UXR Taxonomy: Terms, Meanings, and Connections

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UXR uses a growing vocabulary to describe how human-made systems affect time, effort, attention, dignity, agency, safety, opportunity, and recovery.

You do not need to learn this taxonomy before using or understanding UXR. It is a reference system, not an entrance exam.

Scope and Method Terms

Human-Made System

Any product, service, institution, process, rule, space, infrastructure, technology, or organized practice designed, maintained, required, funded, regulated, or mediated by human beings.

Observation

The stage that identifies the person's objective, the sequence of events, the conditions, the measurable or supportable costs, and the outcome without yet claiming a complete cause or moral judgment.

Explanation

The stage that tests which mechanisms, incentives, policies, decisions, or system components contributed and distinguishes supported inference from uncertainty.

Evaluation

The stage that considers necessity, proportionality, distribution, comprehensibility, contestability, responsibility, and remedy after the evidence boundary has been established.

Agency, Responsibility, and Asymmetry

Institutional Capability

The combined information, continuity, authority, staffing, automation, expertise, legal resources, financial resources, and redesign capacity available to an institution.

Responsibility Scales With Capability

The developing principle that the side better equipped to carry coordination, recordkeeping, explanation, correction, or risk should carry proportionally more of that burden.

Institutional Asymmetry

A difference in information, records, continuity, authority, expertise, resources, time, or power between an institution and the people who depend on it.

Practical Agency

The real ability to understand and use a choice, right, appeal, or remedy under actual conditions.

Anticipated Burden (Working Term)

The work, delay, conflict, uncertainty, or emotional expenditure a person expects would be required to challenge the offered outcome.

Burden Avoidance (Working Term)

Choosing not to pursue a better outcome because the correction or escalation path appears too costly.

Adaptive Acceptance (Working Term)

Accepting the first available answer after experience has taught the person that challenge is unlikely to justify its cost.

Unexpressed Objective Loss (Working Term)

The loss of an outcome that a person wanted or reasonably should have received but stopped pursuing before creating a visible dispute.

Burden and Cost Terms

Human Cost

A measurable or supportable cost imposed on people, including time, effort, attention, money, dignity, agency, safety, health, or lost opportunity.

Human Externality

A human cost created by a system but excluded from the institution's own accounting, performance metrics, or decision model. Human externalities can exist without money or profit.

Burden Transfer

The movement of work, complexity, delay, risk, coordination, confusion, or cost from an institution onto the people who use or depend on it.

Extractive Burden Transfer

Burden transfer in which an institution gains while imposing avoidable, disproportionate, uncompensated costs on people who lack meaningful choice or remedy.

Shared Efficiency

A change that reduces work or cost for both the institution and the person rather than merely moving the burden downstream.

Shared Inefficiency (Working Term)

A system failure that consumes resources on both sides without producing the intended outcome.

Total Resolution Time (Working Term)

All time spent by the person and institution until the objective is completed or abandoned.

Repeat-Contact Burden (Working Term)

Additional interactions caused by failure to resolve the original objective.

Resolution Yield (Working Term)

The proportion of interactions that produce a usable, durable result.

Population-Averaged Burden (Working Term)

The total burden divided across a relevant population and time period. It does not imply equal burden for each person or day.

Burden Distribution (Working Term)

How a total cost actually falls across different people, including concentration among groups with fewer alternatives or greater exposure.

Burden Cascade (Working Term)

A primary system failure that produces secondary and downstream costs across time, money, health, safety, infrastructure, environment, attention, or opportunity.

Human Time Dividend

The estimated time returned when a verified reform removes avoidable burden while preserving or improving comprehension, accuracy, safety, consent, access, and remedy. Any estimate should disclose population, period, assumptions, distribution, uncertainty, and baseline.

Interpretation and Review Terms

Interpretive Stress Testing

A development method that examines how different professional, moral, cognitive, cultural, historical, and fictional lenses understand, misclassify, simplify, resist, or over-amplify UXR.

Correctly Recovered Principle

A conclusion that accurately reflects the framework as written.

Communication Discovery

A new metaphor, explanation, or translation that clarifies an existing UXR idea without changing the framework.

Reasonable Misunderstanding

A mistaken interpretation that a careful reader could plausibly reach from the current documentation.

Documentation Ambiguity

Language or structure that reasonably supports more than one meaning and may require revision.

Lens-Imposed Conclusion

A conclusion produced mainly by the reviewer's prior worldview rather than by UXR's documentation.

Framework Proposal

A genuinely new concept or method suggested by a review that UXR has not yet adopted.