CRO & UX Glossary

Important terms and acronyms that I often use. 

A/B testing – (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a methodology for comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. (via Optimizely)

Affinity mapping – sometimes also known as affinity diagramming, snowballing, or collaborative sorting, is the process of creating an affinity diagram. Simply, it’s when you gather qualitative information about your users and group it by category. (via UserTesting)

Agile UX – Designers and developers working collaboratively and iteratively to build and ship versions of a product in short cycles—improving and updating the product along the way. (via UX Design Institute)

AIDA Model – describes the four stages a consumer goes through before making a purchasing decision. The stages are Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA). During these four stages, your content will ideally attract attention to your brand, generate interest in your product or service, stimulate a desire for it, and spur action to try or buy it. (via HubSpot)

Bayesian Statistics – The Bayesian approach to statistics is a method that encodes past knowledge of similar experiments into a statistical device, known as prior. This prior is combined with current experiment data to make a conclusion on the test. (via CXL)

Behavioral Targeting – A technique used in online advertising and publishing, where data from visitor browsing habits (e.g., search terms, sites visited, purchases) is used to display relevant ads and offers and improve campaign effectiveness. (via HotJar)

Branching Logic Surveys – Branches are useful when you want to send respondents down different paths in the survey. You can use branch logic to branch respondents to different survey flow elements based on variables like question responses or embedded data. It’s a bit like a choose your own adventure novel. Depending on how your respondents answer certain questions, they will take different routes through your survey. (via Qualtrics)

Bucket Testing – another term for A/B Testing or Split Testing

Canary Testing – A way to reduce risk and validate new software by releasing software to a small percentage of users. With canary testing, you can deliver to certain groups of users at a time. Also referred to as canary deployments, incremental, staged, or phased rollouts, canary releases are a best practice in devops and software development. (via Optimizely)

Card Sorting – A UX research method in which study participants group individual labels written on notecards according to criteria that make sense to them.  This method uncovers how the target audience’s domain knowledge is structured, and it serves to create an information architecture that matches users’ expectations. (via NN Group)

Churn Rate – Customer churn, or customer turnover, refers to the number of customers you’re losing in a predetermined time period. Formula: (Lost Customers / Total Customers at start of Time Pd.) * 100  (via HubSpot)

Click Map – A type of website heatmap that displays where users click the mouse cursor on a desktop device or tap the screen on mobile. Click maps help website owners track on-page user engagement, such as clicks on buttons, links, and images across a website, which in turn helps them optimize their pages and CTAs for better conversions. (via HotJar)

Clickstream Analysis – UX designers use clickstream analysis to gain a deeper understanding of user behaviour. Clickstream analysis records a user’s trail of activity as they interact with an app or website—i.e. the sequence of clicks they make or the pages they visit. (via UX Design Institute)

Cognitive Load – Refers to the amount of effort that is exerted or required while reasoning and thinking. Any mental process, from memory to perception to language, creates a cognitive load because it requires energy and effort. When cognitive load is high, thought processes are potentially interfered with. To the UX designer, a common goal when designing interfaces would be to keep users’ cognitive load to a minimum. (via Interaction Design Foundation)

Contextual Inquiry – A type of ethnographic field study that involves in-depth observation and interviews of a small sample of users to gain a robust understanding of work practices and behaviors. (via NN Group)

Conversion Rate Calculation – calculated by dividing the number of conversions (desired actions taken) by the total number of visitors and multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage. (Number of Conversions/Total Number of Visitors) * 100

Customer Journey Management – The process of optimizing the experience your customers have with your brand. It uses technology and behavioral science to create interactions that your customers find irresistible as they move through your sales funnel. (via Optimizely)

Customer Journey Mapping – In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes. (via NN Group)

Dark UX – It’s the practice of deliberately designing in a way that tricks the user or subtly pushes them towards an action they probably don’t want to take. A classic example of dark UX is making it confusing for users to cancel their subscription. (via UX Design Institute)

Decision Fatigue – When the mind becomes fatigued after a sustained period of decision making. Making decisions is a cognitively taxing process, and decision making ability declines after long sequences of decisions. (via Optimizely)

Decision matrix – A decision matrix – sometimes referred to as a prioritization matrix – is a framework used to evaluate and prioritize ideas based on a set of predetermined criteria. In UX, it can help you to weigh up different design options and make informed decisions that balance available time and resources against the needs of the user. (via UX Design Institute)

Design thinking – A non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown. (via Interaction Design Foundation)

Diary study – A research method used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time. In a diary study, data is self-reported by participants longitudinally — that is, over an extended period of time that can range from a few days to even a month or longer. During the defined reporting period, study participants are asked to keep a diary and log specific information about activities being studied. To help participants remember to fill in their diary, sometimes they are periodically prompted (for example, through a notification received daily or at select times during the day). (via NN Group)

Disruptive Tests – A part of Speero’s Solution Spectrum Blueprint™ of categorizing CRO testing into three categories based on a difficulty scale. Disruptive Tests are large-scale tests that involve the most amount of lift and planning. Typically many months of research go into executing a disruptive test as it will typically involve changing the functionality of the website, which will require a more extensive lift from the development team. Examples of Disruptive tests are creating new website functionality, new pricing models, changing brand positioning, solution architecture, more products, etc. (via Speero)

Empathy map – A collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to 1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and 2) aid in decision making. (via NN Group)

Experience Analytics – Instead of just tracking data regarding burn, churn and conversions, experience analytics drills down into the entire customer journey. You collect data at different touchpoints, monitor behavior across your channels and use the information to make intelligent design decisions for each digital interaction. (via Optimizely)

Eye-Tracking – Eye-tracking technology helps observe and measure eye movements, pupil dilation, point of gaze, and blinking to see where subjects of a study focus their visual attention, what they engage with, and what they ignore. (via HotJar)

Fake Door Testing – (also known as painted-door testing) is a lean technique to quickly test the viability of new ideas before committing resources to their development. It is used to gauge customer interest in a product, feature, or service that doesn’t actually exist, but which you might be considering. (via UserPilot)

Five Second Testing – a form of usability testing that allows you to measure how well a design quickly communicates a message. This kind of test provides both quantitative and qualitative feedback that helps you optimize a design. A five second test is run by showing an image to a participant for just five seconds, after which the participant answers questions based on their memory and impression of the design. (via Lyssna)

Focus group – You use a focus group in qualitative research. A group of 6-10 people, usually 8, meet to explore and discuss a topic, such as a new product. The group shares their feedback, opinions, knowledge, and insights about the topic at hand. (via QuestionPro)

Form testing – A procedure used to evaluate the quality of an online form on a website. It involves looking at factors including text, length, and general design to evaluate the functionality and efficacy of the forms and boost conversion rates. If your forms are not structured, it might hurt your conversion rates and jeopardize all your paid or organic attempts to get people to fill them out. (via VWO)

Frequentist Statistics – The Frequentist approach to statistics (and testing) is a method which makes predictions on the underlying truths of the experiment, using only data from the current experiment. (via CXL) 

Funnel testing – The process of analyzing and optimizing the conversion rate of a sales or marketing funnel. It involves evaluating each step in the funnel, from the initial point of contact with a customer to the final conversion. By analyzing the data and metrics at each stage of the funnel, you can identify bottlenecks or areas where visitors are dropping off and make changes to improve the conversion rate. (via VWO)

Gestalt principles – Principles/laws of human perception that describe how humans group similar elements, recognize patterns and simplify complex images when we perceive objects. Designers use the principles to organize content on websites and other interfaces so it is aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand. (via Interaction Design Foundation)

Headline Testing – The process of developing multiple title variations for an article or piece of online media, which can then be tested on multiple audience segments to determine which one performs the best. (via Optimizely)

Heatmap – A heatmap (or heat map) is a graphical representation of data where values are depicted by color. They are essential in detecting what does or doesn’t work on a website or page, and which parts and elements of a page users engage with. (via HotJar)

Heuristic evaluation – A method for identifying design problems in a user interface. Evaluators judge the design against a set of guidelines (called heuristics) that make systems easy to use. (via NN Group)

Heuristics – To assess usability, we recommend Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics — a set of high-level guidelines based on an understanding of human behavior, psychology, and information processing. (via NN Group)

Hick’s law – According to Hick’s law, the more options or choices a user has, the longer it will take them to make a decision or choose a course of action. In UX, the goal is to keep the number of options available to the user to a minimum, making it quicker and easier for them to navigate through the experience without feeling overwhelmed. (via UX Design Institute)

High, Medium & Low Fidelity Wireframes: (via HubSpot)

• A low-fidelity wireframe is a skeleton of a digital screen, web page, or application. It’ll have the bare-bones elements that will be included in the finished project.
• A medium-fidelity wireframe is a step up from its low fidelity counterpart. Medium wireframes will have more detail — including accurate spacing, headlines, and buttons.
• A high-fidelity wireframe is a realistic prototype that closely resembles the final design of a project. It can include typography, colors, images, icons, and CTA buttons.

How Might We (HMW) – If you’re in the process of solving a UX problem and trying to come up with ideas, you might frame the problem as a “How might we?” question. (via UX Design Institute)

Hyper-personalization – uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to go further than segmentation and allow you to create a customer experience that is unique to an individual. (via Optimizely)

ICE – The ICE Score is the default prioritization framework in Projects by GrowthHackers and was invented/popularized by GrowthHackers’ founder Sean Ellis. (via CXL)

• Impact – What will the impact be if this [testing idea] works?
• Confidence – How confident am I that this will work?
• Ease – What is the ease of implementation?

Information Architecture – In UX design, the information architecture (IA) of a website refers to two things:

1. The practice of deciding how to organize and maintain your content, what the relationships are between each piece of content, and how content is visibly displayed on your website’s navigation.
2. The website’s structure, its organization, and the nomenclature of its navigation elements. The website’s IA refers to how information is organized, structured, and presented on that website. (via NN Group)

Information Scent – refers to the strength of relevant messaging throughout the customer journey as well as visual and textual cues that provide website visitors with hints on what information a site contains. (via Optimizely)

Iterative Tests – A part of Speero’s Solution Spectrum Blueprint™ of categorizing CRO testing into three categories based on a difficulty scale. Iterative Tests are smaller-scale tests that can be set up relatively easily and can fill in any roadmap gaps in between larger tests. Examples of Iterative tests are copy tweaks, CTA verbiage/color, image changes, etc. (via Speero) 

Lean Hypothesis Testing – an approach to agile product development that’s designed to minimize risk, increase speed of development, and hone product market fit by building and iterating on a minimum viable product (MVP). (via Optimizely)

Lean UX – a collaborative approach to the UX design process which focuses on getting feedback as early as possible in order to make quick design decisions. (via UX Design Institute)

Mental model – What users believe they know about a UI strongly impacts how they use it. (via NN Group)

Micro Conversion – an action or a set of actions that strongly indicate a user progressing towards profitable action on your website. (via VWO)

Microcopy – Microcopy is the small text snippets that guide us through websites, apps, and other digital experiences. (via UX Writing Hub)

Multi-armed Bandit – a multi-armed bandit solution is a ‘smarter’ or more complex version of A/B testing that uses machine learning algorithms to dynamically allocate traffic to variations that are performing well, while allocating less traffic to variations that are underperforming. (via Optimizely)

Multivariate Test (MVT) – a technique for testing a hypothesis in which multiple variables are modified. The goal of multivariate testing is to determine which combination of variations performs the best out of all of the possible combinations. (via Optimizely)

Null hypothesis – the claim that no relationship exists between two sets of data or variables being analyzed. The null hypothesis is that any experimentally observed difference is due to chance alone, and an underlying causative relationship does not exist, hence the term “null.” (via Wikipedia)

Pain-points – any issues, problems, frustrations or hiccups a user encounters during a given experience or interaction. (via UX Design Institute)

Personalization – a powerful way to communicate empathically with your customers and tailor your business to their particular needs. A personalization strategy lets you identify segments of visitors with distinct preferences or needs, and then create targeted experiences for them. (via Optimizely)

PIE – The PIE prioritization framework was originally designed by Conversion President, Chris Goward, to prioritize A/B test target areas. In other words, it was meant to answer the question: “Where should I test first?” (via Conversion)

• Potential – How much improvement can be made on this page(s)? You should prioritize your worst performers. This should take into account your web analytics data, customer data, and expert heuristic analysis of user scenarios.
• Importance – How valuable is the traffic to this page(s)? Your most important pages are those with the highest volume and the costliest traffic. You may have identified pages that perform terribly, but if they don’t have significant volume of costly traffic, they aren’t testing priorities.
• Ease – How difficult will it be to implement a test on this page or template? The final consideration is the degree of difficulty of actually running a test on this page, which includes technical implementation, and organizational or political barriers.

Preference Testing – Preference testing (also called desirability testing) is used to compare the aesthetic or emotional appeal of a design or concept,  in order to understand how people perceive and respond to different variants.The goal of this UX research method is to learn more about how each design influences participants’ perceptions of things like  trustworthiness, or whether or not a design does a good job of communicating a particular message or idea. This method is most effective during the early stages of product development. (via User Interviews)

Primary conversion – the principal actions you intend for users to execute on your site. These actions are often directly linked to revenue, such as making a purchase. (via ContentSquare)

Prototype Testing – taking that early version or mock-up of your product (your prototype), presenting it to your target audience, and gathering crucial feedback about which parts of it work and which need improvement. (via User Pilot)

Qualitative Data Analysis – the process of organizing, analyzing, and interpreting qualitative data—non-numeric, conceptual information and user feedback—to capture themes and patterns, answer research questions, and identify actions to take to improve your product or website. (via HotJar)

Quantitative Data Analysis – the process of analyzing and interpreting numerical data. It helps you make sense of information by identifying patterns, trends, and relationships between variables through mathematical calculations and statistical tests. (via HotJar)

Sales funnel – A sales funnel is a marketing term used to capture and describe the journey that potential customers go through, from prospecting to purchase. (via Salesforce)

Sample size – the sample size used in a study is usually determined based on the cost, time, or convenience of collecting the data, and the need for it to offer sufficient statistical power. (via Wikipedia)

Secondary conversion – actions that lead users closer to primary conversions, such as subscribing to a blog or downloading a free ebook, which are crucial steps in the sales funnel. (via ContentSquare)

Server-Side Testing – a form of experimentation where the variations of a test are rendered directly on the web server, before it is delivered to the client. (via Optimizely)

Session Recording – renderings of real actions taken by visitors as they browse a website. Recordings capture mouse movement, clicks, taps, and scrolling across multiple pages on desktop and mobile devices. (via HotJar) 

Squeeze Page – A squeeze page is a landing page that is specifically designed to collect email addresses from visitors and potential customers

Statistical significance (via Optimizely)

Statistical Significance – a measure of how unusual your experiment results would be if there were actually no difference in performance between your variation and baseline and the discrepancy in lift was due to random chance alone. (via Optimizely)

Substantial Tests – A part of Speero’s Solution Spectrum Blueprint™ of categorizing CRO testing into three categories based on a difficulty scale. Substantial Tests are medium-scale tests that involve more lift than an iterative test and may involve a web designer to assist with any changes to front-end elements. While they may involve more lift from internal teams, Substantial Tests do not involve changing the functionality of the website, which typically requires a more extensive lift from development teams. Examples of Substantial tests are creating new social proof, updating the page experience, creating a new user flow, etc. (via Speero)

Task analysis – the systematic study of how users complete tasks to achieve their goals. This knowledge ensures products and services are designed to efficiently and appropriately support those goals. (via NN Group)

Test duration – The average recommended A/B testing time is 2 weeks, but you should always identify key factors relevant to your own conversion goals to determine the best length for a test that will meet your goals. (via AB Tasty)

Tree testing – A tree test evaluates a hierarchical category structure, or tree, by having users find the locations in the tree where specific resources or features can be found. (via NN Group)

Type 1 error – Often assimilated with false positives – happen in hypothesis testing when the null hypothesis is true but rejected. (via AB Tasty)

Type 2 error – Type 2 errors happen when you inaccurately assume that no winner has been declared between a control version and a variation although there actually is a winner. (via AB Tasty)

Uplift – Refers to the improvement or uplifts in business achieved as a result of implementing effective and strenuous conversion rate optimization techniques. (via Omniconvert)

Usability Testing – A method of testing the functionality of a website, app, or other digital product by observing real users as they attempt to complete tasks on it. The users are usually observed by researchers working for a business during either an in-person or, more commonly, a remote usability testing session. (via HotJar)

User Flow – A set of interactions that describe the typical or ideal set of steps needed to accomplish a common task performed with a product. (via NN Group)

User Journey – A scenario-based sequence of the steps that a user takes in order to accomplish a high-level goal with a company or product, usually across channels and over time. (via NN Group)

User Journey Map – A common artifact for visualizing journeys, as they are narrative and descriptive. Effective journey maps don’t just relay the steps taken to achieve a goal; they tell a user-centered story about the process. (via NN Group)

User Testing – When you test your product, new feature or prototype on real users in order to gain feedback and inform future iterations of the product. (via UX Design Institute) 

UTM Link – (Urchin Tracking Module) code is a snippet of text added to the end of a URL to track the metrics and performance of a specific digital marketing campaign. UTM codes can contain up to five parameters: Campaign, source, medium, content, and term. (via HubSpot)

UVP (unique value proposition) – A clear statement that explains the benefits of your product, how it solves customers’ problems, why it is different from the rest, and why customers should buy it. It’s also the #1 thing that determines whether people will bother reading more about your product or hit the back button. On your site, your value proposition is the main thing you need to test—if you get it right, it will be a huge boost. (via CXL)

UX Audit – UX audits involve looking at quantitative data—e.g. bounce rates, conversions, and clicks—to see where the user experience is lacking or deteriorating, and learning more about these trends with qualitative data from watching users explore your site or product or talking to them directly. (via HotJar) 

UX Documentation – Captures all the key steps in the UX and product design process. It acts as a single source of truth, allowing anyone within the team or the wider organization to understand the scope of a project, how design decisions have been made, and what the outcomes were. (via UX Design Institute)

Visitor Segment – The process of segregating prospects and customers into different groups based on some fundamental parameters such as geography, visitor behavior or characteristics, acquisition sources, psychographics, and more. (via VWO)

Website Readability – A measure of how easy it is for visitors to read and understand text on a web page. Readability depends on a text’s presentation (e.g., font choice, spacing, colors, etc.) and context (i.e., the actual words and sentences that are written on the page). (via HotJar)