Summary: This SaaS Product Design Glossary is a curated collection of essential terms in SaaS product design—covering UX, UI, development, research, and strategy.
If you’ve ever sat in a meeting with a designer and found yourself nodding while quietly Googling terms like “affordance” or “CMF,” you’re not alone.
Design—especially product and industrial design—has its language. And honestly, it can feel a bit like jargon until you start connecting the dots.
That’s why we put this glossary together. It’s not just a list of definitions—it’s more of a companion for anyone navigating this space.
Perhaps you’re a product manager seeking to make more informed decisions, or a founder collaborating with a design team for the first time.
Or maybe you’re a curious learner who keeps seeing the same few terms pop up and wonders, “Should I know this by now?” Wherever you’re coming from, this resource is for you.
What you’ll find here is a collection of 100+ terms—some are foundational, others a bit more nuanced.
We’ve included everything from processes and tools to design principles and usability methods. We tried not to over-explain, but also didn’t want to assume too much.
The goal? To help you not only understand what these terms mean, but also see how they are applied in real-world projects.
Let’s get into it.
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🧊 3D Modeling
This one’s everywhere. It’s the process of creating a digital three-dimensional object using specific software—often for visualizing, testing, or even printing a product prototype. Think of it like sketching, but in a space where depth matters. Tools like Blender, SolidWorks, or Rhino are standard here. You’ll find this in industrial design, animation, architecture—you name it.
🧪 A/B Testing
At first glance, it might seem more like a marketing tool—but designers use it too, especially in digital products. It’s a controlled experiment where two versions of something (such as a landing page layout) are shown to different users to see which one performs better. The version that drives more clicks, engagement, or signups usually wins. It’s part science, part art, and sometimes the results surprise you.
🧭 Affordance
A bit of a philosophical term, but stick with it. Affordance refers to how a design suggests its use. For example, a button that looks pressable—even before you’re told what it does—that’s good affordance. It’s the subtle way a product “tells” a user how to interact with it. You see it in everything from door handles to mobile apps.
🌀 Agile Development
Agile is more than a buzzword—it’s a way of working. Initially developed in software development, Agile promotes flexibility, rapid iteration, and close team collaboration. In the design context, it means working in sprints, adapting to change, and involving users early and often. It’s not perfect, but it beats waiting six months for feedback on something you’re about to launch.
🛠️ AutoCAD
This one’s a classic. AutoCAD is a long-standing tool used primarily for drafting—both in 2D and 3D. Architects, engineers, and industrial designers lean on it for precision. It’s not as flashy as newer design tools, but in specific industries, it’s still a gold standard.
♿ Accessibility (a11y)
Accessibility—often written as “a11y” (because there are 11 letters between ‘a and ‘y)—isn’t just about ticking checkboxes. It’s about making sure everyone, regardless of ability, can use and benefit from your product. That includes people with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments.
It could be as simple as ensuring color contrast is strong enough to read, or as nuanced as making sure your app works with a screen reader. True accessibility is built in from the start—not added as an afterthought. It’s not just the right thing to do—it’s sound design.
🧠 Affinity Mapping
You know that feeling after a user research session when your team has way too many notes, ideas, quotes, and observations? Affinity mapping is a method for making sense of chaos.
You take those bits—sticky notes, highlights, scribbles—and start grouping them into themes. Perhaps you’ve noticed that “trust” keeps coming up, or users are frequently frustrated by loading times. These clusters begin to form larger patterns, leading to valuable insights. It’s not just organizing—it’s a way of seeing meaning emerge from mess.
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📋 Backlog (Product Backlog)
Think of the backlog as your product team’s to-do list—but with strategy baked in. It’s a prioritized collection of everything that might make it into your product, including features, bug fixes, design polish, user stories, and even technical debt clean-up.
But not everything in the backlog is equally urgent. Items near the top? Those are next in line. Stuff further down? Good ideas for later—maybe. The backlog is a living document. It grows, shrinks, and shifts as user feedback rolls in and business goals evolve. A healthy backlog reflects clarity and focus. A messy one? Well, that’s when chaos starts to creep in.
📊 Benchmarking
Picture this: You’re developing a new wearable device. Benchmarking involves comparing similar products, such as those from Apple, Garmin, or Fitbit, to assess performance, features, or even packaging. The goal isn’t to copy. It’s about setting a reference point so you know where you stand (and where you need to improve).
💡 Brainstorming
We all know what this sort of means, but in the design world, brainstorming is more structured. It’s a session—sometimes messy, sometimes magical—where people throw ideas onto the wall (literally or figuratively). No judgment, no filtering. Just exploration. It’s often the birthplace of unexpected solutions… or at the very least, something to iterate on.
📘 Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines serve as the rulebook for how a company presents itself—both visually and verbally. Think of them as your design team’s GPS. They cover topics such as logo usage, brand colors, typography, tone of voice, iconography, and how imagery should be perceived.
They help maintain consistency, whether you’re designing a billboard or a mobile app. But more than that, they protect the brand’s identity—so it doesn’t get diluted as different people, agencies, or teams touch it. A good guideline doesn’t just say what to use—it explains why it matters.
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🧮 CAD (Computer-Aided Design)
An umbrella term. CAD software allows you to design things digitally with precision—whether it’s the internal mechanism of a smartwatch or the chassis of a new electric scooter. Tools like SolidWorks, AutoCAD, and Fusion 360 fall into this category. It’s essential when physical products are involved.
🎨 CMF (Color, Material, Finish)
This one gets overlooked outside design circles, but it’s powerful. CMF refers to the surface-level choices that can change how a product feels—both visually and in the hand. Matte black aluminum feels premium, while glossy plastic might feel, well, less so. Good CMF makes your product desirable before anyone knows what it does.
⚙️ CNC Machining
This is about manufacturing—specifically, how designs become real things. CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control. It’s a process where software guides cutting tools to shape parts out of raw materials, such as metal or plastic. Think of it as sculpting with robots. In industrial design, understanding how CNC machines work can influence the way you design parts from the outset.
🧪 Concept Testing
Imagine this—you’ve got a new product idea. Perhaps it’s a modular desk setup or a smart water bottle that tracks hydration levels. Before pouring money into prototyping or manufacturing, you want to know: Does this make sense to people? That’s where concept testing comes in.
It’s a checkpoint. You present your concept—usually in the form of mockups, sketches, or lightweight prototypes—to potential users or stakeholders and observe their reactions. Do they get it? Would they use it? Would they pay for it? Sometimes, a small “meh” at this stage can save you thousands down the road. It’s not foolproof, but it gives you a reality check before you go too far down a path that might not lead anywhere.
🔐 Constraints
Not the most glamorous term, but honestly, this is where much of the real design work resides. Constraints are the invisible boundaries you work within—budget limits, material availability, production timelines, shipping requirements, or even the size of a product that needs to fit on a shelf.
At first, they feel like hurdles. But over time, you realize they’re also helpful. They force you to think creatively and prioritize. Too much freedom, and you risk going off the rails. Good design often emerges from working with constraints, rather than against them.
🧍 Consumer-Centered Design
This one feels obvious. Of course, we’re designing for people. But you’d be surprised how often that gets lost in the process. Consumer-centered design is a mindset—one that keeps the end-user at the heart of every decision.
What do they need? What frustrates them? What brings them joy, or makes their day just a little easier? It’s not about what looks cool or what’s technically impressive. It’s about empathy. Observing, asking questions, listening—then building something that respects and reflects the user’s world. It’s more human, less ego.
🌗 Contrast Ratio
Contrast ratio is all about legibility—specifically, the brightness difference between two colors, typically foreground text and its background. If there’s not enough contrast, text can become unreadable—especially for users with vision impairments or in bright lighting conditions.
Accessibility standards, such as WCAG, provide actual minimum ratios (like 4.5:1 for standard text). But beyond rules, good contrast feels right—it lets content breathe and helps users focus. If your design looks great, but no one can read it? That’s a problem.
🤝 Cross-Functional Team
No one builds great products in a vacuum. A cross-functional team is a group where everyone brings a different piece of the puzzle, including designers, engineers, marketers, researchers, product managers, and even customer support personnel.
It can be messy. You’ll butt heads. But it also creates richer solutions, because you’re looking at a problem from more than one angle. You see the ripple effects. And if the team communicates well (big if), the collaboration can elevate the outcome.
🎨 CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Okay, let’s get a bit technical for a moment. CSS is what makes websites look the way they do. It’s not the content of a site—that’s HTML—but it’s how you style that content: fonts, colors, spacing, layout, hover states. All the visual polish? That’s CSS doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
If HTML is the bones, CSS is the wardrobe. And yes, it can be fussy. One misplaced bracket and suddenly your footer is bright pink for no reason. But when it works? It’s magic. The internet would be pretty bland without it.
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📦 Deliverables
This term sounds a bit corporate, but it’s essential. Deliverables are the actual things you hand off at the end of a project—or at key milestones along the way. They can be tangible (such as a prototype) or digital (such as a Figma file, style guide, or research report).
What matters is clarity. Everyone—client, designer, developer—should know what’s being delivered, in what format, and by when. No one likes that awkward “Wait… weren’t you doing that part?” conversation at the end of a deadline.
📄 Design Brief
Think of the design brief as your project’s north star. It’s a document (hopefully written with care) that outlines what the design needs to achieve, who it’s for, what the constraints are, and any specific goals or KPIs. It’s the thing you revisit when you’re deep in the creative weeds and start asking, “Wait… what were we solving again?”
A good brief provides direction without limiting your options. A bad one feels like a vague email that says, “Just make it modern and fun.” Trust me—investing time in a solid brief saves headaches later.
🔧 Design for Assembly (DFA)
Designing a product is one thing. Design it so that someone else can assemble it quickly and without special tools? That’s DFA. It’s about simplifying the assembly process—reducing parts, using snap-fits instead of screws, and avoiding awkward angles, among other things.
Why does it matter? Because every extra step in assembly adds time, and time adds cost. Additionally, fewer assembly steps typically mean fewer opportunities for error. It’s a win-win when done right.
🏭 Design for Manufacturing (DFM)
Very similar to DFA, but broader. DFM is about making sure your product isn’t just clever—it’s manufacturable. That slick idea you had for a seamless enclosure might look great on screen, but can it be injection-molded? Will these tolerances work in real-life applications?
Designing with manufacturing in mind from the outset means fewer surprises when transitioning to production. It’s about speaking the same language as your engineers and factory partners. Because a design that can’t be built isn’t a design—it’s a wish.
🔁 Design Iteration
This is where the magic happens. Iteration is the process of creating something, testing it, learning from the feedback, refining it, and then repeating the process. And again.
It’s tempting to fall in love with your first version. But iteration teaches you to let go a bit—to treat ideas as drafts, not final declarations. Sometimes the improvement is subtle—a button moved, a headline tweaked. At other times, it’s a complete rethink. Either way, each loop gets you closer to something that works.
🎨 Design Language
Every brand has a vibe. And that vibe? It usually comes down to something more profound than just a logo or a color palette—it’s the design language. This refers to the visual and stylistic “rules” that make products from a particular company feel like they belong to the same family.
Take Apple, for instance. Sleek lines, minimalist interfaces, muted tones, soft shadows—they all speak the same visual language. You can tell an Apple product even without the logo, and that’s the power of design language. It’s subtle, but it shapes how people recognize and trust a brand across devices, screens, packaging—everything.
🧩 Design Pattern
Here’s a deceptively simple term. A design pattern is essentially a proven solution to a recurring problem within a specific context. It’s not a one-size-fits-all fix, more like a well-worn path through the forest—others have taken it, it works, and it saves you from reinventing the wheel.
Say you’re designing a login form. There’s probably a pattern for that. Error validation? That too. Design patterns show up in both UX (like progressive disclosure) and UI (like card layouts), and knowing them helps you move faster—and more confidently—because you’re building on solutions that are already tested.
⏱️ Design Sprint
Sometimes, projects move slowly. Other times, you need answers yesterday. A design sprint is for those moments. Originally developed at Google Ventures, it’s a five-day, tightly structured process designed to answer a critical business question through design, prototyping, and user testing.
It’s intense. Monday, you define the problem. Tuesday, sketch. Wednesday, decide. Thursday, prototype. Friday, test. By the end of the week, you have something tangible—and tested—that can guide your next steps. Not everything gets solved, but a sprint often unblocks what months of meetings can’t.
📚 Design System
Think of a design system as the DNA of your product’s interface. It’s more than just a library of buttons and components—though those are in there, too. A solid design system includes rules, usage guidelines, typography standards, color tokens, spacing scales, and tone of voice.
Why does this matter? Because without one, you end up with design drift. One team uses shadows, another doesn’t. Margins start to feel random. The product slowly loses cohesion. A well-maintained system ensures consistency across screens, teams, and time zones—and it makes life easier for both designers and developers.
💭 Design Thinking
This one gets tossed around a lot, but when practiced sincerely, it’s incredibly powerful. Design thinking is a human-centered, iterative problem-solving framework that revolves around five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
It starts with empathy—truly understanding what users are going through. From there, you move on to framing the problem, brainstorming wild ideas, creating quick models, and learning from honest feedback. It’s not linear, and it’s not perfect, but it pushes teams to step outside their assumptions and focus on real human needs.
📤 Design Handoff
The design handoff is that critical moment when your beautiful Figma file (or XD, Sketch, etc.) transitions from being a design to becoming a real, coded product. But it’s more than just handing over files—it’s about communicating intent.
That includes spacing, behaviors, states, accessibility notes, responsive behavior, and any edge cases. A great handoff reduces the back-and-forth between designers and developers. A sloppy one? That leads to inconsistencies, delays, or even rework. The smoother the handoff, the faster the build.
🧩 Design Tokens
Design tokens are akin to the DNA of a design system. They’re tiny, reusable pieces of visual information—things like color codes, font sizes, spacing units, border radii—that live in code but translate to design.
Instead of saying “#FF5733” for your primary button color every time, you refer to a token like $color-primary. If you need to change it later? Update the token in one place, and it is propagated throughout the entire system. It’s consistency, scalability, and sanity in one tidy little concept.
🔧 DevOps
DevOps stands for “development” and “operations,” and it’s all about making software delivery faster, smoother, and more reliable. It’s a set of practices that breaks down the wall between people writing code and those deploying or maintaining it.
In product teams, DevOps often means automation, continuous integration, faster releases, and fewer “it works on my machine” problems. Designers don’t always interact with it directly—but knowing the workflow helps when collaborating on large, fast-moving teams.
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🏛️ Elevation Drawing
While more common in architecture and industrial design, elevation drawings are still used in product work—especially when physical environments are involved. An elevation drawing is like a flat view of a structure or object, head-on, without the perspective distortion you’d get in a photo or 3D rendering.
Think of it like standing directly in front of a building and drawing what you see, line for line. It helps to understand proportions, materials, and how various parts align visually. Clean, clear, and often overlooked unless you’re working on spatial layouts.
🧍 End User
This term is so simple, it’s easy to breeze past. The end user is, quite literally, the person who will use your product. Not the buyer. Not the investor. Not the internal stakeholder. The human at the other end who’s logging in, tapping a button, or assembling the thing.
Designing with them in mind means prioritizing their experience—what do they need? What frustrates them? Where do they get confused? It’s easy to forget the end user when you’re buried in technical specs or client feedback, but they’re the one person whose opinion truly matters.
💺 Ergonomics
Ergonomics is where design meets comfort—and in some cases, safety. It’s the science of fitting products, tools, and environments to the people using them. That curved keyboard? Ergonomics. That perfectly angled office chair backrest? Also ergonomics.
It’s especially critical in industrial design and physical product development, but it also applies digitally. Button sizes, click areas, eye strain from color contrasts—good ergonomic choices reduce user fatigue, increase efficiency, and sometimes even prevent injury. It’s invisible when done well, and frustrating when it’s not.
✨ Experience Design (XD)
Not to be confused with just “UX” (though related), experience design examines the entire journey a user undertakes with a product or brand. It’s not just about the interface—it’s how someone feels using it. Are they delighted? Confused? Do they trust it? Are they willing to come back?
It connects the dots between branding, UI, service design, and even customer support. Think of XD as zooming out—taking a wider lens to make sure everything works together seamlessly and meaningfully. Because ultimately, experience is the memory your product leaves behind.
🫂 Empathy Map
An empathy map is like stepping into your user’s shoes—but with a bit more structure. It breaks down what the user says, thinks, does, and feels—four lenses to help you understand their mindset.
For example:
- Says: “I hate entering passwords every time.”
- Thinks: “There has to be a faster way.”
- Does: Reuses the same password everywhere.
- Feels: Frustrated, anxious about security.
Mapping this out helps teams build shared understanding and keeps the conversation grounded in real user emotions—not just features or specs.
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🧪 Figma
Figma has become a de facto design tool these days—especially in collaborative environments. It’s browser-based, which makes it incredibly easy to work across teams without worrying about version control or local installs. Designers love it, developers tolerate it (mostly), and product managers… well, they like peeking at it.
But it’s more than just a wireframing tool. Figma’s power lies in real-time collaboration, design systems integration, auto-layout for responsiveness, and plugins that extend its capabilities. If you’re in the design world, you’ve probably heard “Just drop it in Figma” at least once this week.
🧩 Feature Creep
You know when a product starts lean and focused… but ends up with a dozen new tabs, ten toggle switches, and three onboarding flows? That’s feature creep. It’s what happens when teams keep saying yes—to every request, every edge case, every “what if.”
Initially, each new feature seems justifiable. However, over time, the product becomes bloated, confusing, and increasingly challenging to maintain. Users don’t know where to look. The core experience gets buried. Avoiding feature creep means making tough decisions—saying no more often than yes, and always returning to the question: “Does this help our user solve the core problem?”
📐 Form Factor
This one might sound a little abstract at first, but it’s surprisingly tangible. Form factor is the physical footprint of a product—its size, shape, proportions, and sometimes even its “feel.” It’s most often discussed in the context of electronics (such as laptops, phones, and wearables), but the idea applies across the board.
Think about the difference between a desktop computer and a tablet. Same basic function: computing. Different form factors. And those decisions—how compact it should be, how it fits in your hand, whether it stands upright or lies flat—can make or break a product’s usability. Not to mention its appeal.
🧑💻 Front-End Development
Here’s where code meets interface. Front-end development is what transforms raw data and backend logic into something people can see and interact with. It’s everything users interact with directly on a screen—buttons, layouts, animations, dropdowns, forms.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the leading technologies in this area. But beyond the tech, good front-end dev is really about bringing design to life while keeping performance and accessibility in mind. You can have the most beautiful UI in a Figma file, but if the front-end doesn’t do it justice, users will notice—sometimes immediately.
📋 Functional Requirements
Let’s be honest: this one sounds dry. But it’s pretty foundational. Functional requirements are the “must-haves” that define what a product needs to do—not how it looks, but how it works.
Does it need to send push notifications? Should users be able to filter search results? Will it support payments or uploads? These details often come from stakeholders, user research, and business goals. Miss one, and you risk building something that’s visually polished… but functionally off the mark.
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🧠 Gestalt Principles
These are timeless psychological insights into how people naturally perceive visual information. Gestalt principles explain things like:
- Why do we group similar items together
- Why do we see patterns in chaos
- Why alignment feels more “organized”
There are a handful of key ideas—like proximity, similarity, closure, and figure-ground—that influence everything from how we scan a website to how we interpret icons. You don’t need to memorize them all, but understanding a few can dramatically improve the clarity of your layouts.
🧱 Grids & Layouts
Grids are the invisible skeletons of most great design. They help align content, create rhythm, and bring order to complexity. Whether it’s a 12-column grid on a website or a modular card layout in a dashboard, grids create harmony.
Layouts are how you place and structure content within those grids. They influence readability, hierarchy, and visual balance. You don’t always have to be rigid—but without some underlying structure, designs tend to fall apart fast.
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🌐 HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
If the web had a skeleton, HTML would be it. It’s the standard markup language that structures content on websites. Headlines, paragraphs, lists, links, forms—all those elements get defined in HTML. It doesn’t do much for style (that’s CSS), and it doesn’t add interactivity (that’s JavaScript), but without HTML, there’s no page to begin with.
For designers, understanding just a bit of HTML goes a long way. It helps you work more effectively with developers and makes your designs more realistic and grounded.
🧠 Human-Centered Design (HCD)
This term gets thrown around a lot—and for good reason. Human-Centered Design is about building products around people, not just for them. That means talking to real users, observing their behavior, understanding the context, and iterating based on the feedback.
It’s not a straight path. You might discover halfway through that what you thought was the problem… isn’t. And that’s okay. HCD is flexible, empathetic, and grounded in the belief that design should solve human problems—not just business ones.
✅ Heuristic Evaluation
This one’s for when you want a quick, expert-led review of your product’s usability—without running a full-blown user test. A heuristic evaluation involves going through the interface using a checklist of best practices (aka “heuristics”) like:
- Is the system giving helpful feedback?
- Can users easily undo actions?
- Are labels and buttons clear?
It’s fast, affordable, and often uncovers low-hanging usability issues. No users required—just someone with a good eye and a strong UX instinct.
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♿ Inclusive Design
This one’s close to human-centered design, but with a sharper focus: accessibility. Inclusive design ensures that people of all abilities can use and benefit from your product—not as an afterthought, but as a core principle.
This might involve designing interfaces that are compatible with screen readers, utilizing color schemes that accommodate color blindness, or creating physical products that are accessible to individuals with limited mobility. It’s not just ethical—it’s smart. Because when you design for the edges, everyone benefits.
🏭 Industrial Design
Industrial design often sits at the intersection of form and function. It’s not just about how something looks, but how it works, how it feels in your hand, how it fits into everyday life—and yes, how it gets manufactured.
Whether it’s a coffee maker, an electric bike, or a Bluetooth speaker, industrial design blends creativity with engineering. Designers in this space are part artist, part problem solver, and part user advocate. They shape the tangible world, one thoughtful detail at a time.
🧭 Information Architecture
Information architecture (or IA for short) is the backbone of any content-heavy website or app. It’s how things are grouped, named, and navigated—so users can find what they need without getting lost in the digital woods.
Ever landed on a site and had no idea where to click first? That’s poor IA. Good IA feels invisible. It guides you intuitively, helping you move from point A to B without friction. It’s part logic, part empathy, and part taxonomy nerd-out.
🧠 Interaction Design (IxD)
If experience design is about the journey, interaction design is about the touchpoints. IxD focuses on how users engage with a product: tapping, swiping, scrolling, hovering, and dragging. It’s about motion, feedback, and behavior—not just visuals.
For example, what happens when you long-press a button? How fast should a tooltip fade in? Does a slider snap to a grid or move freely? These details shape how intuitive—or frustrating—an interface feels. And while they’re easy to overlook, they’re often what users remember most.
🔁 Iterative Design
Design rarely succeeds on the first try. Iterative design embraces that. It’s a cyclical process: make something, test it, learn from the results, make it better, and repeat. The goal isn’t perfection on the first pass—it’s progress over time.
This approach can feel messy, even tiring, but it’s honest. It admits we don’t have all the answers upfront—and that’s okay. By iterating, we stay open to change and grounded in evidence. It’s what moves ideas from “interesting” to “actually works.”
🔍 Information Scent
It may sound a bit unusual, but it’s a fundamental concept. Information scent refers to the cues users follow to find what they’re looking for. Think link text, icons, headings—anything that suggests what’s behind the next click.
If users catch the right scent, they continue. If not, they hesitate—or worse, bounce. For example, a button labeled “Next” doesn’t give off much scent. “Continue to Payment” is clearer. It’s all about ensuring people can accurately predict where their click will take them.
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🖼️ JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
JPEG is one of those terms we all toss around—”just send me a JPEG”—but behind it is a clever bit of image compression magic. Essentially, it’s a file format that reduces the size of images by discarding a small amount of visual information that most people won’t even notice. That’s why JPEGs are so popular on the web: they strike a balance between decent image quality and small file size.
But here’s the thing—it’s lossy compression, meaning you lose a bit of detail every time you save it. That’s why designers usually keep the original PSD or RAW file in the background, just in case they need to tweak something without having to start from scratch.
🗺️ Journey Map (User Journey)
A journey map visualizes the entire experience a user has with your product or service, from start to finish. It covers not just screens and clicks, but emotions, touchpoints, and pain points across time.
From the moment you first hear about our product, to onboarding, to seeking help when something breaks—every step matters. Journey maps often include thoughts, feelings, and quotes, plotted along a timeline. They help teams see the big picture and ask: “Where are we delighting… and where are we dropping the ball?”
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🔠 Kerning
Ah, kerning—the art of not letting your typography look off. It’s the space between individual letters, and while it seems tiny, it’s the kind of detail that makes or breaks good design.
Too tight, and the text feels squished. Too loose, and it falls apart visually. The goal is balance—getting the spacing just right so it feels natural when you read it, even if most people can’t quite say why it looks better. It’s one of those invisible skills that separates beginner typography from professional polish.
📊 KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
KPIs are how you know if what you’re doing is working. They’re not just metrics—they’re meaningful metrics that tie directly to goals. For example:
- Sign-up rate might be a KPI for onboarding success.
- Daily active users? A KPI for engagement.
- Support tickets? A (reverse) KPI for usability issues.
Choosing the right KPIs helps teams stay focused and aligned. The trick is picking numbers that reflect value—not vanity, because tracking something just because it looks good in a dashboard isn’t the same as making progress.
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✏️ Low-Fidelity Prototype
A low-fi prototype is your product in its sketchiest form—and that’s a good thing. It’s quick, rough, and designed to test core ideas without sinking hours into polish. Think: wireframes, paper sketches, clickable boxes that don’t do much… yet.
The beauty of low-fidelity is that it invites honest feedback. Because it doesn’t look finished, people feel more comfortable criticizing it, which is precisely what you want early on. It’s not about making something pretty—it’s about finding out if your direction even makes sense.
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🧠 Market Research
This is where good design starts—with real people. Market research means stepping outside the studio and digging into what your users want, need, fear, or love. It can take many forms, including surveys, interviews, data analysis, and competitor audits, among others.
The goal? To replace assumptions with insight. You’re not just building what you think the market wants—you’re finding patterns, validating demand, and identifying gaps. It’s foundational. Skip it, and you’re designing in the dark.
📐 Material Design
Material Design is Google’s design language—and more than just a style guide, it’s a whole philosophy. Introduced in 2014, it brought a sense of depth and motion to flat digital interfaces. Shadows, elevations, responsive transitions—these weren’t just for flair. They were meant to mimic the physical world, making digital experiences feel more intuitive.
What sets Material Design apart is its structure. It’s not just “use these colors”—it gives you rules on spacing, behavior, layout grids, and component usage. It’s beneficial for teams working across Android apps or building for Google’s ecosystem. Love it or not, it’s influential.
⚡ Microinteractions
Microinteractions are those tiny moments in a product that seem almost invisible—but add a great deal of delight—a slight vibration when you like a post. A progress bar is filling up—a confetti animation after finishing a task.
They often answer small questions like:
- What just happened?
- Did that action work?
- Can I do this again?
These small details enhance feedback, reinforce the brand, and make the product feel more engaging. They don’t take much—but they often leave the biggest impression.
🧪 Mockup
Mockups are where your design begins to take shape—even if it’s still just a static representation. It’s like a snapshot of the final product, usually used to show clients, stakeholders, or teammates what the result could look like. Although no real functionality is yet available, all the visual details are in place.
You might mock up a website homepage, a mobile app screen, or even a packaging design. Think of it as dressing your idea up for its first interview—it’s not hired yet, but you want to show what it’s capable of.
🎨 Mood Board
Mood boards are how creative people say, “Let’s figure out the vibe first.” They’re visual collages—collections of colors, textures, images, type samples, quotes, and anything else that captures a desired aesthetic or emotion.
Before diving into logo sketches or interface mockups, a mood board helps align everyone’s creative direction. Is this brand playful or serious? Earthy or futuristic? You don’t always need one, but when you’re staring at a blank screen, it’s a great way to spark the first few ideas.
🚀 MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
An MVP is not your dream product. It’s the bare minimum version of your idea—the one that does just enough to test if your core hypothesis is valid. It’s stripped-down, sometimes clunky, but purposeful.
The goal is learning. Will people use it? Pay for it? Come back again? Every feature beyond that is extra—nice, but not necessary. MVPs are the backbone of lean startups because they help avoid the trap of overbuilding something no one wants.
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👋 Onboarding
Onboarding is that first impression moment—the make-or-break period where a user either feels welcomed… or lost. It’s how your product teaches people what it is, what it can do, and why it’s worth sticking around.
It could be a short walkthrough, tooltips, a helpful checklist, or even just a brilliant empty state. Great onboarding respects a user’s time, gets them to value quickly, and reduces confusion. Bad onboarding? Users close the tab and don’t come back.
🎯 OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
OKRs are a framework that helps teams align around what they want to achieve—and how they’ll measure it. Each objective is a big-picture goal. The key results? Those are the specific, trackable things that show you’re moving in the right direction.
For example:
Objective: Improve the onboarding experience.
Key Results:
– Decrease time-to-first-action from 5 mins to 2 mins
– Improve onboarding completion rate to 80%
– Increase NPS for new users to 60+
Good OKRs are ambitious but realistic. They push teams to focus, prioritize, and evaluate success in concrete terms—not just “we think things got better.”
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🖌️ Photoshop
Photoshop is one of the OGs of digital design. It started as a photo-editing tool, but over time, it’s become a kind of Swiss Army knife for designers. You can do everything from retouching skin and compositing images to designing UI mockups, social media graphics, or even 3D textures.
It’s insanely powerful—but also, yeah, a little bloated. For many designers, it remains the go-to choice for heavy image manipulation, especially when pixel precision or advanced effects are required. Just save often—Photoshop tends to crash at the worst possible moment.
🪜 Progressive Disclosure
Progressive disclosure is a UX principle that says, “Show only what’s necessary right now.” You don’t overwhelm the user with every option or setting up front—you reveal details as needed.
Think of how advanced filters stay hidden until you click “More options,” or how a form expands only after selecting a specific choice. It keeps interfaces clean, focused, and less intimidating—while still offering depth when users want it.
🧮 Pixel Density
Pixel density refers to how many pixels are packed into a given amount of physical space—usually measured in PPI (pixels per inch). The higher the density, the sharper and crisper things look, especially on screens like smartphones or retina displays.
It’s why designs that look great on a regular monitor might suddenly appear blurry on a high-density screen. As a designer, it’s something you can’t ignore—especially if you’re creating graphics or interfaces meant to scale across multiple devices. Hint: always export @2x or @3x when in doubt.
📁 Portfolio
A portfolio isn’t just a folder of your past work—it’s a curated story of who you are as a designer (or developer, or strategist, or…). It’s where you show your process, not just your polish. The best portfolios don’t just say “look what I made”—they say, “here’s how I think.”
Yes, it should look good. But what matters just as much is how you explain your decisions. What was the problem? What was your role? What changed because of your design? Whether it’s a sleek personal website or a tidy PDF, your portfolio is your handshake—it introduces you before you’re in the room.
🔄 Product Lifecycle
Every product, regardless of its innovation or popularity, has a finite lifespan. The product lifecycle maps that journey—from the big launch to (eventually) the slow fade-out. It begins with an introduction (new, risky, exciting), transitions into growth (if things go well), followed by maturity (peak sales, heavy competition), and ultimately, decline (interest fades, updates cease, support ends).
Understanding where your product is in this cycle shapes how you design, market, and iterate. For example, a mature product might require a redesign to stay competitive, while a declining one might need to be sunset gracefully.
🧪 Prototype
Think of a prototype as a test drive. It’s an early version of a product—just functional enough to explore an idea, spot flaws, or get feedback. Sometimes it’s clickable wireframes; other times, it’s a physical model made of cardboard and tape. And that’s okay. The point isn’t perfection—it’s progress.
Prototypes let you ask, “What happens when someone uses this?” They bring theory into practice, fast. And the quicker you prototype, the faster you learn what’s working—and what’s not.
⚡ Rapid Prototyping
This is all about speed. Rapid prototyping is the process of quickly building rough models—usually digital, sometimes physical—to test out concepts before committing serious resources. The idea is to stay scrappy. Instead of spending weeks refining something, you build fast, test, learn, repeat.
It’s a favorite in agile teams or early-stage startups, where moving quickly matters more than being pixel-perfect. Because, really, why spend a month building something no one wants when you could find that out in a day?
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📱 Responsive Design
Responsive design isn’t a feature anymore—it’s an expectation. It’s the approach that ensures a website or app looks good and works well, no matter the screen size: mobile, tablet, laptop, ultra-wide monitor—you name it.
It’s not just about shrinking things down. It’s about adapting layouts, interactions, font sizes, and even functionality to suit different devices. If users have to pinch-zoom or scroll sideways, something’s off. A responsive design should feel natural everywhere—fluid, not forced.
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📈 Scalability
Scalability is a bit of a buzzword, but it’s also essential. It’s about designing systems, products, or processes that can grow without breaking down. Can your app handle 10 users today and 10,000 next month? Can your design system adapt as your product evolves?
It’s not just technical—scalability applies to UX too. That clean dashboard with five features might become a cluttered mess once you add fifteen more… unless you planned for it. So, scalable design means thinking long-term: what happens when this thing succeeds?
✏️ Sketch
Sketching is where most designs begin—not on the screen, but in a notebook, on a whiteboard, or even a napkin. A sketch is fast, informal, and intentionally messy. It’s not meant to impress. It’s meant to think out loud, visually.
You sketch to explore ideas before they solidify. Sometimes the best concepts come out in these rough, low-stakes moments when there’s no pressure to be “right” yet. And no, this isn’t about the Sketch software—it’s about the act of drawing.
🪟 Scoping
Scoping is the act of drawing the line. What are we building? What are we not building? It defines the boundaries of a project—what’s included, what’s out of scope, and what can maybe wait until v2.
Clear scoping helps prevent scope creep (that slow, sneaky expansion of work). It prevents teams from overcommitting and enables everyone—from designers to developers to clients—to remain realistic. Good scoping isn’t about being rigid. It’s about creating focus, setting expectations, and building something valuable without burning out the team in the process.
🧑💼 Stakeholder
Stakeholders are anyone who has a say—or a stake—in the success of your product. That includes executives, investors, clients, users, developers, marketers, and sometimes even regulators.
They don’t all want the same things, and that’s where it gets tricky. Part of product work involves managing these different voices: aligning priorities, communicating trade-offs, and ensuring decisions aren’t driven by the loudest person in the room. Keeping stakeholders involved—but not over-involved—is a balancing act.
🎬 Storyboarding
Storyboarding borrows from filmmaking but works beautifully in UX. It’s a way to visualize a user’s journey through your product, scene by scene, step by step. Each frame represents a moment: a login screen, a loading spinner, a frustrating error.
By laying it out visually, you catch gaps, friction points, or moments of delight you might otherwise miss. Storyboarding reminds you that design isn’t static—it’s a lived sequence—a story. And you’re the one writing it.
🧾 SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
SVGs are those magical graphics that don’t get blurry no matter how much you zoom in. Why? Because they’re vector-based, not pixel-based. That means they’re defined by math, not tiny colored squares.
For designers, SVGs are a dream: they’re lightweight, resolution-independent, and editable. Want to animate a logo? Use SVG. Need crisp icons on a retina display? SVG again. They’re instrumental in responsive web design where clarity matters across screen sizes.
📊 System Usability Scale (SUS)
Despite the dry name, the SUS is surprisingly handy. It’s a short, standardized questionnaire (just 10 questions) used to assess how usable a system or product feels. You hand it to users after testing and get a score from 0 to 100.
It’s not perfect, and it won’t tell you why something isn’t working—but it gives you a benchmark—a baseline. If your SUS score goes up after a redesign, that’s a win. If it drops, you know it’s time to take a deeper look.
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🧵 Texture Mapping
Ever wondered how a digital apple gets that shiny red skin—or how a 3D model of a sneaker looks like it’s made of mesh, rubber, and leather? That’s texture mapping. It’s the technique used to apply surface details (such as color, texture, reflections, and patterns) to 3D models.
Without it, everything would look like a gray blob. Texture mapping gives those flat, sterile surfaces life—wood grains, brushed metal, worn denim, glowing neon. It’s not just aesthetics—it helps users recognize materials, imagine touch, and get immersed in a product or scene.
🔤 Typography
Typography is one of those things you only notice when it’s bad—but when it’s good, it does a ton of invisible work. Typography is the art (and discipline) of arranging type—choosing fonts, adjusting spacing, setting hierarchy, balancing visual rhythm.
It’s not just about “picking a nice font.” It’s about legibility, emotion, tone, and brand identity. The right typography can make something feel premium, playful, serious, or bold. And a slightly too-tight line height or badly kerned headline? You’ll feel that discomfort even if you can’t name it.
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🖥️ UI (User Interface)
UI stands for User Interface, but really, it’s the face of your product. It’s everything a person sees and interacts with—buttons, sliders, input fields, navigation menus, icons, spacing, and animations. It’s the layer between user intention and system response.
A good UI feels intuitive. It anticipates the user’s needs, maintains a visually clean interface, and provides clear communication of feedback (such as loading states or error messages). It’s not just “pretty design”—it’s the structure and interaction layer that makes using a product possible.
✅ Usability
Usability is all about ease. Can someone figure out your product without needing a manual or a 30-minute tutorial? Can they accomplish what they came for without confusion, frustration, or giving up halfway?
Good usability often goes unnoticed—which is the point. It should feel seamless. It’s part of UX, but it focuses explicitly on clarity, intuitiveness, and speed of learning. You shouldn’t need to explain how to use your product. If it’s usable, people just… get it.
🧪 Usability Testing
This is where you find out whether your design works for real users—and not just in theory. Usability testing involves presenting your design to someone (ideally your target user), assigning them tasks, and observing how they interact with it.
Where do they struggle? What surprises them? Do they complete the task? It’s not about telling users what to do—it’s about watching what they do and learning from it. Even a short test with five users can reveal insights that change everything.
🌍 User Experience (UX)
UX isn’t just “how it looks”—it’s how it feels to use. It’s the whole arc of someone’s interaction with your product or service: how they find it, how they use it, how they feel afterward. Did it solve their problem? Did it delight them? Frustrate them?
UX is about empathy, flow, utility, and trust. It spans everything from micro-interactions to entire customer journeys. It’s invisible when it’s excellent—and obvious when it’s not.
🧭 User Flow
A user flow is like a map. It shows the steps someone takes to complete a specific task inside your product. That might be buying a book, booking an appointment, uploading a photo, or resetting a password.
Each screen, each button, each decision point is part of that flow. Understanding and optimizing these paths helps reduce friction, prevent dead ends, and keep users moving smoothly toward their goals. It’s less about aesthetics, more about logic and momentum.
🧍 User Persona
Personas aren’t just made-up characters—they’re informed archetypes based on fundamental research. A user persona captures the behaviors, motivations, pain points, and goals of a specific type of user who may interact with your product in a particular way.
You might have “Raj, the data-heavy enterprise user” or “Sophie, the time-strapped solo freelancer.” They help teams align decisions around real needs and avoid designing for some vague “everyone.” Because let’s face it—if you design for everyone, you risk helping no one in particular.
🧠 User Research
Before you can design effectively, you must understand who you’re planning for. User research is how you do that. It’s talking to people, watching them work, asking questions, listening closely. It’s observing behaviors, analyzing patterns, and uncovering why someone does what they do.
This may involve interviews, surveys, usability tests, or simply listening to customer support calls. The goal isn’t just data—it’s insight. And good user research keeps you grounded. It reminds you that design isn’t about guessing—it’s about solving real problems for real people.
📝 User Stories
User stories are simple, human-centered descriptions of what a user needs or wants to do. They’re often framed like this:
“As a [type of user], I want to [do something] so that I can [achieve a goal].”
For example:
“As a new user, I want to sign up with my Google account so I don’t have to remember another password.”
They’re quick, lightweight, and meant to keep the focus on why a feature matters—not just what it is. Used in agile teams, user stories help prioritize work around actual user value. When written well, they align designers, developers, and product managers around the same outcome.
💸 UX Debt
UX debt is similar to financial debt. It builds up when teams take shortcuts—skipping user testing, launching a half-baked flow, or patching UI inconsistencies just to hit a deadline. In the moment, it feels manageable… but over time? It adds up.
Maybe it’s that confusing checkout flow no one got around to fixing, or that dropdown menu that’s grown into a cluttered maze. UX debt slows you down later—making it harder to build new features and maintain user satisfaction. It’s inevitable, but when tracked and appropriately addressed, it’s fixable. The key is knowing it’s there and budgeting time to pay it down.
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🔺 Vector Graphics
Vector graphics aren’t made of pixels—they’re made of math. Instead of storing color data for each tiny dot on the screen, they use shapes like points, lines, curves, and polygons to define an image. The result? Graphics that can scale up or down infinitely without ever getting blurry.
That’s why logos, icons, and illustrations are usually designed as vectors—so they stay crisp whether they’re on a business card or a billboard. Formats like SVG, AI, and EPS are all vector-friendly. The downside? They’re not ideal for complex images, such as photographs. But for clean, scalable design elements? Vectors are the gold standard.
🌐 Viewport
When we say “viewport” in web design, we’re not talking about the entire webpage—we’re talking about what the user can see at a given moment. It’s the visible area of the web browser window, and it varies widely depending on the device, such as a phone, tablet, laptop, widescreen desktop, etc.
Why does this matter? Because a beautifully designed site on a 27-inch monitor might be a nightmare on a smartphone—unless you’ve accounted for different viewports. Responsive design, media queries, and mobile-first layouts all hinge on understanding and adapting to the viewport. It’s where your interface meets the real-world constraint of screen size.
🧭 Visual Hierarchy
Not everything on a screen should scream for attention. Visual hierarchy is the art of guiding the viewer’s eye—subtly suggesting what to look at first, second, third. It’s achieved through contrast, size, spacing, alignment, color, and typography.
A bold headline. A primary button in a standout color. A muted caption tucked just beneath an image. These are all cues. Without a clear hierarchy, users get lost or overwhelmed. But when it’s done well? They glide through the content without even realizing they’re being led.
🧬 Version Control (Git)
Version control—most often through Git—is how developers (and increasingly, design teams) track changes over time. Every edit is saved as a commit, so you can go back, compare versions, or work in parallel without overwriting each other’s work.
It’s similar to Google Docs’ version history, but for code. Tools like GitHub or GitLab make collaboration smoother, help with rollback in case of bugs, and avoid the classic “final_final_FINAL_v3.png” nightmare designers know all too well. For design systems and coded components, version control is essential.
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🔳 Wireframe
Wireframes are the blueprints of digital design. They strip away the visuals—no colors, no fancy typefaces, no photos—so you can focus purely on structure and flow. Where does the navigation go? How are the sections arranged? What happens when a user scrolls or clicks?
They’re usually grayscale, often sketched out quickly in tools like Figma, Balsamiq, or even on paper. Think of them as the scaffolding before the bricks and paint. Wireframes help teams align on layout and logic before jumping into aesthetics.
🔄 Workflow
A workflow, put, is how work gets done. It’s the step-by-step path—from task to tool to teammate—that leads to a finished result. In design, this process might involve sketching, wireframing, prototyping, gathering feedback, iterating, and then handing off the work to developers.
But workflows aren’t just about process—they’re about making things smoother, more predictable, less chaotic. Good workflows reduce friction. Bad ones? They create bottlenecks, duplicated efforts, and endless Slack messages, such as “Wait, who’s updating this file again?”
A solid workflow makes the difference between a team that feels in sync… and one that’s constantly playing catch-up.
⬜ Whitespace (Negative Space)
Whitespace is often misunderstood as “space,” but it’s anything but wasted. It’s what gives your design breathing room. It creates focus. It emphasizes what matters and lets users rest their eyes between actions.
Whether it’s padding between elements or margins around sections, whitespace helps guide attention and makes interfaces feel less cramped. Some of the most elegant designs use more whitespace—not less. It’s not about what you add—it’s about what you allow to exist around it.
🎁 Bonus SaaS Product Design Resource
If you’re hungry for more real-world examples, tools, and inspiration beyond this glossary, check out UIUXshowcase.com — a growing library of free product design resources explicitly curated for designers, developers, and product thinkers.
From hand-picked portfolios and design systems to powerful AI tools and UI kits, it’s built to support you at every stage of your creative process.
Whether you’re wireframing your next idea or refining your design system, this is one bookmark you’ll come back to.
🧾 Wrapping It Up
Design is full of jargon—but behind every term lies a real challenge, a human insight, or a practical decision someone had to make.
This glossary isn’t just about definitions—it’s about decoding the language we use in UX, UI, and product teams every day.
Whether you’re a seasoned designer, a founder building your first product, or just someone trying to make sense of all those Figma comments and stakeholder emails, the goal here was simple: clarity, not complexity.
And remember—no one knows all the terms by heart. Design is a collaborative, ever-evolving field.
The more you understand the language, the more confidently you can contribute to conversations, critique ideas, and advocate for better experiences.
Bookmark this. Revisit it. Share it with a teammate who’s just getting started. And most importantly, keep asking questions—because good design always begins with curiosity.