Rapid terminology testing

Author: Mary Shakshober | Last edit: December 22, 2025

What is rapid terminology testing?

Rapid terminology testing is a framework for understanding your users’ gut reactions and intuition when it comes to certain terms or phrases that they see in a graphical user interface. The idea is to isolate words from the visual aspects of the design to achieve an understanding of how words can help reinforce the user’s mental model around the task at hand. To do this, we simply pose users with a broad scenario, present them with terms, and then prompt them to discuss where their mind goes when they hear those terms/phrases. This helps to build a deep understanding of how they view various structures that they manage in the UI or elsewhere. 

Why choose this method of research?

The terminology testing method presented here has multiple benefits:

1. It enables designers to isolate and understand terminology separate from usability of the application as a whole. Since terminology is being tested on its own it provides a means for ensuring that terms used are the most relevant and meaningful to the user.
2. It helps to define and validate information architecture (IA). Since successful navigation of an application or website leans heavily on the user’s understanding of terms used to name enable wayfinding, this framework will help you understand how a user might think about the IA of your application by giving you a baseline set of IA categories. Once you have these statements crafted, based off of the terminology test findings, you can then go a step further by conducting a survey where a larger pool of users express their agreement/disagreement with the statements. This creates an extra validated form of statement creation.
3. It requires very minimal preparation. We’ll discuss this more in the ‘When’ and ‘How’ sections, but, on average, the preparation time required for this type of research is less than 2 hours. The largest preparation lift for this framework is finding an audience to conduct the study with. However, this method does lend itself well to both group sessions and 1:1 sessions, so you can get creative with your facilitation.

When would I conduct this method of research?

This method of research worth considering if you fall into one (or both) of these cases: 

1. When you are in the discovery phase of a project. If you and/or your stakeholders have ‘hunches’ or small amounts of feedback on something that you think is worth digging deeper into to see if it really is a problem worth tackling, this framework can help you to uncover what a user thinks about existing terminology. 
2. When you don’t have much preparation time. It’s often the case that we have to snag face time with users when we can based on their schedule, cadence of existing customer demo sessions, etc., right? Sometimes this puts us in a position to need to find a way to get feedback from them without enough time to prepare a traditional research study. Or maybe you are just in a phase where showing a GUI doesn’t make sense, thus making traditional usability testing impractical. In cases like this, terminology mental model research comes in very handy, as it only takes about 2 hours from start to finish to prepare and only requires a short slide deck to present to participants.

How do I carry out this method of research?

Preparing for a test

The following steps will allow you to prepare for performing the test.

1. Create a copy of the ‘Terminology mental model’ slide template and the associated notetaking template.
2. Fill out the slide template with your terminology. Note: The template was created for a group session, so it references using the ‘chat’ feature within Google Meet to manage the various opinions. For 1:1 sessions, you should modify the deck to not include references to the ‘chat’. 
   1. Slide 1: Update with your information.
   2. Slide 2: Pose a ‘multiple choice’ style question to the group that asks for users to weigh in on their expectation of which scenario best fits the word or phrase being tested. . For my example, I chose 3 of the following scenario types, but you could change these to fit your needs … 
      1. One scenario that matched the current GUI implementation
      2. One scenario that matched the GUI interaction of a competitor 
      3. One curveball scenario that logically makes sense
   3. Slides 3-5: Simply include groups of similar or related terms/phrases that you want to test with users. This will be used to solicit feedback about the meaning of specific words or phrases and describe how they are the same or different.
   4. Slide 6: Add an invitation for them to keep in contact with you about the topic at hand (or more generally about your product/feature). You can provide a name and email address for them to reach out to, a link to the UXR participant database sign up, etc. 
3. Update the notetaking template with screenshots of your slide deck and your terms/phrases. This will make it easy for your notetaker to follow along with you while you present and facilitate the session. 

Test facilitation

Best practices for facilitating a terminology test are the same as those for performing any usability test. See the Usability Testing method for guidance about test facilitation and how to ask good questions. The following are specific guidelines for facilitating a terminology test using this method.

1. Slide 1: Introduce yourself and give a very broad contextual description of what will be discussed with the participants. Try to avoid using phrases or terminology that you will be asking for their input on later in this introduction, to eliminate possible bias. 
2. Slide 2: Set the stage with a scenario based question around what a user expects to be able to achieve in a page based on its navigational title. Doing a sort of ‘multiple choice’ question like this as your first exercise is helpful with getting participants participatory. Once users weigh in with their answer to the multiple choice question, you should prod them to verbally elaborate by saying something like, “I see a lot of you voted option A. Can someone who voted A explain their thought process?”. 
3. Slides 3-5: Prompt the participant(s) with the same set of questions for each slide:
   1. What do these phrases mean to you?
   2. Are they synonyms?
   3. How do they differ?
4. Slide 6: Ask users if they want to chat more about the topics discussed in the future. 

Slide 7: Thank participants for their time and insights. 

Examples in the wild

Hybrid Cloud Console notifications and integrations terminology mental model study

• Facilitation deck
• Observer notes
• Group session recording
• 1:1 session recording

Insights Remediations terminology mental model study

• Facilitation deck
• Observer notes

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