The false consensus effect is the tendency to assume that others share your opinions, beliefs, and preferences more than they do. In UX research, it shows up when small groups, whether participants, stakeholders, or even the design team, mistake their limited perspective for “what users want.”
A sad path is the scenario where something goes wrong in a user’s journey, whether it’s an error, invalid input, unexpected behavior, or a dead end. In UX, designing for the sad path means accounting for mistakes, edge cases, and failures gracefully, so users can recover without frustration.
The happy path refers to the ideal, friction-free journey a user takes through your product when everything works perfectly, no errors, no edge cases, no unexpected detours. It’s the “best case scenario” that your design or flow is intended to support.
Dogfooding is the practice of a company using its own product in real-world conditions, just like its customers would. It’s a way for teams to experience the product firsthand, uncover issues early, and demonstrate confidence in what they’re building.
The executive seagull effect describes a situation where a senior leader swoops into a design discussion at the last minute, makes loud, disruptive critiques, drops sweeping changes, often without context or understanding, and then flies away, leaving the team to clean up the mess. It’s a vivid metaphor for leadership involvement that feels random, superficial, and demoralizing.
The A/B Cemetery is where all those countless tests go to die, forgotten, undocumented, and often unreconciled with product strategy. It’s what happens when teams run experiments but fail to learn from them, act on them, or even remember they happened.
Wizard of Oz testing is a research method where users interact with what they believe is a fully functioning product or system, but behind the scenes, a human is performing some or all the work. It’s a clever way to test ideas quickly without having to build full functionality yet.
Pogo sticking describes the frustrating user behavior of repeatedly jumping back and forth between a main page and individual items in a list, like bouncing up and down on a pogo stick, because they can’t find what they need or navigate efficiently. It’s a sign of poor information scent, weak previews, or a lack of helpful context.
Whack-a-Mole describes a frustrating pattern where fixing one usability problem seems to create another, often in a different part of the system. It’s what happens when you address symptoms instead of root causes, leaving teams trapped in an endless cycle of reactive fixes.
Design debt is the accumulation of shortcuts, inconsistencies, and outdated patterns in a product’s user experience over time. Like financial debt, it lets you move faster in the short term, but if left unpaid, it compounds into a bigger, messier problem that slows you down and frustrates users.