About UX Dictionary
We're an independent design publication and a living glossary — for the people who research, design and build digital products, and for everyone trying to make sense of the language around them.
Design has a vocabulary problem. Terms like affordance, information architecture, design token and heuristic evaluation get thrown around in critiques and job specs, but the meanings drift, overlap and collect jargon until they stop being useful.
UX Dictionary exists to fix that. We write clear definitions that say what a term actually means, essays that go deeper on the ideas behind good UX and UI, and practical breakdowns of patterns, research methods and design systems — so the words you use map to the work you do.
What we publish
- 01
UX Design — Flows, usability, information architecture and the craft of making products easy to use.
- 02
UI & Visual — Layout, color, typography and components — the visual language of interfaces.
- 03
UX Research — User research, usability testing, personas and turning insight into better design.
- 04
Design Systems — Tokens, components, documentation and scaling design across a product.
- 05
Craft & Career — Process, collaboration, portfolios and growing as a designer.
How we work
Definitions you can actually use
Every glossary entry leads with a plain, jargon-free meaning, then shows how the term plays out in real product work — not a textbook footnote.
Show the craft, not just the theory
We pair concepts with concrete examples, patterns and trade-offs, so a definition turns into something you can apply in your next design review.
Independent and opinionated
We have points of view about good and bad design, and we say so. No vendor decides what lands on the page or how a tool gets described.
Kept current
Language, tooling and best practice in design move fast. We revisit entries and essays and stamp them with the date they were last reviewed.
Want to know who writes the entries? Meet our contributors, or send the desk a message.