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USABILITY GLOSSARY |
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| adaptive menu |
A menu where the most recently-selected item(s) are shown at the top so as to help the user repeat common commands quickly without searching for them in long menus. |
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| affinity sorting |
Putting related items closely together, as in card sorting. Affinity means inherent similarity |
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| affordance |
A situation where an object's sensory characteristics intuitively imply its functionality and use. A button, by being slightly raised above an otherwise flat surface, suggests the idea of pushing it. |
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| minesweeping |
A theory of human reasoning that says that people minimize cognitive load by minimizing reasoning and using quick heuristics to make decisions. Thus, people avoid complex memory, planning, and decision-making in favor of acting upon information immediately available perceptually, well-known information, and pretty good rules of thumb. |
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| "scent of information" |
A conceptual information trail - people choose which page to visit next based on the perceived relationships among past information, current information, and desired information - the stronger the relationship among the pieces of information, the stronger the "scent". |
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| schemas |
Patterns of behavior and/or information that guide our ability to understand new information or help us select appropriate actions. For example, text boxes are recognized as input fields, so do not display messages in text boxes, because users will think they can edit or change the box's content. |
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Roy Zornow
MS Word version 
