🧲 Friction & Flow

Term What it means Use it like…
Friction Anything that slows a user down, causes confusion, or requires extra effort (physically, cognitively, emotionally) “There’s a lot of friction when I try to cancel my subscription”
Flow The feeling of smooth, uninterrupted progress through an experience “Once I decided what I wanted to buy, the flow was very smooth through checkout”
Cognitive load How much mental effort a user has to expend to understand or complete something. ‘Good’ design reduces cognitive load. “There are way too many options on this screen, it increases cognitive load because I have to make too many decisions at once”

🧠 Understanding the user

Term What it means Use it like…
Mental model What the user expects will happen based on past experiences. Thoughtful interaction design aligns with mental models and bad design fights them. “Using the ✨ icon to signify premium offerings breaks the user’s mental model — people expect it to mean AI these days”
Affordance What an object or interface suggests you can do with it — i.e. buttons should look clickable, sliders should look draggable. “I didn’t realize that component was interactive, it doesn’t have very strong affordance”
Signifier The visual or contextual cue that tells you how to use something (arrows, labels, icons, hover state). “There’s no clear signifier that the text is expandable here”
Note: you can think of affordance as the possibility, signifiers as the clues
Feedback What the system shows you after you take an action. This can be visual, auditory, haptic, etc. “I submitted, but there was no feedback so I wasn’t sure it worked and I submitted again!”

🧭 Navigation & Structure

Term What it means Use it like…
Information Architecture (IA) How content is organized, grouped, and labeled. Good IA helps users predict where things live, while bad IA drives searching, backtracking, or guesswork.
Hierarchy The visual or structural prioritization of elements “The visual hierarchy draws my eye away from disclaimer”
Wayfinding How users understand where they are, where they’ve been, and where they can go “The progress indicator makes the wayfinding in this survey super clear”