“It’s More of a Mindset Than a Method”: UX Practitioners’ Conception of Design Methods
summary
Thirteen interviews across consultancies, agencies and companies show UX practice treats methods as adaptable toolkits rather than fixed recipes: practitioners combine and repurpose techniques into an appropriation-oriented mindset, favoring broad generalist skills over memorizing named methods. Everyday tools named include sketching and whiteboarding, basic interviewing and persuasion inside Agile settings, and a surprising scarcity of rigid user‑research protocols. Recommendation is to teach instrumental judgment—when and how to adapt methods—rather than only how to execute canonical method steps.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction to research
- 1:51Design methods in UX practice
- 7:32Study methodology details
- 10:21Practitioners' method use findings
- 14:56Mindset over methods approach
- 17:31Future work and education
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