UXD or user experience design is a major unit of design management, yet a broad concept that creates carefully designed products and systems for the end-users. If one were ever to enter a design studio, what they’ll see is drawings on paper or digital media, but what they’ll hear in that room will be words-- terms and acronyms. It is almost as if the UI and UX designers speak in a language unique to them. In order to understand their tongue, let us take a look at the design terms every product manager should be aware of.

UX UX or User Experience is a broad term that incorporates several disciplines that are essential in bringing life to design ventures. CX Customer Experience or CX deals with a customer’s emotions generated by his or her interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels, or products. IxD Interaction Design or IxD is the study of a user’s interactions with a page, application, or product. It is known to facilitate the activities we want to perform on a system. F-Shaped Pattern On the internet, it has been found that most websites host, and hence most people view content that is F-shaped, which is a couple of horizontal stripes followed by a vertical strip of content. It is not only convenient for the reader and easy on the eyes, but it will also significantly increase the reading speed on the website. A/B Testing A/B testing is the practice of generating two versions of a web page with a single variable and compare them online so as to facilitate determining which one performs better. API Application Programming Interfaces are software elements that help different apps communicate with each other. Companies and software developers develop their own APIs so as to help the users have better access to the information on their servers. Front and Back-End Development One often hears developers talking about front-end and back-end development, or the combination of both also known as full-stack development. In the software development process, the terms front and back-end refer to different divisions in a product-- the user interface and the mechanism working in the back. The front-end is what the user sees and experiences. For all practical purposes, it is all about the buttons, the text, beautiful colors, the UI and UX design involved, and the layer one sees on the screen when using an application, the website, or any software product at hand. On the other hand, the back-end is the databases and the servers, the engine which powers the front-end, but that is not always directly visible. Breadcrumbs These are alternative navigation aids for the users that will tell them their position on a product of the company’s offering, mostly with reference to a website. Breadcrumbs facilitate the users in retracing their steps on websites that have a multilevel hierarchy. Mockup It is a realistic demonstration of the design’s final look towards the end. It is imperative to remember that the final product is expected to look exactly like the mockup design. With this implication, it is expected that all revisions to the website content have been completed before the mockup design. Tree Testing It is a technique usually used to determine and evaluate usability, findability, labeling, and organization of a website’s navigation structure and by extension, the information architecture. Tree testing not only helps in detecting navigational issues while the project is still in the early stages of development but also in measuring the extent of how well users can use the hierarchy to find the items. The above terms are just a few elements of a humongous set of design terms that one expects the product manager to know.