Albert Einstein (or Richard Feynman, or some guy on the vast, quote-misattributing internet) once said that if you cannot explain a concept to a six year old, you don’t understand it well enough. A quick scroll of a few UX articles will reveal the many folks who obsess over UX jargon but rarely explain any of it. They may begin to explain, but then list 5 very long books to read for access to another almost-definition.

But UX is not an MLM. It’s not pay-to-play. No newbies to the field, let alone a six year old, wants to spend hours pouring through articles to halfway understand the context of Agile vs Waterfall, or my aforementioned least favorite term, “downloading.”

Seriously, people. Just say you’re writing on sticky notes.

I understand that every subculture has jargon. But when I’ve read 50 variations of “In this article, we’ll explain scrum,” only to read on and see, “Scrum methodology is an Agile framework, and Agile framework is based on agile methodologies” - which explains absolutely nothing - I get frustrated. The consensus seems to be that everyone reading about UX already knows about UX. Worse, terms are often encased in quasi-religious fervor, with reverent descriptions of “saviors of UX” : prophets like Jake Knapp, Google, and the Old God, Don Norman. I know from the adulation of web authors that they changed the user design game, but phrases like:

Just like that the long dark night of UX was finally over.

and

Lean UX was conceived by Jeff Gothelf in 2013 and brought true user experience design back into harmony with product development.

make UX sound like a straight-up cult. Even the Nine Old Men aren’t exalted this much.

Don’t get me wrong; the people I’ve met since studying UX and UI have been welcoming and helpful. I have had many questions answered, fears calmed, and techniques taught. But some days, the culture of it all feels like being an agnostic dragged to church. “I’m happy this makes you happy, but when’s dinner?” I know I’m coming at this from a teacher’s standpoint. Lesson plans are the outline of when to explain, what to explain, and how; when a student doesn’t understand something, it’s up to the teacher to find new approaches.

And maybe that’s where this disconnect is coming from. Not everyone who writes about UX has education on the brain; some people are more concerned with showing that they’re in on something. It makes me miss the animation and comics world, where weirdos with wrist braces and cartoon tattoos break down definitions for anyone who will listen. I once saw an older animator explain a wall full of storyboards to a toddler. The kid was admittedly distracted, but the joy of sharing ideas was the point, not jargon.

So, in the spirit of animators and educators everywhere, I will now attempt to distill three UX phrases into very simple terms for anyone who is also frustrated with constant offers to join The Church of User Experience. I’ll be explaining with an animation bent, because if we’re being honest, corporate jargon is the worst of all jargon, and I’d love to avoid it when possible. Any professional UXers can feel free to correct my definitions, with the caveat that they actually explain what they mean clearly and concisely.

Agile Development

Agile is a quick-and-dirty style of developing a product. If you’ve ever thrown down thumbnails for an animated short on the side of a notebook page in 5 minutes, you’ve basically worked in Agile Development. Just like messy little boxes and stick figures, in Agile, you take a problem presented to you and develop possible solutions within short amounts of time. Then, you take the feedback from presenting those solutions and go back to the drawing board to clean things up.

The time frames in which you develop these solutions are called “sprints.” The point of Agile is the same as working on thumbnails before full storyboards: don’t get stuck on a solution, just get lots of ideas out and see what works. You can work and rework, getting closer and closer to the perfect product, without spending ages on each stage of development before realizing you’ve been focusing on the wrong thing.

2. Scrum

Scrum is the name of an Agile method of creating a product. Agile is the overall idea (make a bunch of stuff quickly), and Scrum is a particular implementation of that idea (make a bunch of stuff quickly, using specific stages). In scrum, you go through these quick stages, which are not called the same thing everywhere, but cover the same ideas:

Initiate - decide on a goal and an overview of the project and its stakeholders (people who have a stake in this project, like the client/business and the user)
Plan - estimate your timeline, make user stories, and figure out what needs to get done
Implement - tackle the tasks you’ve created in the planning stage
Review- review your work, test it, and see what needs fixing
Release - present the final deliverables

Because scrum is an Agile method of creating, it is not a linear process. After the reviewing stage, you may go back to implementation, or even planning, until you get it right.

In practice, using scrum could look like making a project timeline for a short film. When each task is completed, it’s blocked out on the chart or moved into another part of the chart to show your team it was completed and is now ready for the next step.

3. MVP

MVP stands for “Minimum Viable Product.” It refers to the very base level of a product that you can release that will work for the intended user. If you are working on a car rental app that has lots of beautiful imagery, but the user can’t actually rent a car through it, then you’ve failed at achieving the MVP. The main way to make sure you have a product that works as intended is to take solutions found in the design sprints (see Agile Development) and let users test them out. If your users hate the preliminary version of what you’re making, then at least you haven’t spent too much time on it, so it’s easier to adjust.

Richard Williams never hit his MVP while spending 30 years on The Thief And The Cobbler, and that’s why we have Disney’s Aladdin and many grumpy artists who don’t want to talk about him. We also have Who Framed Roger Rabbit, so at least there’s that.

Those are my three terms for this week. Hopefully I explained them well enough. There will be no speaking in tongues here, no falling prostrate before the gods of corporate terminology. The stakeholders for learning UX are, indeed, the learners. Therefore, the jargon should be simply defined and simple to use. I do not want to be part of a closed club. I’ve spent too long teaching in a creative field for that nonsense. The people in UX and UI are, so far, pretty great, and I’d hate to see newcomers give up because no one can say what Agile is without using the word “agile” to explain it.

Forgo the cult, achieve enlightenment.