Frequently Asked Questions

Customer-centered design, web design patterns, pre-design research (task analysis, personas, journey mapping, card sorting), design process (iterative design, prototyping, usability evaluation), foundational HCI models (cognitive load, affordance, Fitts's law, mental models), visual design, navigation and layout, forms and inputs, accounts and sessions, accessibility and internationalization, responsive design, trust and privacy, content design, and common site genres (e-commerce, news, government, community, blogs, and more).

In scope is anything pertaining to UI/UX design: usability testing techniques and reports, design principles and heuristics, information architecture patterns, wireframes/mockups/prototypes as examples of a concept, accessibility guidelines, and semantic/accessible HTML shown as an illustration of a pattern (landmark elements, ARIA roles, form field associations).

Out of scope: code implementation beyond illustrative markup — CSS, JavaScript, backend/server code, build tooling, and framework-specific syntax; full working code samples or copy-paste snippets; forewords and acknowledgements; specific author/editor names; and anything not relevant or practical to UI/UX design.

Patterns are concrete, reusable solutions to a recurring UI or content problem — e.g. breadcrumb navigation or a shopping cart. Principles are the underlying theories, laws, and cognitive models that patterns are built on — e.g. Fitts's law or cognitive load. Processes are design methodologies and project workflows — e.g. card sorting or iterative design. Standards are formal external specifications and legal/regulatory frameworks that patterns and principles are designed to conform to, rather than design theory in their own right — e.g. WCAG or WAI-ARIA. Every concept page in the UX Knowledge Base is tagged as one of the four, and the sidebar groups pages the same way.

To be upfront: pages in this UX Knowledge Base are drafted and organized with the help of large language models (LLMs), which read source material and synthesize it into its structure — they don't invent the underlying guidance. The source material itself comes from two places: The Design of Sites, a book co-authored by one of the founders of fuguUX, and publicly available sources with an open license or public-domain status — U.S. government design guides (USWDS, Digital.gov), Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), GOV.UK's design system (OGL), and Google Material Design and IBM Carbon (Apache License 2.0), among others. Some pages also draw on fuguUX's own internal research and heuristics. Sources that are copyrighted with no open license are never reproduced in a page's body — at most they're pointed to in a "Further reading" note.

Yes. Every source has its own page describing what it covers and under what license, and concept pages link back to the sources they draw on. Pages that draw substantively on a source also carry a dedicated "Sources" section, with a sentence describing what that specific page took from it — not just a citation link. Copyrighted sources with no open license that contain relevant information are not cited inline, but noted in a "Further reading" section instead.

Some "Further reading" notes point to W3C documents, such as the WAI tutorials on forms, menus, and page structure. These are covered by the W3C Document License, which permits copying a complete, unmodified document but not creating derivative works from it — so the UX Knowledge Base links to them rather than summarizing or reproducing their content.

The UX Knowledge Base is built and maintained by fuguUX, which offers AI-powered user experience testing for modern product teams — helping them discover usability issues faster, prioritize improvements with confidence, and continuously improve the customer experience. Learn more on the fuguUX FAQ page.