Everyone's a UX Researcher Now: How Your Entire Company Stole Your Job and Does It Worse

Research is no longer sacred. It's not a domain. It's a vibe. And that vibe is: "We didn't have time to ask a researcher, so I just asked my cousin."

Every day, somewhere in tech, a Product Manager says the fateful words: "I talked to a few users."

And just like that, a study is born.

Never mind that "a few" means one guy named Bryan who also happens to be the PM's old roommate. Never mind that the "study" consisted of a 7-minute Slack thread and a spreadsheet titled "User Painz – Final Final V2." What matters is that someone Did The Research. And now, they're qualified to make sweeping generalizations about the entire user base and fundamentally reshape your product roadmap based on Bryan's opinion about button colors.

The Democratization of Research, or: Who Gave Chad a Screener?

Let's take a moment to appreciate how horrifyingly easy it is to do "research" now:

• Have a Notion template? You're a qualitative analyst.
• Used Dovetail once? Congrats, you're triangulating insights.
• Ran a survey with 12 responses, 3 of them your coworkers? Publish that sh*t.
• Talked to a beta tester in Discord? That's ethnography, baby.
• Skimmed through some App Store reviews while on the toilet? You've just done "sentiment analysis."
• Let ChatGPT hallucinate what users might want? That's "AI-powered predictive user modeling."

At this point, research is less a discipline and more a craft activity at tech summer camp. "Glue the insights to the empathy map, kids! Don't eat the glue! Wait, Skyler, stop eating the insights!"

Gone are the days when research required, you know, methodology. Or training. Or ethics. Today's research is performed with the same casual disregard for rigor that people bring to assembling IKEA furniture—skipping steps, ignoring instructions, and hammering things together until they look vaguely right.

The research screener has transformed from a carefully crafted participant selection tool into a Tinder bio for product feedback: "Swipe right if you've used an app in the last 5 years and have opinions about hamburger menus."

The Expert in the Room is the One Who Speaks Loudest

The real magic happens in stakeholder meetings where suddenly everyone's a research expert:

CEO: "My wife tried it and said it was confusing."

Researcher: "But our usability test with 30 participants showed a 98% completion rate."

CEO: "Yeah, but my wife has a really good sense for these things."

And just like that, weeks of careful research are trumped by Karen from Connecticut who "has a really good sense for these things." Never mind that Karen still prints her emails and thinks Instagram is called "The Instant Gram." Her confusion is now driving your Q3 roadmap.

Let's not forget the classic stakeholder research techniques:

• The Anecdote Avalanche: "My friend's cousin said..."
• The Airport Test: "I was watching people at the airport and nobody uses apps like that."
• The Confident Assumption: "Users definitely want this. It's just obvious."
• The Competitive Panic: "Amazon/Google/Apple does it this way so we have to."
• The Self-Reference: "Well, I would never click on that, so we should change it."

Personas by Committee

Ever been in a cross-functional workshop where the team creates "personas" based on "our gut and vibes"? No data. No users. Just whiteboard fumes and pizza. Suddenly we're staring at Aspirational Annie, a "busy millennial mom" who "values convenience and self-care," which apparently justifies building a crypto-enabled grocery list app.

These workshop personas are the horoscopes of product development. Vague enough to be meaningless, but specific enough that everyone nods along thinking, "Yes, I too know someone who values both efficiency AND quality!" Revolutionary.

The creation process is a masterclass in corporate fantasy fiction:

"Okay, so Annie is 32, she has 2.5 kids, drives a mid-size SUV, and works in 'marketing' but somehow has $200,000 in disposable income. She's always on her phone but also worried about screen time. She wants things to be both simple AND feature-rich. She values her time but will definitely complete our 45-minute onboarding flow."

PMs love this stuff. They get to feel empathetic and in control. It's cosplay for caring. And it often ends in statements like:

"Our users are overwhelmed, so we should add more tooltips."

"Our users want simplicity, so we're adding seventeen new configuration options."

"Our users care about privacy, so we've hidden the privacy settings six levels deep where they'll never accidentally toggle them off."

Quote-Led Strategy

Nothing says "rigor" like a single out-of-context quote leading a product roadmap:

"I couldn't find the save button" – User #3

Therefore: Redesign everything. Scrap the IA. Fire the designer. Pivot the company. Reallocate the entire Q4 budget.

What's that? User #3 was looking at a prototype where we intentionally didn't include the save button yet? Details, details.

There's something magical about how a random quote, pulled from a vague session, can suddenly carry more weight than six months of analytics and a PhD in cognitive psychology. It's like watching a fortune cookie prediction overrule a weather forecast.

The best part is the selective hearing. A user might say:

"Overall I love the product. It's improved my workflow dramatically. The only small thing is sometimes I wish the save button was a bit more visible."

What the PM hears:

"SAVE BUTTON INVISIBLE. PRODUCT UNUSABLE. FIX IMMEDIATELY."

PMs don't need validity. They need velocity. Research is useful as long as it confirms what they already wanted to do. If it doesn't, well, that's what cherry-picking is for. "Let's focus on the actionable feedback" is PM-speak for "let's ignore everything that would require actual work to address."

Designer Diaries: Now With Bonus Bias

Designers have joined the fun too. They'll call it "exploratory research" but what they mean is "I wanted to try out this cool Figma prototype and needed an excuse to show it to someone other than my cat."

These sessions often end in passionate statements like:

"She smiled when she used the carousel, so I think it's really intuitive."

"He figured it out after I pointed directly at the button, so the UI is pretty clear."

"They said 'interesting' seven times, which I'm interpreting as wildly positive."

Bless.

The problem with designers doing their own research is like a chef tasting their own food—there's a vested interest in finding it delicious. When you've spent three weeks crafting the perfect interaction, your observation skills suddenly develop selective blindness to confusion, hesitation, or polite lies.

And the notes from these sessions? Pure poetry:

"User seemed to engage positively with the multi-level dropdown navigation."

Translation: "User frantically clicked everything until something worked, then sighed with relief."

The Real MVP: The Intern with a SurveyMonkey Login

Let's not forget the most dangerous player in this space: the overconfident intern who learned about surveys yesterday. They'll send out a 52-question monstrosity with no logic jumps, seven open-ended questions, and a final NPS prompt just for flavor.

The questions themselves are masterworks of ambiguity:

"On a scale from 1-5, how would you rate your satisfaction with the functionality of the features?"

"Which of the following do you prefer? (Check all that apply)"

• Good
• Easy
• Fast
• Better

Then there's the leading questions that would make a courtroom lawyer object:

"How much do you enjoy our new time-saving dashboard?"

"What's your favorite part of our streamlined checkout process?"

They'll collect 23 responses and write a summary titled "Top 10 User Pain Points," most of which are direct copies of their own frustrations with the product. The final presentation will include exactly zero validity checks, no mention of margin of error, and at least one completely made-up statistic that somehow becomes the company's north star metric for the next quarter.

The Methodological Abominations

The true artistic expression of amateur research comes in the methodology. These approaches make academic researchers wake up in cold sweats:

The Friends & Family Plan: "My mom said she'd definitely use this feature!"

The Hallway Ambush: Grabbing random coworkers who are just trying to get to the bathroom and forcing them to look at wireframes.

The Leading Expedition: "So would you say this is amazing or just excellent?"

The Sample Size of One: "I watched my roommate try to use it, and he was confused, so we need to pivot."

The Confirmation Factory: Continuing to run studies until you get the results you want.

The Statistical Butchery: "80% of users preferred version B!" (Sample size: 5 people)

The Biased Buffet: Only recruiting users who already love your product, then being shocked when they give positive feedback.

The Survey Shotgun: Blasting a survey to everyone in the company Slack and calling it "internal research."

Corporate Legitimization: The Research Theater

The corporate world has evolved to not just accept this amateur research but to actively encourage it through elaborate performances of legitimacy:

The Executive Spectator Sport: C-suite execs watching random user sessions and making sweeping product decisions based on their observations.

The Insights Repository: A graveyard of research reports that no one has read since they were uploaded to the shared drive in 2019.

The Research Council: A recurring meeting where people argue about methodologies they don't understand to delay making any actual decisions.

The Demo Day Deception: Carefully scripted and rehearsed "live demos" with "real users" who are actually the CEO's nephew and three contractors who were coached for four hours.

You, Too, Can Fake It

Honestly, at this point, not doing research is the bigger red flag.

So if PMs, designers, interns, and Brad from customer success are all out here "running research," what's stopping you?

You don't need training. You don't need rigor. You need:

• A vibe board
• Three willing victims (preferably people who owe you favors and won't criticize anything)
• And an unwavering belief that your conclusions are objectively correct

Here's your step-by-step guide to faking it spectacularly:

1. Create an official-looking template. The more boxes and sections, the more legitimate it seems.
2. Use unnecessary jargon. Don't say "we asked people questions." Say "we conducted semi-structured phenomenological inquiry to surface latent mental models."
3. Add charts. Any charts. They don't need to represent your actual data. Just make sure the bars go up and to the right.
4. Include at least one decimal point in your percentages. "42.7% of users" sounds way more precise than "about half."
5. Have a section called "Limitations" but make it tiny and vague. "Time constraints may have impacted depth of analysis."
6. Create a 2x2 matrix with fancy labels. Put most things in the top right quadrant. Label that quadrant "Opportunity Area."
7. End with "Next Steps" that are so vague no one can possibly hold you accountable. "Further explore user engagement vectors in Q3."

The Researcher's Lament

Meanwhile, actual trained researchers are huddled in corners, rocking back and forth, muttering about sample sizes and selection bias while clutching dog-eared copies of "Universal Methods of Design."

Their carefully planned studies get canceled because "we already have those insights" from a Twitter poll the marketing team ran last week. Their methodological concerns are dismissed as "academic" or "not agile enough." Their pleas for more time to find representative users are met with "but we're presenting to the board tomorrow."

The tragedy is watching research become a performative exercise rather than a genuine attempt to understand users. It's become more important to be seen doing research than to actually do research well. It's the product equivalent of taking gym selfies instead of working out—the appearance of the activity without any of the results.

Final Thought: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join the Carnival

In a world where research is being MacGyver'd from Slack threads and unfiltered feedback forms, you may as well lean in.

Because here's the truth: Everyone is doing UXR now. Badly. Loudly. And with enough confidence to derail an entire product roadmap.

So you've got two choices:

1. Sit on the sidelines and scream into the void about research rigor.
2. Grab a post-it, make up a persona, and become the chaos.

The future of research isn't more science—it's better storytelling. It doesn't matter if your insights are valid; it matters if they're memorable. It doesn't matter if your methodology was sound; it matters if your presentation has animations.

So throw away your research ethics textbook. Abandon your statistical significance calculations. Forget everything you learned about cognitive bias.

Instead, perfect your "thoughtful nodding while a user speaks" face. Master the art of turning any feedback, no matter how contradictory, into support for what you already wanted to build. Learn to say "what I'm hearing is..." followed by something the user definitely didn't say but that perfectly aligns with the roadmap.

Welcome to research in 2025, where everyone's a researcher, no one's trained, and the insights are made up on the spot.

Your call. But if you can't beat 'em... at least charge consultant rates to join 'em.

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I write tactical, sarcastic dispatches from the front lines of fake research—where vibes trump validity and the loudest guy in the room just ran a usability test on his dog.

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