UX Glossary
Every term that shows up in an audit — defined so engineers, PMs, and marketers all read it the same way.
The practice of building digital experiences usable by people with disabilities. Audited against the WCAG 2.1/2.2 standard. UXAudit.Now uses axe-core to test against ~90+ WCAG rules on every Agent audit.
The open-source accessibility rule engine maintained by Deque Systems. The industry standard for automated a11y testing. Runs as one of UXAudit.Now's 8 Smart Plugins.
The portion of a page visible without scrolling. The first impression real estate — what every visitor sees in the first ~1-2 seconds. Disproportionately weighted in landing-page and corporate-site UX audits.
Showing two variants of a page to different traffic splits and measuring which converts better. A/B testing answers 'which version is better'; a UX audit answers 'what should we test in the first place?' — complementary practices.
A score comparison against a reference cohort. UXAudit.Now's industry benchmark (Pro+) compares your audit score against the median, top-quartile, and bottom-quartile sites in your platform type.
The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. Often a UX symptom — message-match break, slow load, unclear value proposition. Audited indirectly through performance + content + CTA findings.
The percentage increase in conversion rate after a change. UX improvements that target severity-prioritized findings typically yield measurable lift within one A/B test cycle.
The UX patterns specific to chatbots, copilots, and LLM-powered conversational interfaces. Includes turn-taking, fallback grace, disclosure, error recovery, and multi-turn coherence. UXAudit.Now's blue-ocean platform set with 100+ guidelines.
Google's user-experience performance metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP, replaced FID in 2024), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Real-user data sourced from CrUX; synthetic data from Lighthouse / PageSpeed Insights.
Google's public dataset of real-user performance data from Chrome users, aggregated over a 28-day window. The 'field data' counterpart to synthetic Lighthouse scores. Surfaced via the CrUX Smart Plugin on every audit.
The primary action you want a visitor to take — 'Start free', 'Book a demo', 'Add to cart'. CTA hygiene audits cover prominence, distractor count, and copy specificity.
A UX research method where users group items into categories — used to validate information architecture. Complementary to UXAudit's automated IA scoring.
A Core Web Vital — measures unexpected layout shifts during page load. Score below 0.1 is good. Tracked on every audit via the CrUX + PageSpeed Insights plugins.
The sequence of steps from first visit to purchase / signup / activation. Funnel UX audits identify drop-off-risk steps before analytics shows the drop-off itself.
The mental effort required to use an interface. High cognitive load = users get tired, confused, or bail. UX audits explicitly score cognitive-load contributors: number of choices, label clarity, expected hierarchy, etc.
UX patterns deliberately designed to trick or coerce users — disguised ads, forced continuity, sneak-into-basket, confirmshaming. Modern audits flag dark patterns as ethics + regulatory liability, not just bad UX.
What the user sees when a list, dashboard, or table has no data yet. Good empty states offer a next-best action; bad ones leave the user with no path forward. One of SaaS audit's highest-leverage fix areas.
Qualitative research method using eye-tracking hardware (or webcam-based proxies) to measure where users actually look on a page. Heat-map output complements heuristic audits — predictions vs measured attention.
Any UX element that adds cognitive or interaction cost — extra form fields, ambiguous CTAs, slow load, surprise pricing. UXAudit findings are essentially a friction inventory ranked by impact.
A sequence of steps leading to a conversion — e.g., visitor → product page → cart → checkout → purchase. Funnel UX audits identify drop-off-risk steps before analytics shows you the drop-off itself.
Eye-tracking finding: on text-heavy pages, users scan in an F shape — top horizontal stroke + second shorter horizontal + vertical scan down the left. Page layout audits use the F-pattern to validate where critical content lives.
The percentage of users who start filling a form but leave before submitting. Each extra required field correlates with ~7% additional abandonment. Form-friction is one of the top findings in landing-page audits.
A UX inspection method where evaluators score a surface against a checklist of established usability principles. UXAudit.Now's UX Review Tool is a structured heuristic evaluation against 1,450+ research-backed rules across 5 platforms.
Choice complexity research finding: the more options presented, the longer the decision time. Surfaces in audits as 'too many CTAs above the fold', 'overloaded pricing matrix', etc.
How content is organized, labeled, and navigated. Bad IA = users can't find things. Corporate and SaaS audits both score IA depth, breadcrumb logic, and navigation findability.
A Core Web Vital introduced in 2024, replacing FID (First Input Delay). Measures responsiveness on user interaction. Under 200ms is good.
Google's open-source automated web auditing tool — measures performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices using synthetic / lab data. UXAudit.Now uses the hosted PageSpeed Insights endpoint (same Lighthouse engine, no local install) as one of the 8 Smart Plugins.
A Core Web Vital — measures when the largest content element becomes visible. Under 2.5s is good. Heavy hero images and slow JS bundles are the usual culprits.
Open-source security-header analyzer maintained by Mozilla. Grades sites on Content Security Policy, HSTS, X-Frame-Options, Permissions-Policy, and other header hygiene. One of UXAudit.Now's 8 Smart Plugins.
How well a landing-page headline matches the ad / source that drove the visitor. Message-match breaks silently destroy paid-traffic conversion. Audited explicitly on landing-page-platform audits.
The user's expectation of how a product works. Mismatches between user mental model and actual product behavior cause friction. Good audits surface these mismatches via heuristics built from observed user patterns.
A customer-loyalty metric (0-10 'how likely to recommend?'). Not a UX metric per se but often correlates with UX quality — low NPS often masks UX issues. Out of scope for UXAudit but useful complementary signal.
The first-run experience for new users — signup, walkthrough, activation. SaaS audits weight onboarding heavily because the difference between 'this product clicks' and 'I'll come back later' is decided here.
The position of a score within a sorted cohort. 'Top 25%' means the score is in the top quartile. UXAudit.Now Pro+ shows your percentile within your platform type's audited sites.
The e-commerce page for a single product. UX patterns audited include image gallery, variant selection, stock & shipping signals, product summary, related products, and the buy/cart CTA.
A fictional user representing a key audience segment. UXAudit doesn't run persona research, but our use-case pages (/use-cases/*) are organized by persona (product teams, designers, agencies, marketing teams).
Showing only what's needed at each step, revealing more complexity as the user requests it. Reduces cognitive load. The 'show more' link, the multi-step form, the collapsible section — all progressive-disclosure patterns.
A Pro+ feature that prioritizes UX findings by likely conversion impact. Not just 'here's what's wrong' — 'here's what to fix next, in this order, for the biggest measurable lift'.
UX findings classified by likely business impact: Critical (blocking, fix immediately), High (significant degradation, fix this sprint), Medium (noticeable friction, next backlog cycle), Low (polish-level). Calibrated against observed conversion impact, not visual offensiveness.
UXAudit.Now's suite of 8 specialist analyzers that run in parallel on every Agent audit: Axe Core (a11y), CrUX (real-user perf), PageSpeed Insights (synthetic perf), Mozilla Observatory (security headers), Google Safe Browsing (threat detection), W3C HTML Validator, Wappalyzer (tech stack), Readability + CSS Stats.
Placeholder grayed-out content blocks shown during loading instead of a blank screen or spinner. Reduces perceived load time. Now standard on modern SaaS dashboards and content-heavy pages.
Navigation header that remains visible while the user scrolls. Useful for long pages (e-commerce category, blog posts) where reaching navigation otherwise requires scrolling back to top. Performance cost: layout shifts on scroll require careful handling.
A structured evaluation of a digital surface against established UX rules. Surfaces friction points, usability issues, and conversion blockers — categorized by severity with recommended fixes. Can be manual (human evaluator), automated (AI agent), or hybrid.
The full path a user takes through a product to accomplish a goal — sometimes across multiple sessions and channels. UX audits typically focus on one journey segment (e.g., checkout) rather than the full journey.
The craft of writing interface copy — button labels, error messages, empty-state text, microcopy. Bad UX writing is one of the cheapest, highest-impact fix areas in any audit ('Submit' → 'Start my free trial' lifts conversion measurably).
The international accessibility standard maintained by the W3C. WCAG 2.1 AA is the most common compliance target. UXAudit.Now's axe-core Smart Plugin tests against the WCAG 2.1/2.2 ruleset on every audit.
An open-source tech-stack-detection tool. Identifies frameworks, analytics, CDNs, payment processors, and CMS platforms in use on a site. One of UXAudit.Now's 8 Smart Plugins — useful for security review and competitive intel.
Enterprise-tier export where the PDF report carries your agency's brand instead of UXAudit.Now's. Used by agencies delivering client audits and product teams sharing internal reports without vendor attribution.
A low-fidelity layout sketch used in design. Wireframes themselves aren't directly auditable (no live URL), but the implementation built from them is — typically using our UX Review Tool for guided heuristic evaluation.
Eye-tracking finding: on visually-scanned (non-text-heavy) pages, users scan in a Z shape — top-left to top-right, then diagonal to bottom-left, then bottom-right. Useful framing for hero-section layouts and landing-page above-the-fold composition.
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