The Design of Sites: Glossary
The book’s full glossary (A–X) — several hundred short dictionary-style definitions of terms used throughout The Design of Sites, most cross-referencing the chapter or pattern where the term is actually explained in full.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- The glossary’s UX/design-process terms include Iterative Design, low-/medium-/high-fidelity and horizontal/vertical prototypes, heuristic evaluation, bottom-line/process data, critical incident, think-aloud protocol, persona, scenario, Task Analysis, Card Sorting/Affinity Diagramming, the seven Web Site Development Process phases, company-/technology-/designer-/customer-centered design, gold-plating, brochureware, back-end cost, value proposition, information scent, Fitts’s Law, and red-green deficiency.
- The remaining entries are mostly Web-technology/implementation terminology: AJAX, CSS, HTML, HTTP/HTTPS, JavaScript, XML, cookies, encryption, image formats, bandwidth/connection types, server/scripting technologies, and ad-metric jargon like CPM and click-through.
- Personalization vs. customization: related but distinct ideas — system-inferred adaptation vs. customer-chosen configuration. See Homepage Portal.
- Profile: a lighter-weight, less-detailed alternative to a persona. See Personas and Scenarios.
- The glossary names Yahoo! as the best-known example of a directory — a hand-curated, hierarchically-organized link listing, as opposed to an algorithmic search engine.
- SITE BRANDING (E1, see Trust and Credibility) and PRIVACY POLICY (E4, see Privacy Policy) are each defined only in one-sentence stub form here, cross-referencing the fuller patterns in Pattern Group E.