PSA: This Is a Blog

This is the post where I explain what a blog is.

Every few weeks, someone shows up in my email or in my LinkedIn comments demanding sources, methodology, or data. The most recent contribution was the word "vibefacting," which I will admit is a clever neologism, beautifully constructed, and aimed at completely the wrong target. Whoever coined it should be writing essays. They should not be reading them.

I want to say this once, clearly, so I can link to it the next time it happens. Which will be later this week.

This is a blog. The posts here are blog posts. They share a literary tradition with the essay, the column, the editorial, and the perspective piece. They do not share a tradition with the peer-reviewed empirical paper. This was true before you got here. It will be true after you leave. It will also be true if you scroll back up and squint at the URL.

The posts here are thoughts. Late night thoughts. Mid-afternoon thoughts. Thoughts I have had while folding laundry, while waiting for coffee, while my toddler delivers a serious monologue to a houseplant. They are thoughts. That is the whole genre.

When I write a post, the process looks like this. I think about something. I write about it. I make a coffee. I read what I wrote and decide it is too long. I delete two sentences. I rewrite them. The rewrites are now longer than the two sentences I deleted. I add a joke. I take the joke out. I put it back in. I look up a word I have known for twenty years to confirm it still means what I think it means. I post it. That is the methodology. There is no methodology. There was never going to be a methodology. You wanted a methodology and decided I owed you one. So here it is.

I am not claiming universal truth about UX research. I have never claimed universal truth about UX research. I do not believe universal truth about UX research is available to anyone, including the people who keep telling me their preferred version of it in my comments. UXR is a practice done by humans inside organizations made by other humans, all of whom are, on average, a mess. There is no master equation. There is the work, and there are people thinking out loud about the work, and I am one of those people. That is the whole job description of this blog.

The posts here do not present data. They present observations, arguments, and the occasional pattern I have noticed across roughly fifteen years of doing this work. If you want data, the internet has a lot of it. Some of it is even good. None of it is here.

When citations are relevant, I cite. When they are not, I don't. The conventions of the blog post are well established and do not include a references section, an abstract, or a limitations paragraph that hedges every claim into mush until the author is no longer sure what they themselves think. If you cannot read a 1000/1500-word essay without reaching for those, I gently suggest the problem is not the essay.

I understand that some of you took a research methods class once and never fully recovered. I sympathize. In peer-reviewed venues, the papers have references. They have methods. They have limitations sections so cautious they read like hostage notes. I know the difference. You did not discover a problem with my blog. You discovered that you wanted a paper and were reading a blog.

Believe it or not, people have been publishing opinions without running studies for centuries. Op-eds in major newspapers do not have reference sections. Essays in The Atlantic do not have methods. Perspective/Opinion pieces in academic venues exist as a category for a reason. Editorials in journals you respect are written every month by people who did not run a study before saying what they think. These pieces are not lesser. They shape how fields see themselves. They set the terms of debate. They outlive many of the studies they sit next to. Opinions are not just opinions. They are how perception of a field gets built.

If you cannot tell the difference between an opinion piece and a study, you are going to have a rough time on the internet. You are going to have a worse time in any room where research is actually discussed, because you will not be able to tell when methodology is the right question and when it is just a way to look smart while reading.

These are my thoughts. They are not auditioning to be a paper. They have been allowed to exist as their own form, in their own tradition, for a very long time.

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