Design & Growth Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the product design, UX, branding, and growth terms we use every day. 121 terms, A to Z — a quick reference for founders and product teams.
A
A/B Testing
Comparing two versions of a design by showing each to a slice of live traffic and measuring which drives the target metric better.
Accessibility Audit
A structured evaluation of a product against WCAG, producing a list of failures with severity, location and a route to fixing each one.
Accordion (UI)
A stack of headers that expand to reveal content one section at a time, used to compress long pages into a scannable list.
Activation
The moment a new user first experiences the product's core value — the milestone that separates a signup from a real user.
Affinity Mapping
Grouping raw research observations until themes emerge from the data rather than from the team's assumptions.
AI Product Design
Designing products whose behaviour is probabilistic — where the system can be confidently wrong and the interface has to account for it.
Alert
An in-page message about something needing attention — persistent, placed where it applies, and dismissed only when resolved.
ARPU
Average revenue per user or account over a period — the numerator in most unit-economics calculations, and the one most often averaged badly.
Atomic Design
A methodology that organises an interface into five levels — atoms, molecules, organisms, templates and pages — so components compose predictably.
Avatar
A small image or initials standing for a person or an organisation, used to make ownership and presence scannable.
B
Badge
A small, non-interactive marker showing a status or a count.
Banner
A full-width message at the top of a page or app, for conditions affecting everything below it.
Brand Identity
The visual and verbal system that makes a company recognizable — logo, color, type, imagery, and voice, applied consistently.
Breadcrumb
A trail showing where the current page sits in a hierarchy, and a way back up it.
Bulk Actions
Selecting many records and doing one thing to all of them — and designing what happens when it works for most but not all.
Button Design
Designing the appearance, hierarchy, states, and labels of buttons so people can tell what is clickable and which action matters most.
C
Card
A bounded container grouping related content about one thing — useful for scanning, expensive in vertical space.
Card Sorting
A research method where participants group your content into categories, revealing the mental model they already hold.
Checkbox
A control for independent on/off choices — any number of which can be selected at once, including none.
Chip (UI)
A compact element representing an input, filter, selection or attribute — small, often removable, and usually appearing in groups.
Churn
The rate at which users or customers stop using a product or cancel over a given period — the inverse of retention.
Color System
The palette plus the rules for applying it — semantic roles, contrast requirements, and the values behind each mode.
Combobox
A text input joined to a filtered list — for choosing from more options than anyone should scroll through.
Command Palette
A keyboard-summoned overlay that searches actions and destinations at once — the power-user route through a dense product.
Component Instance
A copy of a component that stays connected to its source, so a change at the source reaches every place the component is used.
Component Library
A collection of built, reusable interface elements — buttons, inputs, modals — that designers and engineers assemble screens from.
Concept Testing
Putting an idea in front of the people it is for, before it is built, to find out whether it is worth building.
Confirmshaming
A dark pattern that words or styles the option to decline so it makes the person feel foolish or guilty for choosing it.
Contextual Inquiry
Watching someone work in their own environment, with their own data and interruptions, and asking about it as they go.
Conversion Funnel
The sequence of steps between first contact and a target action, measured at each stage to show where people drop out.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The practice of systematically raising the share of visitors who take a target action, using research, hypotheses, and controlled tests.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
The fully loaded cost of winning one new customer — all sales and marketing spend divided by the customers it produced.
Customer Journey Map
A visualization of the full experience a customer has with a product or brand over time, stage by stage, including actions, emotions, and pain points.
D
Dark Patterns
Interface designs that steer people into choices they would not make if the options were presented plainly, usually to lift a short-term metric.
Data Table
A grid of rows and columns for scanning, comparing and acting on records — the component most B2B products are built around.
Date Picker
A calendar control for selecting dates — the component most often used where a plain text input would serve better.
Design Debt
Accumulated inconsistency and shortcuts in a product's interface that slow every future change, the design equivalent of technical debt.
Design Retainer
An ongoing agreement where a client reserves a fixed amount of design capacity each month, rather than buying a one-off project.
Design Sprint
A time-boxed process — classically five days — that runs a big product question from idea to a tested prototype with real users.
Design System
A single source of truth for a product's UI — reusable components, tokens, patterns, and guidelines that keep design consistent and fast.
Design Thinking
A human-centered problem-solving framework that moves through empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test to reach validated solutions.
Design Token
A named value for a design decision — a color, spacing step, or type size — stored once and used everywhere instead of a raw value.
Diary Study
Asking participants to record their own experience over days or weeks, capturing behaviour that no single session can show.
Drawer (UI)
A panel sliding in from an edge, keeping the page behind it visible — for work that needs its context.
Drip Pricing
A dark pattern that advertises a low headline price and reveals mandatory fees, minimums or surcharges only as the person moves through checkout.
Dropdown (UI)
A control that reveals a list of options on demand — used for selecting a value, or as a menu of actions.
E
Embedded Design Team
External designers who work inside a client's product team — their rituals, tools, and roadmap — rather than delivering from outside.
Empty State
What a screen shows when it has nothing to show — the first screen of every new account and the least designed one.
Error State
What a screen shows when something failed — the screen most often left to whoever was implementing it at the time.
European Accessibility Act
The EU directive that made digital accessibility a legal requirement for products and services sold to European consumers.
F
False Urgency
A dark pattern that invents time pressure or scarcity, such as countdowns that reset or stock warnings that are not true, to rush a decision.
File Upload
The control for getting a file from a person's machine into a product — and the place where most products lose the work silently.
Filter (UI)
Controls that narrow a set of records — and the much harder job of keeping what was narrowed visible.
Forced Continuity
A dark pattern in which a free trial or introductory period turns into a paid subscription without a clear reminder or an easy way to stop it first.
Form Design
Designing the fields, sequence, validation and error handling of a form so people can complete it without stopping to think.
G
Generative UI
Interfaces assembled at runtime by a model, rather than laid out in advance by a designer.
Grid System
The columns, gutters, and margins a layout is built on — the structure that decides where things can go before anybody decides what goes there.
Growth Design
Design work aimed directly at business metrics — acquisition, activation, retention — run as a series of measured experiments.
H
I
Icon Library
The set of icons a product draws from — chosen once, for coverage and licence, and hard to change later.
Inclusive Design
Designing for the full range of human variation, treating exclusion as a design outcome rather than an edge case.
Information Architecture
The structure of a product's content and functionality — how things are grouped, labeled, and connected so people can find them.
Input Field
The control a person types into — the most-used element in most B2B products and the one where small decisions cost the most.
Interaction Design
Designing the moment-to-moment behavior of an interface — how it responds to input, transitions between states, and gives feedback.
J
L
Lifetime Value (LTV)
The total gross profit a customer is expected to generate before they leave — the ceiling on what acquiring them can be worth.
Link
The control that navigates somewhere — distinct from a button, which performs an action, and confused with one in most products.
Loading Spinner
An indeterminate progress indicator shown while a system is working and cannot say how long it will take.
LTV:CAC Ratio
What a customer is worth against what they cost to acquire — the headline test of whether growth creates value.
M
Mockup
A static, high-fidelity picture of a screen — final colors, type, and imagery — showing exactly how the interface will look.
Modal Design
Designing dialogs that interrupt the page to demand a decision — when to use one, what it must contain, and how a person gets out.
Motion Design
Designing how an interface moves — transitions, feedback, and animation that explain change and make a product feel responsive.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Minimum viable product — the smallest version of a product that delivers real value and lets a team learn whether the idea works.
N
O
P
Pagination (UI)
Splitting a long list across pages, with controls to move between them — the alternative to infinite scroll and load-more.
Popover
A small overlay anchored to the control that opened it, holding content or actions without blocking the page.
Preference Testing
Showing people two or more designs and asking which they prefer and why — useful for direction, unreliable as a decision.
Preselection
A dark pattern that sets a default the person did not choose, such as a pre-ticked paid add-on or the most expensive plan, and relies on them not changing it.
Product Design
End-to-end design ownership of a digital product — from user research and strategy through UX, UI, and shipping — tied to business outcomes.
Product-Market Fit
The point where a product satisfies a real market need well enough that demand pulls growth rather than sales pushing it.
Progress Bar
A determinate indicator showing how much of a known task is done — usable only when the total is actually known.
Prompt Design
Designing what a product asks a model, and what it asks the user — the interface layer around a prompt, not just the wording of one.
Prototyping
Building an interactive, clickable model of a product so a flow can be experienced and tested before it is engineered.
R
Radio Button
A control for choosing exactly one option from a visible, mutually exclusive set.
Research Repository
A searchable store of research findings and their evidence, so what a team already learned can be found again.
Retention
The share of users or customers still active after a given period — the clearest signal that a product delivers ongoing value.
Roach Motel
A dark pattern that makes getting into a subscription or account easy and getting out of it deliberately hard, usually through a cancellation maze.
S
Screen Reader Testing
Operating a product with a screen reader to find what assistive technology actually announces, which is the half of accessibility no scanner reaches.
Search (UI)
The control and the results behind it — where people go when they know what they want and cannot find it.
Segmented Control
A small row of mutually exclusive options that switches how a view is shown, not what it contains.
Service Design
Designing the entire experience of a service across every touchpoint and channel — digital and human — not just a single screen or app.
Sidebar Navigation
A vertical navigation column that scales to real product structure — grouping, nesting and staying visible while you work.
Sitemap
A structured map of every page or screen in a product or site and how they relate — the blueprint of its information architecture.
Skeleton Loading
Placeholder shapes matching the layout of content that is still loading, shown instead of a spinner so the page keeps its structure.
Slider
A control for selecting a value along a range — precise enough for approximations, and wrong wherever an exact number matters.
Spacing Scale
The fixed set of gaps, padding, and margin values a product is allowed to use — usually built on a 4 or 8 pixel base.
Status Indicator
A persistent signal of a system or record's current condition — distinct from a message about something that just happened.
Stepper (UI)
A control that breaks a task into ordered steps and shows where somebody is in the sequence.
Style Guide
A document defining a brand's visual and verbal rules — logo use, color, type, imagery, and tone — so anyone can apply them consistently.
T
Tabs (UI)
A row of labels that switch between alternative views of the same object, showing one panel at a time.
Toast Notification
A brief message that appears over the interface to confirm an action or report a problem, then disappears on its own.
Toggle Switch
A control for a setting that is on or off and takes effect immediately.
Tooltip
A small label appearing on hover or focus, explaining a control without taking space from the interface.
Tree Testing
Testing whether people can find things in a proposed structure, using a bare text hierarchy with no design, navigation or search.
Typography Scale
The fixed set of text sizes a product is allowed to use, and the line heights and weights that travel with each one.
U
UI Design
The craft of the visual and interactive surface of a product — layout, type, color, spacing, and components users see and touch.
Usability Testing
Watching real users attempt real tasks in a product or prototype to find where they struggle, hesitate, or fail.
User Flow
The step-by-step path a person takes through a product to complete a task, including the decisions, branches, and dead ends along the way.
User Interview
A structured conversation with someone who uses or might use a product, aimed at understanding their situation rather than collecting opinions.
User Persona
A research-based profile of a target user type — their goals, context, and constraints — used to keep design decisions grounded in real people.
User Research
Systematic study of users' goals, behaviors, and context — the evidence that turns design decisions from opinion into judgment.
UX Audit
A structured review of an existing product that identifies usability problems and ranks them by impact, producing a prioritized plan.
UX Design
The practice of shaping how a product feels to use — its flows, structure, and logic — so people reach their goal with the least friction.
V
Vibe Coding
Building software by describing what you want to an AI model and steering the result, rather than writing the code yourself.
Visual Design
The craft of how a product looks — type, color, space, imagery, and composition working together to create clarity and character.
VPAT
The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template — the document enterprise procurement asks for before a deal closes.