Glossary
UX/UI Designer Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential UX/UI designer terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key UX/UI designer vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in UX/UI designer training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Accessibility
- Designing for people with disabilities.
- Affordance
- A clue about how something is used.
- Design system
- Reusable components and guidelines.
- Handoff
- Giving final designs to developers.
- Heuristic evaluation
- Reviewing a design against usability principles.
- Information architecture
- Organizing content and navigation.
- Persona
- A profile representing a user type.
- Prototype
- An interactive model of a design.
- Responsive design
- Designs that adapt to screen sizes.
- UI
- User interface: what users see and interact with.
- Usability test
- Watching users try a design.
- User flow
- The steps a user takes to complete a task.
- UX
- User experience: how a product works for users.
- WCAG
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
- Wireframe
- A simple layout sketch.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free UX/UI Designer practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see UX/UI Designer training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.