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UX glossary
A collection of psychological biases, design principles and UX concepts that affect the product experience.
Psychology
😮💨 Cognitive Dissonance - The discomfort of holding two conflicting opinions.
🏎 Cognitive Drift - The experience of losing attention, or your mind 'wandering'.
👍 Confirmation Bias - The tendency to interpret (or seek out) information that is consistent with your beliefs.
⛳️ Default Bias - People tend to accept default suggestions and actions.
🎁 Endowment Effect - People overvalue something that they own regardless of market value.
🏝 Familiarity Bias - People tend to prefer what is familiar to them, and to avoid the unknown.
🚦 Loss Aversion - The pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.
⌛️ Recency Bias - People will favour (i.e., recall, or have a preference for) recent events over historic ones.
⚓️ The Anchor Effect - People become anchored to the first piece of information they see.
👞 The FITD Effect - Agreeing to a small request increases the likelihood of agreeing to a second, larger one.
🪫 The Scarcity Effect - People are more likely to take action if a product or service has a limited supply.
Design principles
🧠 Cognitive Load - Refers to the amount of 'working memory' required to complete a task.
⚡️ Doherty Threshold - People will start becoming disinterested if they have to wait for more than 400ms.
👀 Selective Attention - The process of focusing on a particular object for a certain period of time.
Concepts
🕶 Content Blindness - People will subconsciously pay less attention to similar or duplicate content.
🍟 Context Craving - Often people will crave context and clarity rather than efficiency.
🗯 Context Shifting - The process of switching from one 'thing' to another.
🤯 Experience Creep - Adding functionality often makes your UX exponentially more complicated.
🐨 Fuzzy Context - A correlation between context given, and follow-on questions not answered.
🎮 Gamification - Using elements of game playing to encourage engagement with a product or service.
🍯 Intentional Friction - Intentionally adding friction into a process, for another benefit.
🚧 Knowledge Gap - The difference between the information that the user knows, and what they need to know.