Design & Growth Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the product design, UX, branding, and growth terms we use every day. 40 terms, A to Z — a quick reference for founders and product teams.
A
B
C
Churn
The rate at which users or customers stop using a product or cancel over a given period — the inverse of retention.
Component Library
A collection of reusable, pre-built UI elements — buttons, inputs, cards, modals — shared across a product to speed up and standardize design.
Conversion Funnel
The staged path users take toward a goal — visit, sign up, activate, pay — where measuring drop-off at each step reveals where to improve.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The systematic practice of increasing the share of users who take a desired action, through testing and iterative improvement of the experience.
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
Design Debt
The accumulated cost of inconsistent, outdated, or shortcut design decisions that make a product harder to use and slower to evolve.
Design Retainer
An ongoing engagement where a client reserves a set amount of design capacity each month, rather than paying per fixed-scope 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, reusable variable for a design decision — a color, spacing, or type value — that keeps design and code in sync from one source.
E
G
H
I
Information Architecture
The structural design of a product's content and navigation — how information is organized, labeled, and grouped so people can find it.
Interaction Design
Designing the moment-to-moment behavior of an interface — how it responds to input, transitions between states, and gives feedback.
M
Mockup
A high-fidelity, static representation of a screen showing the final visual design — real colors, type, and content — but without interactivity.
Motion Design
The use of animation and transitions in an interface to guide attention, explain change, and give a product a sense of life and quality.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
The smallest version of a product that delivers real value to early users, built to learn from the market with the least effort.
N
O
P
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 stage at which a product satisfies a strong market demand so well that usage, retention, and word-of-mouth grow on their own.
Prototyping
Building an interactive, clickable model of a product so a flow can be experienced and tested before it is engineered.
R
S
Service Design
Designing the entire experience of a service across every touchpoint and channel — digital and human — not just a single screen or app.
Sitemap
A diagram of all the pages in a website or app and how they relate hierarchically — the blueprint of its structure and navigation.
Style Guide
A reference document defining a brand or product's visual rules — colors, typography, logo usage, spacing, and tone — for consistent application.
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
A map of the sequence of steps and decisions a user moves through to complete a task, from entry point to goal.
User Persona
A research-based, semi-fictional profile of a target user — their goals, context, and frustrations — used to keep design decisions grounded.
User Research
The systematic study of users' needs, behaviors, and pain points — through interviews, surveys, and observation — to ground design in evidence.
UX Audit
A structured expert review of a product's user experience that identifies usability problems and prioritizes fixes by impact.
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.