Concepts, laws, methods and disciplines a UX practitioner actually needs — each explained clearly enough to use, with a practical example and links into deeper reference material. Written to answer what it is, why it matters, when to use it, what it looks like in practice, and what people usually get wrong.
Every entry follows the same shape: what it is, why it matters, when to use it, what it looks like in practice, what people get wrong, and what to read next. Concise where concise is sufficient, longer where the concept genuinely needs it. Nothing padded to hit a word count. The audience is a working UX practitioner or a product person who needs to understand a concept well enough to use it, not a student who needs the textbook version.
Entries are grouped into six categories that reflect how UX practitioners actually think about the field. Principles are broad rules of good design (affordance, progressive disclosure, gestalt). Laws are the empirical rules that predict behaviour under specific conditions (Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, Miller's law). Methods are structured techniques for research or design work (jobs-to-be-done, journey mapping, card sorts). Concepts are the mental furniture of the field (mental models, cognitive load, chunking, wireframes). Disciplines are the specialisms within UX (information architecture, interaction design, content design). Each entry names its category so readers can navigate by intellectual shape rather than just alphabetically.
The glossary is deliberately incomplete. Terms are added when they earn their place — when a practitioner would actually look them up during real work, when the definition adds practical value beyond what already exists in the wider reference (there's no point in a glossary entry for "heuristic evaluation" when the site already has a full framework guide), and when the concept isn't better served by an existing method or audit page. This is the reason there's no glossary entry for "personas" — that concept lives in the persona generator tool and its editorial wrapper, which handle it more thoroughly than a definition could.
Every entry is dated on publication and reviewed at least annually per the editorial standards. When a foundational source updates (a WCAG version bump, a Nielsen Norman Group revision, a change to an established framework), the affected entries are audited immediately rather than at the annual cycle. Corrections are made within a working week per the corrections policy — email hello@uxcompanion.co.uk if you spot a factual error, a stale reference, or an ambiguity.
Missing a term you'd expect to find? The site's FAQ collection covers questions the glossary format isn't the right home for; the audit hub covers audit-specific methodology; the tools suite covers interactive scoring templates. If none of those fit and a term is genuinely missing from the reference product, email — recurring requests become new entries.