Read the notes, then try the practice. It adapts as you go.When you're ready.
Session Length
~17 min
Adaptive Checks
15 questions
Transfer Probes
8
UI/UX design is the discipline of crafting digital products and experiences that are both visually appealing and intuitively usable. User Interface (UI) design focuses on the look and feel of a product, encompassing layout, typography, color schemes, iconography, and interactive elements that users directly engage with. User Experience (UX) design takes a broader view, addressing the entire journey a person takes when interacting with a product, from initial discovery through task completion, ensuring that every touchpoint is efficient, accessible, and satisfying.
The field draws on principles from cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, visual communication, and information architecture. Pioneered by researchers such as Don Norman, who coined the term 'user experience' at Apple in the 1990s, and Jakob Nielsen, whose usability heuristics remain a cornerstone of evaluation methodology, UI/UX design has evolved from a niche specialty into a central function within product development teams. The design thinking framework, popularized by IDEO and Stanford's d.school, provides a structured process of empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing.
Today, UI/UX design shapes nearly every digital interaction, from mobile applications and websites to enterprise software and voice interfaces. Practitioners use tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD to create wireframes, prototypes, and design systems. The discipline increasingly intersects with accessibility standards (WCAG), motion design, design tokens, and data-driven experimentation through A/B testing. As products become more complex and user expectations rise, the demand for designers who can bridge aesthetic excellence with measurable usability outcomes continues to grow.
One step at a time.
A design philosophy and process that places the needs, behaviors, and limitations of end users at the center of every stage of the design process, from research through evaluation.
Example: Before redesigning a checkout flow, a team conducts user interviews, creates personas, and runs usability tests with real customers to ensure the new design solves actual pain points.
The structural design of shared information environments, concerned with organizing, labeling, and categorizing content so users can find what they need and understand where they are within a product.
Example: An e-commerce site uses card sorting studies to determine that users expect 'Gift Cards' under 'Shop' rather than 'Account,' then restructures the navigation accordingly.
Wireframing creates low-fidelity skeletal outlines of a page's layout and content hierarchy. Prototyping builds interactive simulations of the product, ranging from clickable mockups to high-fidelity functional demos, enabling testing before development.
Example: A designer creates a low-fidelity wireframe in Figma showing the placement of a search bar, filters, and product grid, then links screens together into a clickable prototype for usability testing.
A set of broad principles for evaluating interface design, most famously Jakob Nielsen's 10 heuristics, which include visibility of system status, match between system and real world, user control and freedom, consistency, error prevention, and recognition over recall.
Example: A heuristic evaluation reveals that a web application violates 'visibility of system status' because it provides no loading indicator or progress bar when processing a file upload.
A comprehensive collection of reusable components, patterns, guidelines, and principles that ensure consistency and efficiency across a product or family of products. Design systems typically include a component library, design tokens, and documentation.
Example: Google's Material Design system provides standardized button styles, spacing rules, elevation guidelines, and motion specifications that keep all Google products visually and behaviorally consistent.
The practice of designing products that can be used by people of all abilities and disabilities, following guidelines such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). This includes considerations for visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments.
Example: A designer ensures all interactive elements have a minimum color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 against their background, adds alt text to images, and verifies that the entire interface is navigable by keyboard alone.
The design of the behavior of interactive products, focusing on how users engage with interfaces through actions like clicking, swiping, scrolling, and gesturing. It defines how a system responds to user input and communicates state changes.
Example: When a user swipes left on an email in a mobile app, a red 'Delete' action slides into view with a smooth animation, providing clear affordance and reversibility with an 'Undo' toast notification.
Systematic investigation of users and their requirements through methods such as interviews, surveys, contextual inquiry, diary studies, and analytics analysis. User research informs design decisions with evidence rather than assumptions.
Example: A research team conducts a diary study where 20 participants log their daily interactions with a fitness app over two weeks, revealing that most users abandon workout tracking after the third day due to tedious data entry.
More terms are available in the glossary.
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