A psychological phenomenon that states that people tend to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
A technique for understanding people’s experience of a product or service. Participants are asked to keep daily records of their experience using the product, and these records are taken into consideration when designing the design.
The process of developing a product or design system that can be altered to fit different device and interaction contexts.
Also known as a suspension point, is a series of dots (…) that is used either as a substitute for some text that has been omitted from a sentence or when the author does not wish to pause in their writing.
Designs that are created in one colour. It can be any colour, but the whole design will range from light to darker shades. As the name implies, it is typically a single hue, with black and white also being typical combinations for this type of design.
An abstract mark is a type of logo where instead of being a recognizable object from everyday life, it is an abstract geometric form representing a business or brand. Famous examples include the BP starburst logo, and the Pepsi divided circle.
The part of a letter, usually a vertical line, that rise above the x-height.
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.
Also known as the divine proportion, is a number, or a ratio, sometimes approximated by phi and widely considered aesthetically pleasing. The golden ratio has been featured in nature and art in many ways, including hexagonal honeycombs, the human body, and mathematics. More frequently, it is used in design and digital art to represent a path (or steps) one can take to achieve a particular look or result. In art, an artist may produce something (a painting or drawing, for example) using the golden ratio as a basis for its composition.
How well or poorly something can be read.
Affordances describe a relationship between the environment and an animate object, classified as either positive or negative.
Items, such as a car that leads to movement, have a positive affordance. Things like stairs that lead upwards have a negative affordance because they will not allow for any other form of movement other than up or down if used accordingly.