Tradition Is Just Peer Pressure from Dead People: Why Your UX Process Needs an Exorcism

At some point in the last decade, someone printed out Jakob Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics, laminated them, and nailed them to the breakroom wall like sacred commandments. And ever since, entire UX orgs have been cosplaying as 2003-era web designers, whispering reverently about "affordances" while shipping modals that could qualify as human rights violations.

We need to talk.

Because tradition isn't strategy. It's nostalgia with a to-do list. And in UX, tradition often looks like:

• Three unmoderated user tests and a dream.
• Red routes mapped for features no one uses.
• Personas so dated they still list 'owns an iPod' under 'tech comfort level'.
• Sticky notes as a research deliverable.
• Heuristic evaluations performed like seances: "I feel... a visibility of system status... near the back button..."

The Cult of "Best Practice"

"Best practice" is UX for "I saw this once in a Medium article from 2017 and I will die defending it."

Case in point: the unkillable five-user test. You know the one. Five users, preferably from your cousin's Slack group. The same test plan that's been copy-pasted more times than a recipe blog's childhood anecdote. And every time we invoke it, we ignore the fine print: "Five users is enough if the problem is obvious, the task is narrow, and your product is about as complex as a toaster."

But we persist. Because tradition. Because someone senior once told us that's how it's done. Because somewhere, in the foggy mists of UX past, someone ran this playbook and didn't get fired.

Let's be honest about what "best practices" really are: they're safety blankets. They're the professional equivalent of checking under the bed for monsters. "If I follow this hallowed process that everyone else follows, then when things go wrong, it's not my fault."

The problem isn't that these practices are bad—it's that we've stopped questioning them. We've replaced critical thinking with reverence. We genuflect to the wireframe, pray to the prototype, and offer sacrifices to the altar of A/B testing without ever asking: "Is this actually the best way to solve this problem?"

Meanwhile, your product team is shipping features faster than you can say "let's schedule a research study," your stakeholders are making decisions based on whatever random feedback came in last, and you're still meticulously planning another round of tests that will conclude what everyone already knows: the sign-up flow is confusing and nobody reads the terms of service.

Stakeholder Séances

Ever run a research readout where half the slides are quotes like, "I was confused," or "This didn't make sense"—as if these ritual utterances alone will summon alignment? You're not doing research. You're doing necromancy.

The modern UX research readout has all the elements of a Victorian spirit communion: a darkened room (for better projection, of course), a circle of believers eager for messages from beyond (users are practically from another dimension, right?), and a medium (that's you) who claims special ability to interpret the mysterious utterances from the great beyond.

"The users are trying to tell us something... wait... I'm getting a message... they want... clearer navigation? And a... different button color? The spirits are very specific about this shade of blue."

And don't even get me started on "journey maps" built in a two-hour workshop with three PMs, a designer, and that one guy from sales who just "wants to understand the user." You emerge with a mural full of post-its and the collective delusion that you now "get the experience." Meanwhile, the actual users are off making real decisions based on things no one in the room asked about.

These workshops aren't knowledge creation—they're corporate performance art. Everyone plays their assigned role: the skeptic, the advocate, the visionary, the pragmatist. The sticky notes go up, the pictures get taken for Slack, and everyone returns to their desks feeling accomplished without having accomplished anything concrete.

The real journey map should just be a single straight line labeled: "User tries to accomplish task" with a branch that says "Gives up and uses competitor's product instead."

Innovation Theater, Starring Legacy UX

The industry has changed. We've got real-time data pipelines. LLMs. Diffusion models that can invent personas more convincingly than your last qual study. But somehow, we're still running card sorts like it's the golden age of Geocities.

This isn't "mature practice." This is professional inertia.

Your product is evolving. Your users are evolving. And yet your methods are fossilized in a time when "responsive" just meant your developer replied to emails.

There's something almost comforting about the ritualistic nature of traditional UX methods. The familiar rhythm of planning, recruiting, testing, analyzing, reporting. It feels like work. It looks like work. But is it the most valuable work?

While you're carefully crafting perfect discussion guides for next month's usability study, your competitors are running continuous discovery with instrumented products that gather insights in real-time. While you're debating the perfect information architecture in isolated wireframes, users are creating their own mental models based on whatever TikTok trend influenced UI patterns this week.

The pace of digital evolution has accelerated exponentially, but many UX processes still operate like they're running on dial-up. We've bolted a few new methods onto our repertoire—remote testing instead of lab studies, Figma instead of Photoshop—but the underlying philosophy remains frozen in amber.

"We need to test this with users" has become a mantra rather than a strategy. A delay tactic. A corporate prayer that somehow, magically, showing five people a prototype will resolve the fundamental product questions that your organization has been avoiding for months.

The Cargo Cult of User-Centered Design

What we're practicing in many UX departments isn't user-centered design—it's user-centered theater. We've built elaborate simulations of what we think good design process looks like without ensuring it actually produces better outcomes.

It's like cargo cults in the South Pacific after World War II, where islanders built fake runways and radio towers out of bamboo, hoping to summon cargo planes. They had observed the correlation (towers and runways preceded planes with goods) but missed the causation (the infrastructure was for communication and landing, not summoning).

We do the same thing. We've seen the artifacts and rituals of successful design processes, so we copy them religiously:

• Make personas? Check.
• Run a design sprint? Check.
• Test with users? Check.
• Create a component library? Check.
• Ship a confusing, frustrating product anyway? Also check.

The forms are perfect, but the planes never land. The insights never arrive. The users remain as mystified by our products as we are by their behavior.

The Unholy Trinity: Process, Politics, and Pretense

At the heart of UX tradition are three intertwined forces: process, politics, and pretense.

Process gives us the comforting illusion of control in a chaotic product development environment. If we just follow these steps, document these artifacts, conduct these ceremonies, then surely good design will emerge! It's design by cookbook, and about as innovative as following a Betty Crocker recipe from 1957.

Politics shapes which traditions persist. Methods that give stakeholders what they want (quick results, minimal disruption to existing plans, confirmation of their assumptions) survive, while those that challenge power structures or require fundamental rethinking tend to be "deprioritized." Ever notice how competitive analysis always gets budget while open-ended exploratory research gets "maybe next quarter"?

Pretense is the gap between what we say we're doing and what we're actually doing. We say we're "user-centered" while ignoring user feedback that doesn't fit the roadmap. We claim to be "evidence-driven" while cherry-picking data that supports predetermined decisions. We talk about "inclusive design" while testing only with users who match our ideal customer profile.

This unholy trinity creates a perfect environment for zombie traditions to shamble on, year after year, despite their diminishing relevance or effectiveness.

Digital Exhumation: The Traditions That Won't Die

Let's dig up some of the most persistent corpses in the UX graveyard:

The Persona Pandemic: Documents so generic they could describe anyone or no one. "Meet Sarah, 32, she's tech-savvy but busy, values convenience but also quality, and wants things to be easy but powerful." These aren't personas; they're horoscopes.

The Myth of the Minimum Viable Product: Originally a concept about validated learning, it's devolved into "the minimum we can ship without getting fired." MVPs now stand for "Mostly Vapid Products" that launch, gather minimal data, and still somehow justify the next development cycle.

The Requirements Ritual: Endless documents specifying exactly how features should work, created by people who won't build or use them, to be interpreted by developers who will ultimately build what's technically feasible anyway. Requirements documents are like religious texts—endlessly interpreted, frequently misunderstood, and more often cited than actually read.

The Wireframe Worship: Low-fidelity representations that somehow always become high-commitment contracts. "It's just to get alignment on layout," you say, but three weeks later, stakeholders are asking why the final design doesn't match the gray boxes exactly. Wireframes have become UX's version of pinky promises—technically non-binding but breaking them requires an act of Congress.

The Prototype Paradox: Tools have evolved to create increasingly high-fidelity simulations that look and feel like real products—which users then assume are real products. The gap between what we can prototype and what we can build has created a new valley of disappointment when the actual product arrives, missing half the transitions and interactions that made the prototype delightful.

The Way Out (Spoiler: It's Not a Framework)

Here's a radical idea: kill your darlings. Not literally, unless your org has a medieval HR policy—but retire the methods that aren't helping. Ask yourself:

• Are we doing this because it works, or because it's "how we've always done it"?
• Is this practice actually surfacing insight, or just filling airtime?
• Would a confused intern, a GPT-4 prompt, or a well-trained dog yield better research outcomes?
• If this method disappeared tomorrow, would users notice any difference in the product?
• Is this tradition serving users or just serving organizational politics?

It's okay to evolve. Traditions can be honored and dismantled. You're not disrespecting the UX ancestors by questioning their ways—you're honoring their original spirit: curiosity, critique, and making things suck less.

The methods that built yesterday's successful products may not build tomorrow's. Context changes. Technologies change. User expectations certainly change. Why shouldn't our processes?

The Resurrection: New Life for UX Practice

So what replaces these dusty traditions? Not another rigid methodology or framework—that's just swapping one religion for another. Instead, consider these principles:

Outcomes over outputs: Measure success by user and business impact, not by the weight of your documentation or the quantity of your research sessions.

Continuous over ceremonial: Replace big, infrequent research events with ongoing, lightweight learning integrated into regular development.

Evidence over opinion: But recognize that evidence comes in many forms beyond formal studies—usage data, support tickets, social media sentiment, and yes, sometimes just watching real people struggle with your product in the wild.

Adaptation over dogma: Methods should be selected and modified based on the specific questions at hand, not followed by rote because some UX influencer declared them "best practice."

Collaboration over handoffs: The era of UX as a separate phase that produces deliverables to toss over the wall should be dead. Embed research and design thinking throughout the product development process.

These principles don't prescribe specific methods because the methods that work for a fintech app in 2025 won't be the same as those that work for an AR game in 2027. The specific traditions may change, but the meta-tradition of questioning tradition should remain constant.

TL;DR: Burn the Scrolls

Tradition in UX should be a compass, not a cage. Use it to orient, not ossify. Because if your process can't adapt to a world where users swipe, tap, scroll, and curse across platforms, maybe it deserves to die.

And if that feels harsh, just remember: the first step in innovation is admitting that grandpa's usability checklist might need to be buried—with dignity, sure, but buried all the same.

The ghosts of UX past will haunt your org until you perform the necessary exorcism. Sprinkle some holy water on that laminated heuristics poster. Burn some sage around the journey map. Chant "the user is not me" three times while deleting those personas based on your marketing department's wishful thinking.

Only then might you be freed from the shackles of tradition to create something truly useful, usable, and maybe—just maybe—a little less haunted by the mistakes of the past.

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