UX Deliverables: Glossary - NN/G

Introducing NN/G Membership | Access all self-paced courses for $249 per year | Join by Jan. 26, 2027 |
Find the training option that fits your learning style.
August 9, 2024 2024-08-09
In UX, a deliverable is a document that serves as a record of work that has occurred.
UX practitioners produce a wide range of deliverables to communicate design ideas, research findings, and the context of projects to various audiences. Juggling all these different deliverables requires knowledge and understanding of many jargon terms. Use this glossary as a reference as you navigate various UX deliverables throughout a project’s lifecycle.
Jump to a definition in the table or review the complete glossary.
Feasibility, Desirability, and Viability Scorecard
Hierarchical Task-Analysis (HTA) Diagram
Impact–Effort Matrix
Prototype Specification
In our self-paced deliverables course, learn how to fight the urge to create perfect deliverables every time and to use the right deliverable for the right situation.
The clustering of information, often using sticky notes, into relational groups based on similarities or themes.
A data report that describes what users do with a live product, such as their navigation paths, feature engagement, traffic sources, and exit points. This information can help monitor the performance of various content, UIs, or features in a product and identify what doesn’t work.
A representation of a user group that could misuse a product in ways that negatively impact target users and the business.
An abstract representation of a user type, summarizing behaviors, attitudes, motivations, pain points, and goals without specific personal details like names or photos.
A high-level, chronological method of displaying and organizing all the screens and elements users encounter across channels when completing a workflow or journey, to assess its consistency.
Visualization of the users’ experience over time. There are 3 types of chronological maps: experience map, service blueprint, and user-journey map.
A visual representation of a person’s (or a group’s) mental model for a process or concept. Cognitive mapping is free-form and can include numerous visualization methods, including bulleted lists, flowcharts, concept maps, mind maps, or affinity diagrams.
A graph in which nodes represent concepts and labeled, directed edges illustrate relationships between them.
An evaluation of the quality of the content listed in a content inventory. Content audits uncover content that needs updating, gaps for new content, and whether certain pieces of content are ready for removal.
A list of every piece of digital content you currently have, captured at either the page or asset level. It includes specific characteristics about each piece.
A framework created by Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt, and the team at Livework São Paulo for outlining and visualizing what everyone involved in a project knows (Certainties), hypothesizes (Suppositions), and doesn't know yet (Doubts).
A collection of data visualizations, presented in a single-page view that imparts at-a-glance information on which users can act quickly.
A complete set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns.
A visual representation of the people, organizations, products, and services that a user may interact with during a particular experience.
A collaborative visualization used to articulate what is known about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to create a shared understanding of user needs and aid in decision making.
A visualization of an entire end-to-end experience that a “generic” person goes through to accomplish a goal. This experience does not involve a specific business or product. An experience map is used for understanding a general human behavior (as opposed to a customer-journey map, which is more specific and focused on a specific business).
A prioritization method developed by IDEO that ranks items based on a sum of individual scores across feasibility, desirability, and viability.
An expansion of the themes that a UX team owns on the product roadmap. It represents all future problems to be solved by UX (for example, related to design, research, or content) but does not include problems outside of UX (for example, in marketing, development, and support).
A graphical representation of task analysis that breaks down a user’s process of achieving a goal into tasks and subtasks, illustrating the sequence and structure of actions needed to achieve that goal.
A 2D-visual that plots relative user value against implementation complexity.
A high-fidelity map that utilizes UI-design software to add interactive elements like revealing user-research data alongside specific findings or showing specific elements.
A guiding document used in structured interviews that lists interview questions and helps provide focus to the interview.
A framework based on the idea that whenever users “hire” (i.e., use) a product, they do it for a specific “job” (i.e., to achieve a particular outcome). The set of “jobs” for the product amounts to a comprehensive list of user needs.
A visualization of the process that a person goes through to accomplish a goal.
A prioritization framework published by Dr. Noriaki Kano where items are grouped into four categories according to user satisfaction and functionality and then plotted on a 2D graph.
Arranging groups of similar content (usually written on sticky notes) into a preassigned structure (such as a customer-journey map) to understand relationships and patterns across items, groups, and time.
A tree that represents a central topic and its subtopics.
A static, high-fidelity simulation of a proposed UI design that includes visual-design details such as colors and imagery.
A collage of images, video frames, patterns, or text that convey a certain feeling at a glance.