranges from ascenders, which are the upper strokes in b, d, and h, down to descenders like j or y.
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.
A technique used to sequentially present items in a list or other data set that are too long to display at one time.
Colours on the same side of the colour wheel as red, such as pink, orange and yellow.
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 form of typographic ornament used by a type designer for decorative purposes. Common ligatures are based on joining two or more letters together, often with figures embedded in the design
A decoration technique used primarily on paper, metal, and some plastics in which ink or another printing medium is pressed into the material's surface to create a three-dimensional effect.