The Hitchhiker's Guide to Design

Lipstick on a Pig

Lipstick on a pig describes the act of superficially improving the visual appearance of a product or feature, without address…

Origin

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…

Mullet UI

Mullet UI refers to an interface that’s all “flash and show” up front, but clunky, outdated, or neglected in the back. …

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Dribbblization

Dribbblization describes a design trend where interfaces prioritize aesthetic polish and flashy visuals over usability, clari…

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Cargo Cult UX

Cargo cult UX describes the practice of copying design patterns, UI elements, or user flows from other products, often popula…

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Pixel Peeping

Pixel peeping refers to the obsessive examination of a design at an extreme level of detail, scrutinizing every pixel, alignm…

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Frankenstein Design

Frankenstein design refers to a user interface or experience that feels stitched together from mismatched parts, often incons…

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Lorem ipsum trap

The Lorem Ipsum Trap refers to the mistake of designing and evaluating interfaces with placeholder text, like the classic “…

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Empty Fridge Syndrome

Empty Fridge Syndrome describes the disappointing experience users have when they first open a newly installed app or sign in…

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Dark Forest UX

Dark Forest UX describes a user experience that feels inscrutable, unpredictable, or even threatening, much like wandering th…

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Uncanny Valley

The “uncanny valley” is that unsettling gap between almost human and human. In UX and product design, it’s the moment w…

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Yak Shaving

Yak shaving describes the endless, sometimes absurd chain of small, unexpected tasks that you end up doing when trying to com…

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Bike Shedding

Bike shedding refers to the tendency of teams to spend disproportionate more time and energy debating trivial or easy-to-unde…

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Rubber Ducking

Rubber ducking is the practice of explaining a problem aloud, often to someone (or something) else, to clarify your own think…

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Sandbagging

Sandbagging describes the practice of deliberately lowering expectations or under-promising on what a design, feature, or tea…

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Paving the Cow Path

Paving the cow path happens when you formalize and reinforce an existing user behavior or process, rather than designing a co…

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Design Debt

Design debt is the accumulation of shortcuts, inconsistencies, and outdated patterns in a product’s user experience over ti…

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Whack-a-mole

Whack-a-Mole describes a frustrating pattern where fixing one usability problem seems to create another, often in a different…

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Pogo Sticking

Pogo sticking describes the frustrating user behavior of repeatedly jumping back and forth between a main page and individual…

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Wizard of Oz Testing

Wizard of Oz testing is a research method where users interact with what they believe is a fully functioning product or syste…

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A/B Cemetery

The A/B Cemetery is where all those countless tests go to die, forgotten, undocumented, and often unreconciled with product s…

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Executive Seagull Effect

The executive seagull effect describes a situation where a senior leader swoops into a design discussion at the last minute, …

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Dogfooding

Dogfooding is the practice of a company using its own product in real-world conditions, just like its customers would. It’s…

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Happy Path

The happy path refers to the ideal, friction-free journey a user takes through your product when everything works perfectly, …

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Sad Path

A sad path is the scenario where something goes wrong in a user’s journey, whether it’s an error, invalid input, unexpect…

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False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is the tendency to assume that others share your opinions, beliefs, and preferences more than they…

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Design by Committee

“Design by committee” happens when too many voices get equal weight in the design process, and instead of a clear vision,…

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UX Theater

UX Theater is when a team goes through the motions of doing user experience work, but without improving the experience. It’…

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Canary Release

A canary release is a deployment strategy where you roll out a new feature or version to a small subset of users first, like …

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HiPPO

HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It describes the all-too-common situation where decisions about design, pro…

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Broken Windows UX

Broken Windows UX happens when small, visible flaws in an interface, like typos, misaligned elements, or inconsistent colors,…

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Sunk Cost Fallacy

Sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to keep investing time, effort, or money into something, just because you’ve already inve…

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Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms what we already believe, while ignoring or discounting e…

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Anchoring Bias

Anchoring bias happens when people rely too heavily on the first piece of information they see, the “anchor”, when making…

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Primacy Bias

Primacy bias describes how people tend to remember and be influenced more by the first items in a sequence than by those that…

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Recency Bias

Recency bias is the tendency for people to weigh the most recent information or experience more heavily than earlier ones, so…

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Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law describes how the time it takes a user to decide increases with the number (and complexity) of choices presented…

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