Let’s ring in the new year with some design terms I think we need in the year of our Lord 2025.
These terms describe various situations and types of design you might find yourself dealing with as a UXer or product designer. I don’t think there’s a lot of terms to describe these situations, so to remedy that, here’s my list of new design terms for 2025.
Rude Design
When the design is ugly and bad, but it’s getting the results you want so you don’t fix it. Bonus points if you just keep adding stuff to the design so it gets more and more cluttered.
Sneaky Design (bad)
When you do sneaky stuff like signing people up for subscriptions in a way you think they won’t notice or making it hard to cancel subs. Just stuff that’s manipulative and will make users be like 😐 if they realize.
Sneaky Design (good)
When you do stuff behind the scenes to improve the user experience, like saving info the user has previously entered and prefilling things for them. Or wizard-izing complicated workflows to make them easier to do.
Lipstick Design
When you do your best to make it better, but it’s just putting lipstick on a pig.
UX UI Design
No / between UX and UI. This is UI design by people who are just UX designers so it looks like a wireframe. It’s no-frills and super functional without being beautiful.
Redneck Design
When you design something stupid, but it works. When you design something unexpected and kinda ugly which is actually a big improvement for users. Common in design for legacy software. The name comes from r/redneckengineering
Good Bad Design
When it looks like a 90s website/is hideous, but the UX is great.
Bad Good Design
When it looks slick, but the UX is garbage.
Bad Bad Design
It looks bad and it works bad.
Good Good Design
It looks good and it works good.
A Pea
From ‘The Princess and the Pea.’ A seemingly unimportant design detail that many people have strong opinions about. See also HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).
Kobayashi Maru
A situation where tons of legacy systems and software are all interconnected to form an ecosystem which cannot be easily altered. No matter what you design, there will be big downsides and tradeoffs. From Star Trek’s no-win scenario.
Duct Tape Design
Used to describe a design solution which was clearly just chosen to solve an immediate problem and wasn’t well integrated into the overall system.
UX Bankruptcy
When you have so much UX debt, you need to just start over.
I hope these terms help you express your UX truth, and 2025 is a year of great communication.
Thanks for reading!