Artifacts
UX deliverables and design artifacts — wireframes, journey maps, personas, service blueprints, and the documents that make design tangible.
37 articles
A UX Research Report People Actually Read: Structure, Summary, and Recommendations
A UX research report matters only if someone acts on it. How to order findings, write a clear executive summary, and attach an owner and action to each finding.
Accessibility annotations in handoff: what to write for developers
Accessibility annotations tell developers how a design should behave with a keyboard and screen reader: alt text, headings, focus order, and accessible names.
Competitive matrix: comparing without copying
A competitive matrix compares your product with others on features and experience. How to choose competitors, score tasks, weight criteria, and avoid copying.
Content inventory and audit: what we have and what to do with it
A content inventory lists everything on a site; the audit assesses its quality and decides what to keep, update or remove. Columns, scope and maintenance.
Customer Journey Maps
A Customer Journey Map (CJM) is a visualization of the complete story of a user's interaction with a product or service over time and across different channels.
Design Brief: The Document That Aligns Before You Design
A design brief sets the problem, goals, audience, and constraints before you design. What to include, who approves it, and how it differs from a creative brief.
Design decision log: how to document the why
A design decision log records what was decided, why, and which alternatives were rejected. Learn its format, when to write an entry, and how to maintain it.
Design Specifications
Detailed documentation that translates designs into development instructions—the bridge between design and code.
Ecosystem Map: Actors and Relationships in a Service
What a service ecosystem map is, which actors and relationships it shows, how it differs from a service blueprint and a journey map, and when to draw one.
Empathy Maps: Understanding Users at a Deeper Level
An empathy map is a visual framework for understanding a user's needs, feelings, and environment by exploring what they think, feel, see, say, do, and hear.
Experience Map vs. Customer Journey Map: Which to Use and How to Read It
An experience map shows broad human behavior; a customer journey map follows one person with a product. Differences, three-zone structure, and when to use each.
Impact Mapping: Connecting Features to Business Goals
How to run an impact mapping session with Gojko Adzic's method: goal, actors, impacts, deliverables, and how to avoid choosing features before the problem.
Interview guide: how to build one step by step
An interview guide structures a user interview. How to build one in four parts, which questions to avoid and how to use it without reading it like a script.
Job Stories: The JTBD Format for Writing a Product Backlog
A job story describes a person's situation, motivation, and desired outcome. How to write one, how it differs from a user story, and when to use it.
Lean UX Canvas: The Problem and the Hypothesis on One Page
What Jeff Gothelf's Lean UX Canvas is, its eight boxes in order, how to write a testable hypothesis, and how to pick the cheapest experiment to run.
Mockups
A mockup is a static, high-fidelity representation of a product's interface. Unlike wireframes, mockups focus on the visual and aesthetic aspects, including colors, typography, images, and other graphic elements to simulate the final product's appearance.
Moodboards: Visual Direction Before the First Pixel
A moodboard is a collage of images, colors, and textures that shows the feeling a product should convey. When to make one, how to build it, and what to avoid.
Opportunity Solution Tree: From Outcome to Experiment
How to build a Teresa Torres Opportunity Solution Tree: from the desired outcome to opportunities, solutions, and the tests that validate each assumption.
Personas
A Persona (or User Persona) is a fictional user archetype based on real research data that represents a group of users with similar behaviors, goals, and motivations.
Proto-Personas: Hypotheses Before Research
A proto-persona is the team's best guess about who uses the product, written before research. How to build one, when it helps, and when it becomes decoration.
Prototypes
A prototype is an interactive simulation of a final product used to test and validate design concepts before development. Unlike mockups (which are static), prototypes are "clickable" and allow users to experience the flow of an application.
Red Routes
The top 5 user journeys your product must support flawlessly—identify these and everything else is secondary.
Redlining and annotations: specifying without ambiguity
Redlines annotate a design with measurements, spacing, colours and behaviour so developers build it right. What to include, how to organize them, what to avoid.
Research Plan: Objectives, Questions, and Method on One Page
A UX research plan documents objectives, questions, method, participants, and schedule before you run a study. Learn what to include and how to write each part.
Service Blueprints
A Service Blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different components of a service (people, processes, and objects) across the different stages of customer interaction.
Site Maps
A hierarchical diagram showing all pages and how they relate—the blueprint before you design a single page.
Stakeholder map: who influences and who decides
A stakeholder map places the people affected by a project by their influence and interest. How to build one, which strategy fits each quadrant, when to skip it.
Storyboards: telling the experience in panels
A UX storyboard tells, in panels, how a person lives an experience: scenario, visuals and captions. How to make one, which fidelity to use and when not to.
Style Guide vs. Design System: Real Differences and Which to Build First
A style guide sets visual and brand rules; a design system adds components and tokens for building the interface. What each includes and which to build first.
UI Kit: What It Is and When One Is Enough
What a UI kit is, how it differs from a design system and a component library, and when a set of components in Figma is enough for your product.
Usability Test Script: Writing Tasks That Don't Give Clues
A usability test script organizes a session: neutral intro, clue-free tasks, follow-ups, a close. How to write tasks and what to say if someone is stuck.
Use Cases: Complete Scenarios of Interaction With the System
A use case describes step by step how an actor reaches a goal with the system, with its alternate flows. What it contains, how to write one, and when to use it.
User Flows
A User Flow is a diagram that visualizes the complete path a user follows through a digital product to complete a specific task.
User stories for designers: format, criteria and mistakes
A user story says who needs something, what they want to do and why. How to write one, which quality criteria to use (INVEST) and where design contributes.
Value Proposition Canvas for Designers: Customer Profile and Value Map
How to use Strategyzer's Value Proposition Canvas: the customer profile against the value map, and how to check that the fit actually exists with customers.
Wireflows: Wireframes and Flows on One Map
A wireflow combines a user flow with wireframes of each screen in one diagram. What it is, when to use it, how to draw its arrows, and when it does not help.
Wireframes
A wireframe is a low-fidelity visual schematic of an interface, similar to an architect's blueprint. It focuses on structure, content hierarchy, and functionality, deliberately ignoring visual elements like colors, typography, or images.