"Finally, a design book that made me laugh while learning! The anti-patterns are so relatable - I've seen every single one in the wild."
Sarah Chen
Senior UX Designer
"The 'HiPPO' and 'Executive Seagull Effect' chapters should be required reading for every leadership team. Brilliant insights wrapped in humor."
Marcus Rodriguez
Product Manager
"I keep this book on my desk and reference it constantly. The memorable names make it easy to communicate design problems to the team."
Emily Smith
Frontend Developer
Making superficial changes to hide underlying problems.
Lipstick on a pig describes the act of superficially improving the visual appearance of a product or feature, without address…
The phrase comes from an old American saying: “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” In other words, no…
Business in front, chaos in back.
Mullet UI refers to an interface that’s all “flash and show” up front, but clunky, outdated, or neglected in the back. …
The metaphor comes from the mullet hairstyle popular in the ’80s and ’90s: neat and professional in the front, long and w…
Prioritizing aesthetics over functionality in design.
Dribbblization describes a design trend where interfaces prioritize aesthetic polish and flashy visuals over usability, clari…
The term comes from Dribbble, the popular online community where designers share beautiful, high-fidelity visuals. While grea…
Imitating design trends without understanding their purpose.
Cargo cult UX describes the practice of copying design patterns, UI elements, or user flows from other products, often popula…
The term comes from “cargo cults” observed in the South Pacific after World War II. Islanders built wooden replicas of ai…
Obsessing over tiny visual details while missing bigger UX issues.
Pixel peeping refers to the obsessive examination of a design at an extreme level of detail, scrutinizing every pixel, alignm…
The term comes from photography, where enthusiasts “pixel peep” by zooming all the way in on a high-resolution image to e…
A patchwork of mismatched elements.
Frankenstein design refers to a user interface or experience that feels stitched together from mismatched parts, often incons…
The term comes from the 1931 Universal film “Frankenstein”, based on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, where the makeu…
Placeholder content hiding real content problems.
The Lorem Ipsum Trap refers to the mistake of designing and evaluating interfaces with placeholder text, like the classic “…
Lorem Ipsum originates from a first-century BC Latin text by Marcus Tullius Cicero called “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum”…
Pages or apps that look full but offer no useful content.
Empty Fridge Syndrome describes the disappointing experience users have when they first open a newly installed app or sign in…
The metaphor comes from the feeling of opening your fridge expecting to find something delicious, only to see bare shelves an…
Users feel lost in a confusing interface.
Dark Forest UX describes a user experience that feels inscrutable, unpredictable, or even threatening, much like wandering th…
The phrase comes from Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel The Dark Forest, where the universe is compared to a dark forest full of hid…
Close-to-human design feels creepy instead of natural.
The “uncanny valley” is that unsettling gap between almost human and human. In UX and product design, it’s the moment w…
The term was coined in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist. Mori observed that as robots became more human-like, peo…
Doing endless small tasks to reach your real goal.
Yak shaving describes the endless, sometimes absurd chain of small, unexpected tasks that you end up doing when trying to com…
The term comes from a humorous anecdote about needing to shave a yak before you can finish a completely unrelated task, coine…
Debating tiny details while missing the big picture.
Bike shedding refers to the tendency of teams to spend disproportionate more time and energy debating trivial or easy-to-unde…
The UX metaphor ”bike shedding” originates from C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 book, ”Parkinson’s Law,” and specif…
Talking it out makes the solution obvious.
Rubber ducking is the practice of explaining a problem aloud, often to someone (or something) else, to clarify your own think…
The term comes from software engineering, popularized by the book The Pragmatic Programmer, where a developer keeps a rubber …
Deliberately underperforming to create a more favorable future outcome.
Sandbagging describes the practice of deliberately lowering expectations or under-promising on what a design, feature, or tea…
The term comes from gambling, where a player might pretend to have a weak hand to lull opponents into a false sense of securi…
Align design with actual usage and habits.
Paving the cow path happens when you formalize and reinforce an existing user behavior or process, rather than designing a co…
The phrase paving the cow path comes from urban planning. In cities and campuses, planners noticed that pedestrians and cycli…
Accumulation of inconsistencies and design issues over time.
Design debt is the accumulation of shortcuts, inconsistencies, and outdated patterns in a product’s user experience over ti…
The concept is borrowed from technical debt, a term coined by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s to describe the cost of quick-and-…
Constantly fixing small problems without solving the root cause.
Whack-a-Mole describes a frustrating pattern where fixing one usability problem seems to create another, often in a different…
The term comes from the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, where players hit one mole back into its hole, only to have another pop up s…
Users jumping back and forth because navigation is confusing.
Pogo sticking describes the frustrating user behavior of repeatedly jumping back and forth between a main page and individual…
The term comes from search engine optimization (SEO) and user behavior analytics, where it refers to visitors clicking into a…
Users think the system is automated, but it’s manual behind the scenes.
Wizard of Oz testing is a research method where users interact with what they believe is a fully functioning product or syste…
The name comes from the children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum where the powerful “wizard” is reveal…
A graveyard of failed experiments.
The A/B Cemetery is where all those countless tests go to die, forgotten, undocumented, and often unreconciled with product s…
The phrase plays on the idea of a graveyard for A/B tests. In data-driven product cultures, it’s easy to run lots of experi…
Executives make sweeping changes without understanding the details.
The executive seagull effect describes a situation where a senior leader swoops into a design discussion at the last minute, …
The term is inspired by the behavior of actual seagulls: they suddenly appear, squawk noisily, flap around, leave behind a me…
Using your own product to find flaws before your users do.
Dogfooding is the practice of a company using its own product in real-world conditions, just like its customers would. It’s…
The phrase comes from the saying “eat your own dog food,” which likely originated in the pet food industry to suggest a c…
The ideal scenario where everything goes as planned.
The happy path refers to the ideal, friction-free journey a user takes through your product when everything works perfectly, …
The term comes from software testing, where the “happy path” describes the sequence of actions that completes a process s…
The journey where errors and failures appear.
A sad path is the scenario where something goes wrong in a user’s journey, whether it’s an error, invalid input, unexpect…
The term comes from software development, where engineers describe the happy path as the ideal, expected flow through a syste…
Believing that others share your opinions and behaviors.
The false consensus effect is the tendency to assume that others share your opinions, beliefs, and preferences more than they…
The term comes from social psychology research in the late 1970s, when Lee Ross and colleagues found that people routinely ov…
Decisions are made by a group, leading to diluted ideas.
“Design by committee” happens when too many voices get equal weight in the design process, and instead of a clear vision,…
The phrase comes from the political and bureaucratic world, where decisions are made by groups rather than individuals. It’…
Creating a false sense of user involvement through staged interactions.
UX Theater is when a team goes through the motions of doing user experience work, but without improving the experience. It’…
The phrase borrows from “security theater” in cybersecurity, a set of actions meant to make people feel safer without imp…
Rolling out features to a small group before everyone else.
A canary release is a deployment strategy where you roll out a new feature or version to a small subset of users first, like …
The term comes from an old mining practice: coal miners would bring caged canaries underground because the birds were more se…
“Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” rules the room, not data.
HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It describes the all-too-common situation where decisions about design, pro…
The acronym HiPPO became popular in the early 2000s in the context of data-driven decision-making. As analytics and user rese…
Small design flaws signal neglect and make the whole product feel untrustworthy.
Broken Windows UX happens when small, visible flaws in an interface, like typos, misaligned elements, or inconsistent colors,…
The term borrows from the “broken windows theory” in criminology and urban planning, popularized by James Q. Wilson and G…
Sticking with something because you’ve already invested in it.
Sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to keep investing time, effort, or money into something, just because you’ve already inve…
The concept comes from economics and behavioral psychology. Rationally, past costs (sunk costs) should not affect current dec…
Only seeing what you already believe.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms what we already believe, while ignoring or discounting e…
Confirmation bias is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, first explored in the 1960s by cognitive psychologist Peter …
Letting the first number or idea set the tone for everything else.
Anchoring bias happens when people rely too heavily on the first piece of information they see, the “anchor”, when making…
Anchoring bias was first named and studied by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s, as part of their g…
First impressions stick, sometimes too stubbornly.
Primacy bias describes how people tend to remember and be influenced more by the first items in a sequence than by those that…
Primacy bias comes from cognitive psychology research on memory, specifically the serial-position effect, first identified by…
Latest events overshadow all previous evidence.
Recency bias is the tendency for people to weigh the most recent information or experience more heavily than earlier ones, so…
Recency bias is also part of the serial-position effect, a psychological principle identified by Hermann Ebbinghaus and later…
More choices = slower decisions (and more user stress).
Hick’s Law describes how the time it takes a user to decide increases with the number (and complexity) of choices presented…
Named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick, who, along with Ray Hyman, formulated the principle in the 1950s. Their…