A growing collection of handy words and phrases we’ll use when working with you. But if you’re not ready to work with us just yet, this page is a good starting place for ideas.
Ambiguity effect
We have a tendency to avoid things when missing or unclear information makes the option seem unknown. This is one of the key drivers behind refinement and strategic content: if customers can't make an informed decision, there's a negative effect on value perception.
Anchoring
A type of priming, anchoring is the idea that an initial exposure to something acts as a reference point for subsequent interactions. Usually unconscious, this way of thinking can have a big effect on customer behaviour around areas like pricing and value.
Anxiety
We talk a lot about anxiety: using design and copy to alleviate conscious and unconscious anxieties. Common anxieties include privacy and security, whereas others are specific to your brand. Anxieties can be more prevalent in areas like healthcare, or where payments are involved. Reducing anxiety builds trust and makes people feel more comfortable.
Architecture
Focusing on architecture is a crucial part of our UX sprints. It's an opportunity to refine the relationship between all the moving parts: screens, pages, or single interfaces. A simplified architecture forms the basis of user flows; how people move through and use the product.
Atomic design
A methodology for creating strong design system. It focuses on looking at all the thousands of parts that make a designs with a clear hierarchy. Working well for large projects, this ensures designs are consistent, flexible, and scalable.
Audit
The process of reviewing an existing product or service. We'll often undertake an audit at the start of a project, to identity what's good, and what's not working so well. Finding friction helps us propose new solutions. These useful written documents include detailed annotated screenshots, along with a comprehensive review of the bigger picture.
Authority
We have an innate bias towards being influenced by authority, tending to look for authoritative figures for guidance, especially in stressful situations. We use a range of strategies to build brand authority, encompassing visual design, content, and usability.
Barrier to entry
A way of describing a point within a flow where users stop, therefore holding back from continuing with the task. By removing the friction around this point, it could be a forced registration or confusing interaction, abandonment rates will decrease.
Benefits led
Instead of just listing features or functions, a common pitfall for tech startups, we use a benefits led approach. Focusing on how your product or service actively benefits users makes it more relatable and more valuable. Everyone can build a product full of features, but only the best brands tell you how they can make life better.
Branding
More than just a logo, brand identities are made up of systems that include visual language (think logos, colours, and typography) and personality (copywriting, tone of voice, and philosophy). The aim is to make a brand distinctive, memorable, and professional.
Commitment
We're more likely to finish something once we've committed to it. It's an instinctive trait to avoid backing out of an agreement, especially if you've invested in a process. We use a variety of techniques to encourage commitment at checkout or signup.
Confirmation bias
We have a tendency to search for, interpret, focus on, and remember information in a way that confirms our preconceptions or beliefs. Being aware of this, from both a brand owner and customer perspective, can help change behaviour in a positive way.
Conversion optimisation
A strategic approach that encourages users to convert into customers, or in more general sense, complete a desired action like registering or leaving a review. We use a range of strategies for conversion optimisation, including bolstering the brand experience, user experience, and reducing anxiety.
Copywriting
Put simply, copy is text. Thoughtful copy is often overlooked by startups and small businesses, it's easy to focus on visuals. But words make up a huge proportion of what we look at — websites, apps, advertising, and so on. Inconsistent, complex, or verbose copy instinctively reflects poorly on the brand. But considered copy with a good tone of voice reinforces it.
Development
The technical implementation consisting of front-end (what your customers see) and back-end (mechanics behind the scenes). We offer development expertise to build websites, meaning we can talk to your developers in their own language, creating UI that's designed for code.
Diminishing returns
The idea that the more you apply a treatment to a single problem, the less regular improvement you'll eventually see. Instead of putting all your resources to fix one problem, it's often more beneficial to look at a wider set of issues to manage the overall user experience.
Ecommerce
Buying and selling online. Typically as online stores, ecommerce elements can also be integrated within apps and other platforms. Physical and digital products, along with services, can be sold, usually requiring checkout and payment integrations.
Emotive triggers
Brands that connect with people at an emotional level will see higher rates of engagement. The strategy of building emotive triggers into designs, elements that evoke positive feelings, adds a human touch and more positive experience.
Eye path
The natural way our eyes move around a screen. We can alter user's eye path through careful design and layout, putting more emphasis on certain elements, actions, or important information.
Fragility
When an interface feels fragile, it loads additional negative effects on the overall user experience. A robust and polished flow tends to add value to an experience, giving users a better impression of your brand.
Friction
Anything on a page, or in a journey, that makes users slow down is friction. At best this causes frustration, but is also a major cause of abandonment. Identifying friction or pain points though auditing lets us find solutions that make fluid user experiences.
Funnel
If 100 people land on a landing page, only 10 might get to the end. As you move down a page (or though a series of screens), a good design will use techniques to funnel you into the right mindset to complete a desired action.
Gamification
Incorporating game-like elements within a non-game context, like a productivity app or online store. Strategies like creating a feeling of progression, using feedback and rewards, and social awareness can create habitual and sometimes addictive behaviour.
Handover
The stage of a project once we've finished design. We prepare everything in a clear and accessible way, ensuring nothing is lost in translation. Handover often consists of annotation, asset creation, moving UI into Zeplin, and talking with the development team.
Hierarchy
Organising content in a system that prioritises the most important elements first. We use hierarchy when looking at the architecture of a digital product, or layout of an interface. It means users don't have to search for what they need, and will never miss an important sell.
High fidelity
A way of describing user interface designs that are ready for the real world. High fidelity UI and artwork we design has a high level of polish, accuracy, and finish — giving developers everything they need for build.
Ikea Effect
Studies show that labour enhances affection. So when people construct products themselves, more value is attached to those creations. This could be putting together a Billy bookcase, but we can also use the technique to engage people within user interfaces.
Loss aversion
We intuitively want to avoid losses. Think FOMO, or the fear of missing out. Using this concept can help encourage users to do something — perhaps sign up, or finish checkout. Common examples include countdown timers or low stock warnings, but can be subtly incorporated through thoughtful design and copy too.
Mental model
Learned behaviour we expect to experience. We'll often complete actions without thinking, it's second nature. So when elements within an app or website don't behave as we expect, it can cause confusion and frustration. Being different is often advantageous, but sometimes using mental models for intuitive behaviour is good too.
Network effect
Social media is a great example of the network effect, where having more people in your network makes your experience becomes more valuable. If you're the only person in a group, there's not much value to being part of it. Launching products by targeting pre-existing networks, or making it easy to build new networks, can add value to your product.
Personality
A way of humanising a brand is to develop its personality. Part of this can be tangible through customer facing design: copywriting, tone of voice, and visual language. But we can also create an underlying set of principles that your whole team can get behind.
Positioning
A strategy for a brand or product to set itself apart from competitors, creating a unique space in the mind of customers. Positioning (or repositioning) is an important part of building or refining a brand identity, often forming the foundation of our approaches.
Priming
A strategy that prepares people to behave with a certain mindset. We can look at priming within content creation and copywriting strategies to encourage greater conversion rates.
Prototype
We use quick, iterative prototypes to test what we're designing in the context of a browser or a device. Our prototypes are interactive, so we can move through user flows, testing the usability and overall experience. We also use prototypes to share new designs directly with clients and developers, letting everyone understand the product in context.
Reciprocity
By nature, people look to repay favours from others. This unconscious response can often be encouraged through the unexpected: brands offering free gifts, surprise discounts, or building personalised services.
Refinement
Brands and products can be complex: Lots of moving parts and intelligent functionality can quickly result in a bloated user experience. Part of our role is finding ways to reduce and refine, creating straightforward user journeys that customers can get behind.
Responsive design
We access websites and apps from an increasingly wide range of devices, each with different screen sizes. Responsive design is about creating the best experience for all users, whether they're using an iPhone on the train, or large desktop in the office.
Scarcity
We instinctively fear loss. If shop only has one jumper left, it's likely to increase both the perceived value behind the jumper and our desire for it. It's the same if we're told 20 other people are looking at this jumper; we're likely to fear losing the opportunity to own it.
Second-order thinking
Priority boarding means less waiting. But if everyone makes the upgrade, you won't get on the plane any quicker. In fact, everyone will suffer more because of the additional fee. It's often tempting to copy what your competitors are doing, but this might not always be the wisest mindset.
Sketch
A piece of software we use to design user interfaces — from initial wireframes and user experience work, to fully fledged high fidelity designs ready for development. Sketch is purpose built for this, making responsive handover and implementation seamless.
Slack
A free app that lets you chat directly with us, without the need for email. We tend to have a different Slack channel for each client, keeping conversations direct and to the point. You can ask questions and get an instant response, and we can give support to direct to other members of your team, like project managers or developers.
Social assurance
We have a deep instinct to seek safety in numbers, so look for social guidance. We assume the actions of others are correct, so want to copy them. This makes things like reviews, testimonials, and customer statistics powerful ways to reduce anxiety and improve conversions.
Sprints
Sprints are a series of short periods we'll use to focus on a particular task, like brand or user experience. It's a fast, agile, and risk free approach that works for all budgets. Isolated sprints can be as quick as three days, or be part of a wider series of sprints that cover more areas.
Tone of voice
It's not what you say, it's the way that you say it. Tone of voice communicates the personality of your brand, a big part of the first impressions you make with customers. We can craft tone of voice through careful copywriting, but with visual design language too.
Trust
Users need to trust your brand. If you don't trust something or someone, you don't engage with them. We have a number of strategies to build trust, covering UX and UI. It's particularly important to reduce anxieties in sensitive markets, like health, finance, and education.
USP
Unique selling point. All brands have similarities, but it's important to focus on what makes your product or service stand out. Tell customers what's unique about your brand — what do you do differently? Why is it better? What are the benefits?
User experience (UX)
The overall experience we feel using a product, like a website or app. When we focus on UX, we make the user's experience as easy and enjoyable as possible. On a practical level, UX includes areas like user profiling, architecture, and small design tweaks. For this reason, it's closely related to user interface (UI) design.
User interface (UI)
The visual design users interact with in a digital product the user interface. Part of building a good user experience (UX) is designing a well considered user interface (UI), which is why we often use these two terms together. A poor interface results in a poor experience. A distinctive, polished UI makes a product more memorable.
User journey
Designing the series of steps a customer takes when using with your product. It's often a good strategy to reduce the number of steps it takes to complete a task, moving from A to B as quickly as possible. Although, this depends on context and demographic (eg. age).
User profiling
User profiles consist of attributes about the people who use your product or service: their demographic, unique requirements, expectations, anxieties, and so on. Building user profiles is often part of our early sprints, helping us understand how to design the most valuable solutions.
Value positive
We unconsciously apply value to things. A button that says "submit" is likely to be value negative — it implies the value behind the action is low. But we perceive elements that are actionable and informative to be value positive. A button that says "get started for free" is much more powerful, using strong copy and positivity to encourage behaviour.
Value proposition
A succinct phrase that clearly explains what your product or service is, and how it will benefit your customers. It should be positive and specific, giving customers an unquestionable first impression of your brand.
Variable rewards
We're naturally curious. Instead of predictable rewards or outcomes, we have a desire to search for new rewards when variability exists. Computer games are often built around this model — creating habitual and loyal behaviour.
Webfonts
We need a specific webfont or appfont licence to be able to use fonts on a website or app. These are optimised for display on screen rather than in print, and are an integral part of every design.
Zeplin
An app we use that makes handover of high-fidelity UI simple. It gives developers key information, like CSS styling values and dimensions. We annotate designs with functional requirements, with a transparent change-log to ensure everyone's on the same page.