UX Dictionary

Have you ever worked with someone in UX, wanted to do some UX for your SaaS, or are you aspiring to become a designer yourself? If you've answered yes to any of these questions, you might have discovered that there's a lot of jargon in the world of UX.

Even after working in UX for over seven years, I still struggle with certain words and what they mean at times. That's why I'm building a community-driven UX Dictionary. To help you (and me) better understand and learn about UX.

And the best thing? I'm building it (kinda) in public.

How it works

The main thing about UX Dictionary is that it is community-driven. Anyone can either submit a request for a keyword or suggest edits to a keyword. This way, you can involve both designers and those working with designers.

For each keyword, the UX Dictionary includes a sidebar showing who contributed to this keyword. If five designers agree on a definition, that's worth more than just one designer's opinion of a particular UX keyword definition.

I'm planning to include an "agree (or disagree) with this definition" feature somewhere down the road. But more on goals later.

Even though I only started recently, I already had a business owner submit a request to share something about bootstrap from a designer's perspective. The idea seems to work!

My goals

Right. Up next, let's discuss goals. Working on a new side hustle gives me a lot of energy. That's a great goal already, but I always try to include some more. Here they are.

Building it by hand

I'm a designer by trade, but I have always had an eye for coding. I like the logic of it compared to design, which can sometimes be subjective. That's why I'm going to build it myself.

The most important reason for me to build UX Dictionary by hand is that I want fewer dependencies. Using a CMS is fast and easy but has downsides, like the performance. To fix these downsides, I need to use (paid) plugins. These plugins might cause new problems, and I don't want that anymore.

Back in my WordPress days, I was afraid of updating my plugins because I would never know if something would break. I could spend days trying to fix design issues after updating plugins. I don't like that!

Now, with me coding everything by hand, I have complete control of what I do. Here's an example.

In WordPress, I have several huge CSS files. Unfortunately, they slow down my website and are unused in most cases. To solve this, I need a premium plugin that costs me time and money to maintain.

I can do the same for UX Dictionary in one CSS file that's only a fraction of the size. No plugins needed.

An added benefit is that I, as a designer, improve my coding skills. One step closer to becoming a UX unicorn, right?

Personal project

Creating personal projects is something I recommend to people looking for jobs during my mentoring sessions.

It is something that's yours. If it takes off, you don't need a job. And if it doesn't, you have a great portfolio project and learned a lot at the same time. It's a win, anyway.

So why not lead by example? I'm not looking for a job, but having an extra personal project under my belt always helps.

Helping the UX world with a free resource

There's so much info on UX online that it is hard to figure out what is useful and what isn't. And then there's also a lot of paid content. Don't get me wrong. I'm okay with that, as I also have a lot of paid content.

However, creating something that's community-supported and free feels like a good thing to do for the community. And I'm all for that.

Keeping tabs on what to do

One of my weaknesses is a lack of focus. I'm full of ideas and like to start too many new ideas. The result? A lot of unfinished projects.

To keep better track of what I'm doing, I'm creating versions for my side hustles. When writing this post, I'm on version 0.1.4 of UX Dictionary.

To stay within scope, I have my list of things to do for v0.2. Anything new that I come up with is added to my backlog of v0.3 and 0.4. That way, I stay focused.

For the next version, I'm planning on including the following.

• The first version of a footer
• Related keywords
• Setting up analytics
• Adding about ten new keywords

Next steps

That's it for this intro post. I plan to share more of my UX Dictionary journey as it progresses. Expect an update here soon.